12-11-2018, 12:29 AM | #131 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Strength (ST) in high TL settings - Pricing?
Part of the problem with ST in high/ultra tech is that UT weapons and armor tend to be designed with a somewhat average ST in mind. A stronger person can carry bigger weapons and wear heavier armor, but not if those things aren't on the equipment table.
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12-11-2018, 05:28 AM | #132 |
Join Date: Oct 2018
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Re: Strength (ST) in high TL settings - Pricing?
well except the hypersense rocket weapons, but that’s solved by mechanisation. ultra tech equipment for super humans would be a cool thing to see because supersoldiers and super strong aliens are frequent in sci fi.
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12-11-2018, 07:12 AM | #133 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: OK
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Re: Strength (ST) in high TL settings - Pricing?
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I think the only important thing that's going on here is that ST is worth different amounts in different types of high TL games in a way that doesn't happen in low TL games. Some TL 10 games are very different from other TL 10 games. Sometimes ST is more useful and sometimes it's less useful. Whereas at low TL games, it's always about the same. ST 15 is worth just about the same thing in one TL 3 game as in another (unless it's a romance game or whatever, but we're talking about normal adventuring contexts here). There's no such thing as a normal adventuring context at TL 10. That could be many different things. In some of those contexts, ST is great, and in others it's trash, and there's a huge gulf in between where it's of varying levels of utility.
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12-11-2018, 11:02 AM | #134 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Strength (ST) in high TL settings - Pricing?
Light LC3 armour includes nanoweave (DR18/6* good vs piercing and slashing attacks) and ablative nanoplas (36/6*, strong vs lasers). The former will protect against all normal conventional pistols and shotguns, and all but magnum ETC pistols, and make gauss pistols do about half their normal damage. The latter gives protection against about 5d of laser attacks before becoming next to worthless. So LC3 armour protects fairly well against LC3 weapons, and that makes having a good amount of HP to soak up 'leaks' is useful, just as it is at low TLs. If your cyberpunk games had people routinely having much better guns than this (i.e. lower LC weapons) without better armour to match, well it's not surprising that there was a tendency to pink mist with an imbalance in favour of offence over defence.
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12-11-2018, 01:12 PM | #135 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Strength (ST) in high TL settings - Pricing?
In my experience, corporate security tends to use military grade weaponry and cyberpunk heroes tend to return the favor.
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12-11-2018, 01:43 PM | #136 | |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Strength (ST) in high TL settings - Pricing?
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Either that or they only bring gear they can smuggle or quickly ditch. Body armor is very difficult to smuggle, because it has to cover so many places, is hard to quickly put on after you pull it out of concealment, and it tends to be big and bulky. I find a lot of players ignore many subtleties of Legality class, especially in exotic settings. Most of the time, it feels like a headache and not that fun.
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12-11-2018, 02:01 PM | #137 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Strength (ST) in high TL settings - Pricing?
In general though, most cyberpunk heroes will smartly run the other way that deal with corporate security wearing Commando Battlesuits. In either indicates that the people are guarding something above the pay grade of the heroes or that the corporation is really paranoid.
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12-11-2018, 02:29 PM | #138 | |||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Strength (ST) in high TL settings - Pricing?
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Now, if they have access to powered armour, the whole thing becomes a lot easier, mainly because they usually simply don't have all the stuff they'd like to be carrying (though a semi-portable energy weapon or heavy chaingun and ammo eats up a good chunk of an ST25 character's basic load, and if a semi-portable plasma gun is in the loadout you want ST12+ to be able to use it in a commando suit). Their goal in powered armour is to stay unencumbered whilst carrying everything they can think of a possible use for. I find myself having to point out that even in powered armour bulk will matter after a certain point.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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12-11-2018, 03:03 PM | #139 | ||
Join Date: Sep 2004
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Re: Strength (ST) in high TL settings - Pricing?
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I don't think anything anyone is defending the damage component of ST. HP is always useful, but it's certainly not the bulk of the cost. Lifting ST has many uses, but I certainly haven't played in many games over 30 years where it's been more useful at high TLs than lower TLs. My low TL characters were less likely to have ways to offload, acquire, or replace items as necessary so they had to carry with them. Naturally certain campaigns (genres) may be different, but that's the general trend. For that matter, encumbrance is usually tracked down to the last ration in Dungeon Fantasy, but the "I have a breakfast bar in my jacket" is usually a "sure, whatever" in a modern or high TL game. Quote:
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12-11-2018, 05:25 PM | #140 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Strength (ST) in high TL settings - Pricing?
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Also, you say "It sounds like Dungeon Fantasy in Space!" as if that is 1) not a valid style of play, and 2) as if people don't play games that are like that. EDIT: And my recollection of Star Frontiers games from back in the day was that encumbrance wasn't a huge issue because there wasn't that much gear in the game to carry. Compare with Traveller where Strength was hugely useful because the encumbrance rules were really ungenerous (and in many Traveller games because people weren't heavily armed and armoured and thus good old fashioned beating and grappling was common and viable, and there weren't many other non-lethal options).
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." Last edited by Rupert; 12-11-2018 at 05:28 PM. |
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