[Jinumon]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

You could just as easily have fuel/coolant requirements for inertialless boost drives and get the same sense of drama while avoiding civilization killing reaction or reactionless rockets. For example, you could rule that inertialless boost drives require 1 fuel tank worth of coolant per engine component for every week of operations, meaning that anyone who skips refueling is going to have a really bad time of it.

I've actually done this in the past by having reactionless drives that only function if supplied by a Fuel Cell power plant, so you simply have a "time we can keep the engine on" as opposed to having to calculate delta-V. I think it's a perfectly legitimate middle-ground if that's what you're going for. I tend to like a little more crunch in my games is all.

Originally Posted by Anthony

Sure, but the point is that there's a wide variety of cinematic rockets (so you need to decide what you're emulating), and they were not generally designed with any particular concern about what is realistic, or even makes sense. For example, anime jump jets don't normally run out of fuel but only allow leaps rather than sustained flight, generally with no explanation as to why they work this way.

Fair point.

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

If players get to bend reality in the name of cinematics, so do GMs. A vehicle breaking down at exactly the worst moment is very cinematic, and so should be part of the GM's toolkit.

Agree to disagree on this one. Then again, I don't generally give my players the tools to "bend reality" or, if I do, they come with very specific mechanics that say just how much and how often you can influence the plot. They also often come with give-and-take sort of circumstances, like "Okay, you get to turn that hit into a graze, but now I as the GM get to decide when you fail a roll, as per the Unluckiness disadvantage, once." All that said, these kinds of rule-bending mechanics are always worked out ahead of time and my players are always aware of exactly what might happen if they exploit them too much. It's a sort of in-game contract with each other. I know a lot of people are comfortable just saying "it's my game, rule zero, if you don't like it you can get out," but I feel like the best games reserve that kind of arbitration for only the most dire of circumstances.

Jinumon