Star Trek Phasers for GURPS?

[umbros]

What do you think is the simplest, most fun, truest to the setting, way to handle Phasers in GURPS?

I had thought about using the stats for a rainbow laser but with a "stun" setting like an omni-blaster. A standard type II phaser would be a RLaser Pistol with a HT-3 stun when set to stun.

What do you think? Any other ideas?

[Agemegos]

I don't remember an occasion on which anyone was ever shot with a phaser and merely wounded. Set to "stun" they stun. Set to "kill" they completely destroy the body. Affliction mechanics, with a "Stunned" option and a "Dead, disintegrated" option would seem more appropriate than injury rules. Either that or they need to do about <correction> 290 points of damage.

The hand phasers in the later series had terrible ergonomics and no sights. BEAM WEAPONS (Hand Phaser) should be a Hard skill, and the weapons' acc should be zero. Hand phasers in TOS weren't so bad.

You might find the following sites interesting and useful, but be aware that their author is no respecter of sacred cows. You might decide to reject his conclusions and even his criticisms out of hand, nevertheless you should find it useful to consider his collected observations of what phasers are shown as doing.

• http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/...d/Guns-ST.html
• http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/...eam/Beam1.html

[Captain-Captain]

TOS phasers were hit and 5arget drops or disintegrates. In later shows they got nerfed to the point a character could be hit multiple times and while dying, still get a heroic last action.

IIRC The FASA Start Trek rules gave them Stun Kill and Disintegrate settings.

The hit/drop 'rule' also applies to Star Wars EXCEPT in RPG rules. In a one shot game using the FASA rules and a WotC Star Wars adventure, our GM was astounded at how quickly his NPC thugs went down. He's complaining pos aborted game how in Star Wars you 're supposed to take a hit, keep shooting until finally someone dropped.

We had to break the reality of the movies to hm gently.

It's a sad thing when someone's sense of fictional realities is warped bey9od recognition by inflating hit points. :)

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Captain-Captain

TOS phasers were hit and 5arget drops or disintegrates. In later shows they got nerfed to the point a character could be hit multiple times and while dying, still get a heroic last action.

It's worse than that. In TOS, the ship's phaser banks were much more realistically powerful, compared to the movies and the other series.

By 'realistically', I mean given the known power of those ships, the kind of power you'd need to do star flight. It was said more than once in the days of TOS that Enterprise had sufficient fire power to wreck inhabited worlds.

When Enterprise fired on the unshielded Klingon ship in Day of the Dove, that ship was vaporied almost immediately. That is perfectly plausible given those energies (actually, it would have been more plausible for it to take a few moments, but the outcome would be the same). That's the kind of power you would expect such machines to have.

Compare that to the movies, where we start seeing phaser battles between ships at point-blank range that do nothing but chew holes in the armor.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by umbros

What do you think is the simplest, most fun, truest to the setting, way to handle Phasers in GURPS?

I had thought about using the stats for a rainbow laser but with a "stun" setting like an omni-blaster. A standard type II phaser would be a RLaser Pistol with a HT-3 stun when set to stun.

What do you think? Any other ideas?

Fer cryin' out loud.

They put a TL 12 weapon called a Disnintegrator in the new UT and one shot from even the holdout model will indeed completely disintegrate a normal human and no one makes the connection from this to the phaser.

I feel sympathy with Kromm having to answer "How do I model a light saber in Gurps? Is it anything like a Force Sword?" so many times.

Let disintegrators fire at partial power for reduced use of energy/charges and you have half of the mods you need.

Then use the omniblaster rule to add a stun setting to a disintegrator and you have the other half. It will max out at -10 most of the time and this is close enough to the auto-stun you see on Trek for rpg purposes.

Or if that's not direct enough for you you can borrow the stunner rules from Vorkosigan. That's another cinematic universe where stunners work like plot devices. You get hit in the torso or the head and you're stunned. No roll or anything.

[ImperialOne]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Fer cryin' out loud.

They put a TL 12 weapon called a Disnintegrator in the new UT and one shot from even the holdout model will indeed completely disintegrate a normal human and no one makes the connection from this to the phaser.

I feel sympathy with Kromm having to answer "How do I model a light saber in Gurps? Is it anything like a Force Sword?" so many times.

Let disintegrators fire at partial power for reduced use of energy/charges and you have half of the mods you need.

Then use the omniblaster rule to add a stun setting to a disintegrator and you have the other half. It will max out at -10 most of the time and this is close enough to the auto-stun you see on Trek for rpg purposes.

Or if that's not direct enough for you you can borrow the stunner rules from Vorkosigan. That's another cinematic universe where stunners work like plot devices. You get hit in the torso or the head and you're stunned. No roll or anything.

You are SO right... come on everyone!

I do agree, setting 8 (16 settings in a canon phaser) is the standard kill setting, should do about 100-120 damage. With some granularity, 190 points is about setting 12..

I would also try to minimize wide variance in the damage range as well. Instead of 8d damage at whatever setting, maybe 2d+18, etc.

[Mr Frost]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Fer cryin' out loud.

They put a TL 12 weapon called a Disnintegrator in the new UT and one shot from even the holdout model will indeed completely disintegrate a normal human ...

Unless the rules changed in 4th edition , it takes 20 x H.P. damage to actually disintergrate a person , not 10 x .

Average person 10 H.P. , takes 240 H.P. cor damage to disintergrate .
Holdout Disintergrator {UT 4th.ed p.130} average damage 122.5 H.P. cor .
Even hotshotted it dinna hav tha poower Jim .


He would need to double damage and given Star Treks Plotonium power suppily technology use some sort of "cosmic" power cell that has Plot number of shots per cell .

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Mr Frost

Unless the rules changed in 4th edition , it takes 20 x H.P. damage to actually disintergrate a person , not 10 x .

The rules changed in 4th edition.

It takes a total of 11 * HP to achieve "Total Bodily Destruction, if that makes sense given the source of the damage)". (GURPS Basic Set p. 419)

[Mr Frost]

Originally Posted by Brett

The rules changed in 4th edition.

It takes a total of 11 * HP to achieve "Total Bodily Destruction, if that makes sense given the source of the damage)". (GURPS Basic Set p. 419)

Why 11 ?

Was 10 insufficient , but 12 excessive ?

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Mr Frost

Why 11 ?

Was 10 insufficient , but 12 excessive ?

Well, I wasn't involved in the rules revision in any way, so I'm just guessing. But I expect that "-10 * HP" was a nice round number that seemed roughly right.

To go from +HP to -(10 * HP) involves losing 11 * HP hit points.