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. :)

[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.

[cmdicely]

Originally Posted by umbros

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

That...depends. Phasers work differently from episode to episode within the same series, so its not like there is a good fixed reference point. If you want something that has all the features phasers have at one point or another, you want something that:
* might be FTL (or maybe that's just the mounted version)
* can stun, so something like the stun setting for omni-blasters is needed.
* can disintegrate all or part of a target
* can inflict injury without disintegrating (sometimes cauterizing, sometimes not.)
* can be used as a tight-beam, continuous cutting tool
* can be used to heat objects
* can be set for varying areas of effect -- on most settings
* can sometimes cause very substantial knockback

[quarkstomper]

A couple years ago I ran a ST:Next Gen-era campaign and I made up my own damage table for phasers. I might have based some of the numbers off of existing weapons, but mostly it was pulled out of my hat.

I gave the phasers four settings: Heat, Stun, Kill and Disintegrate, with a fifth setting, "overload", that I didn't bother defining because it was essentially a plot device. And I had four different types of phasers: Type I, the standard issue Federation phaser; Type II, a more powerful hand phaser, and the Phaser Rifle. (In retrospect, I see that I was basing this on how the phasers were depicted in TOS; I don't know if phasers had these distinctions in Next Gen). To these three standard classes I added a fourth: The "Bunny Phaser", a low-powered phaser with only the heat and stun settings, issued to non-Starfleet personnel; (my wife's character was a civilian on board a Galaxy-class ship so I figured they wouldn't let her have a standard phaser).

These are the damages I came up with. Once again, these were just numbers I pulled out of a hat with little to no play-testing or relation to existing weapon stats:

Bunny Phaser
Heat: 10 degrees per second
Stun: Target must roll vs. HT to avoid Stun; stunned for (Margin of failure) seconds.
Kill: None
Disintegrate: None

Phaser I:
Heat: 20 degrees per second
Stun: Target must roll vs. (DR+HT-4) to avoid stun; stunned for (10xMOF) minutes
Kill: 3d burning
Disintegrate: 10d

Phaser II:
Heat: 50 degrees per second
Stun: Target must roll vs. (HT-4) to avoid stun: stunned for (30xMOF) minutes
Kill: 4d burning; reduce DR by 1/2
Disintegrate: 15d

Phaser Rifle:
Heat: 100 degrees per second
Stun: Target must roll vs. (HT-10) to avoid stun; stunned for (MOF) hours
Kill: 8d burning; reduce DR by 12
Disintegrate: 20d

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by umbros

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

Simple, and true to setting: ignore GURPS damage rules. A phaser hit stuns if the phaser is set on stun, it kills if it is set on kill, etc. You don't need damage rules to represent that. Rules would only be a complicated way to sometimes get simple things wrong.

[Qoltar]

Forum member Gold & Appel posted a good suggestion in one of my STAR TREK-related threads. He said go with the Omni-blaster from Ultra Tech.

Since it was available when running the GCA - thats what I went with.

So far TWO game sessions, one in June and one in December using that shortcut....and so far no problems as far as the players are concerned.


- Ed Charlton

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Brett

Simple, and true to setting: ignore GURPS damage rules. A phaser hit stuns if the phaser is set on stun, it kills if it is set on kill, etc. You don't need damage rules to represent that. Rules would only be a complicated way to sometimes get simple things wrong.

Given canon presentation, even in the recent Abrams ST movie, Brett's exactly right. One hit, and you're either KO'ed, dead, or both dead and vaporized. No fuss, no muss, no stats required for dropping 'em. Only possible stats needed for the stun setting are how long you stay down; define it as either a HT roll at a penalty that reduces for duration (use, perhaps, the speed range table on the speed setting rather than range) or "you're out for 30-HT minutes" for simplicity.