Mixed Sci fi setting

[Brian Leybourne]

It is possible to get grazed or take a round through non-vital tissue...so levels of wounds are always a real possibilty... and multiple shots hitting isn't going to make one bigger wound, but individual wounds of a similar scale.  Doing it the other way, to me, almost feels like your cheating the player a bit.

You have a base power of EIGHT. With an average TO of 4 and given that I obviously need at least one success to have hit you, my minimum damage per shot is (8+1-4) a level 5 wound. How does that accommodate for grazes or non-vital tissue shots? :-)

Brian.

[Brian Leybourne]

And, little known fact, I did them all 3 times!!!!!

And you loved every second of it, mate :-)

You want pain, try coding the damage tables into the combat sim. We're talking around 8,000 lines of code just for them... :-)

Brian.

[Mayhem1979]

Hey I didn't say such things were easy to achieve with a high powered, plasma-based weapon :-).... just that the possibilty (usually with advanced armor, the guy using the weapon on it's low power setting to save ammo, etc...) should be there.  

After all, with SW weapons even a graze with a powerful weapon is gonna cook a signifigant portion of whatever it hits a lot of the time.  Or alternately, using a modern weapon, a .50 cal macine gun round is basically never gonna do what we'd refer to as  a level one or two wound if it hits  someone in the arm.

Besides, the base 8 weapon I gave is a military grade weapon meant to go through armor... and is no worse than a longbow in norm TROS.  :-)

[Michael Tree]

I like the idea of the Force as something where you have a Force Pool (FP) based on your WP and raw talent (your midichlorian count, if you like, although I'm the first to say that I wish Lucas had never pulled midichlorians out of his ass) and then there are a series of different force powers which would be treated as skills - they represent the TN to use that force ability, which you do by spending dice from your FP and rolling against the power difficulty. Additionally, you could add FP dice to your CP on a 1-for-1 basis as well, something clearly seen in most of the films where the Force was used to make people better fighters etc. FP would refresh pretty fast too, you never saw anybody in the films "running out" of force as it's easy to do with SP, for example.

I also worked on a RotF conversion a while ago, which was pretty close to this, except that I used a single Force attribute, not one combined with Will.  The sole reason for this was that it makes Force skills on the same scale as other skills (ie. 2-8 dice), and it keeps combat pools a manageable size.

For character creation, the Force is a priority category, which, depending on the letter, gives the character a static Force attribute that can't be increased through SAs.

For the Dark Side, it seems to me that in the movies the dark side only becomes a temptation when the characters emotions and motivations are triggered.  In TROS terms, the dark side supercharges SAs.  I ruled that whenever a character uses SAs, he can take a number of bonus dice equal to 1/2 his Force attribute (rounded up) as extra bonus dice, to represent the power of the dark side.  (I based it on the Force attribute because it seems to me that the characters with the greatest temptation are those with the greatest power).

The catch of the dark side is that in any scene where the character uses the power of the dark side, he doesn't gain any SAs, and he doesn't get checks next to any of the skills he uses while 'under the influence.'

With this system, the scene in Return of the Jedi where the Emperor is trying to turn Luke makes perfect sense:  By taunting Luke, the Emperor is activating Lukes SAs, making them releavent, and making Luke feel so hopeless so he'll take the extra power to try to save his friends.

Modeling the "falling to the dark side" bit is a bit trickier.  I suppose that the character could accumulate "dark side points" every time he calls on the dark side, which as they steadily increase make the character more and more angry and fearful, until he finally goes to the dark side for good when he reaches a certain threashold (say, 10).  It could even be done as a skill rating, where the character puts a tick next to it for every roll influenced by dark side SAs, and the Force attribute rolled to lower it instead of MA.