Combat rounds

[stofsk]

In the Handbook, on page 159, it's revealed that the combat round for basic starship combat is 20 minutes long. I thought this was a bit too long, so I propose to change this to 10 minutes.

A combat round for lifeforms is 6 seconds long.

A combat round for vehicles is 60 seconds long (x1 minute).

A combat round for starships is 600 seconds long (x10 minutes).

This change appeals to my sense of linear progression.

Thoughts? Flames? Ridicule?

 

[veltyen]

Thoughts.

The story is more important then the numbers. This is the difference between a wargame (even a narrative wargame) and a role playing game.

Tweak to feel. Running a culture like game then it would be more then appropriate to run space combat turns as 1 second long. That's a lot of time for a specialised combat AI, but not long enough for a crew to have any effect on the outcome of combat.

With vehicle turns that is for chases and other cinematic sequences. 1 minute makes sense for that. For force vs force then 6 seconds makes more sense.

What I'm trying to say is that a turn is a turn long.

 

[stofsk]

Yeah, always go with what seems right, not "Hang on, you can't do that because of *legal gibberish*."

 

[Ganidirsii O'Flynn]

I'm gonna chime in with Veltyen on this one, Sto. Space combat rounds are going to be long in once we (inevitably) get to them in real life too.

This is one reason why our Traveller games (pick your edition) tend to look like 2300AD space combat. We tend to have electronic battles before any real firing takes place. Also, we tend to use missiles as point detection systems. The key is to identify and fire on the badguy before he can do the same to you.

Missiles are far and away our big ship-killers with lasers taking a dim second place. In the TU I play in, the missile can be fed a target solution from the ship's computer and fired 'dumb', or can be operated as an rpv. We tend to use lasers for point-defence and close-in fighting (less than say 50k range).

HOWever, when you're aboard a merchant, and most Traveller PC's are, using missiles also means spitting real money at the bad guy, as opposed to the essentially free combat power of lasers.

In any event, both forms of combat can take several minutes to reach their targets, and all the while we're doing everything we can do to sour the bad guys target solution on us.

I hope that explains it, rather than just saying 'it won't work like that, trust me'.