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Gunnery and Improved critical - gratuitious stupidity

veltyen

SOC-14 1K
I know it sounds gratuitous, but would a gunner with improved critical(Meson Spinal Weapon) have a critical threat of 2+

I can see a career for anyone with this ability. Weapon Specialisation(Meson spinal mount) would be less useful, but sometimes those extra 20 points of damage may come in handy.

If I was running the Navy this would be the first thing my gunners would learn.


Since spinal weapons have crews (rather then individual gunners) I would require all the crew have the ability, this requires an extremely elite crew before this can be pulled off.

Veltyen
 
Since gunnery involves skill checks, rather than attack rolls, I don't think Improved Critical would be applicable anyway.
 
Hello Morte.
My reading of the rules is if you dont have gunnery then you suffer a - to your hit roll.
And an improved crit would always be applicable, but i cant remember if the improve crit only adds the normal range or just doubles the normal range.
IE - mellee weapons have a base 20 for crit, some weapons have a better crit (18,19,20) this gives them a +2 to the base crit, If you improve the crit all you get is +2 to the 18-20 crit so it ends as 16-20, if you improve the crit again all you get is another +2 not +4 (14-20).
So if you improve crit spinal meson guns it will give you a crit of 5-20 = base 15 +5 for improved crit +5 for spinal (the spinal is not a base crit it's because it's a spinal so the base crit for mesons is 15).
Bye.
 
G'day Lionel,

For WP/ feats Swordsman and Marksman (and the rest of the non-gunnery WP/s) are -4 without the feat, Artillery and ship weapons cannot be used without the feat, taking the feat gives you Gunnery 0 for free. So basically anyone with those feats does have Gunnery, just not nessersarily more then a passing knowledge. Oddly enough AP/Battledress does not give you gunnery, but does give you proficiency with all battledress mounted weapons.

The melee criticals are slightly off. ImpCrit 20 becomes 19, 19 becomes 17, 18 becomes 15. Under 3.5 (and I think errata'ed in 3.0) you cannot stack abilities/magical properties that increase threat range. Not a big deal, 15 is quite often enough.

Sorry, too much DnD lately.

That is something that surprised me, T20 doesn't have any "improved" melee weapons. A base cutlass is not very scary, even in the hands of an all out Marine. Melee weapons max out at TL3. Considering Melee is what you want to use on a boarding action to capture a target, the lack of a vibro-diamond edged-memory metal-monofilament variant for melee weapons seemed out of place. I don't want to turn it into melee being the fastest way to kill people either. For the moment I have settled on using a slightly modified armor piercing bullet rule. Max armor piercing is TL/2 round down. Cost is (Cost of weapons * 10 * (1+AP)) so a TL14 AP 7 cutlass costs 8000cr, enough to make that kind of treatment prohibitive for most people. This allows even a low tech civilisation to create outstanding weapons but for an extreme cost. Energy effects (effectively lightning and fire branding) I might also use at a later date.

Returning to topic the whole meson spinal mount thing came from someone asking me what the most dangerous weapon was. A nearly always criticalling meson spinal mount fits that bill, with a average damage vs a human target of 4440 points, ignoring armor. They meant for their character to carry as a side arm, but hey.

Regards
Veltyen
 
Originally posted by Lionel Deffries:
Hello Morte.
My reading of the rules is if you dont have gunnery then you suffer a - to your hit roll.
But when you use gunnery it isn't "an attack", which has a highly specific meaning in D20 tied into your "(Base) Attack Bonus". It's a "skill check", which is a different activity.

And Improved Critical applies to attacks, not skill checks.

You see similar things in D&D: for example a rogue/wizard can get sneak attack damage when using a ray spell because that involves making an attack roll using his BAB, and sneak attack damage is adeed to attacks under certain circumstances. But he can't get sneak attacks with magic missile, because that always hits and so involves no attack roll.
 
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