User talk:Eiji-kun/Complete Transportation/Introduction

Size Modifier

Extending the Size Modifier to AC and attack rolls beyond that for Colossal is probably a bad idea. It encourages designers to give them Natural AC to compensate, as well as stupidly high Dexterity modifiers for ranged attacks. Effects that reduce size category don't reduce natural armor, so the former is very likely to be abused quickly. The latter can be avoided by expressly saying that ships don't attack, gunners do: the attack modifiers for a Medium, Small, or Tiny gunner are going to be a lot more reasonable. Alternatively, you could use the size of the turret instead of the size of the gunner or ship, so the Death Star's main cannon can't possibly hit anything smaller than a large asteroid, but its trench defenses can be used to shoot at things in its trenches. --Foxwarrior 00:33, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

On that, I found a solution (though I haven't written it out yet). They'll be getting no such natural armor, rather ships which are just too big to dodge practically will be relying on what I call Active Defense. It'll be written out like AD 25/Missiles and Melee or some such. Active defense are a type of item you put on a mount which actively protects you from something. The best example is a flak gun designed to shoot down enemy missiles. Against the types of attacks the AD protects against, AD becomes your effective AC.

Oh yeah, I'm working on categorizing things into damage types. Missile, ballistic, energy, and melee.

This should make giant Death Stars into things that won't be dodging and weaving, but using their large component spaces to cover their butts with ADs up the wazoo. Meanwhile small ships can forgo that and just dodge. One advantage is that ADs generally run off ammo of some sort so a small ship could wear a big ship out if it drains all their ammo before it runs out of firepower itself. I found such an image fitting.

Oh attack rolls, ships don't attack. The attack roll will be based on the nature of the gun and the gunner using it (most of the bonus is based on the gun usually). Here, I'm treading carefully to make attack bonuses and AC bonuses kind of rare. I want only a little spectrum of growth between poor AC/attack and great AC/attack. This helps in a few ways, but one way in particular I imagined is that it'll help prevent people from hopping in their attack helicopter and taking out the evil cult from the sky. For here, while low level people should be (reasonably) boned, I want high level people to actually be missed most of the time by these non-growing weapons and armors. Their badasses, they can dodge gunfire like that. Thus to that end I am building ships as if they were in the 6-15th level areas, were they PCs. What say you? -- Eiji-kun 03:24, 11 November 2011 (UTC)