Friday, April 8, 2011

Starship combat non-critical hit table

A lot of starship battle simulations ultimately boil down to a war of attrition: your phasers burning through the other guy's shields before his missles pierce your armor.  However, many space combat games have some sort of critical hit system as well--either integral to the game mechanics, like the threshhold checks in Full Thrust, or bolted on as an afterthought like the Galactic Knights optional critical hit table.  This is also known as the Golden BB rule--meaning a one-in-a-million lucky shot can get through and take out your flagship.

Most of the time, though, your shots simply amount to ticking off armor boxes or crossing off systems on your ship diagram.  But there's more to a starship than gun emplacements, engines, and electronics.  When I run my convention scenarios, I like to describe to the players what happens with the non-critical hits, or when someone takes out a cargo space on a transport.  However, it's tough coming up with something on the fly, so I whipped up this table for future reference.

NON-CRITICAL STARSHIP DAMAGE TABLE (d%)
Die roll     Result                                      
01-02        Forward dry cleaners
03-06        Starbord pizza oven
07-11        Arcturan pornography library
12-13        Holodeck
14-16        Shuffleboard deck
17-19        Paint locker (d10: 1-7 gray; 8-9 white; 10 plaid)
20-23        Chief engineer's still
24-29        Video arcade
30-34        Spare dress uniforms
35-37        Septic tank
38-41        Petting zoo
42-47        Swimming pool
49-52        Captain's disco lounge
53-58        Stormtrooper target range
59-63        Aft car rental kiosk
64-69        Are you really reading this far?
70-72        Port sauna
73-76        EVA window cleaning equipment
77-80        Dune buggy garage (lose 1-6 dune buggies)
81-82        Satellite TV dish
83-86        Intellectual property cloakers
87-88        Political officer's quarters
89-92        Internet connection wait, that's critical-roll again
93-94        Make it up your own damn self
95-97        Roll again twice on this table
98-99        Disc golf course
 00          Rulebook destroyed: game ends

Let me know if you end up using this, and how it works out for you.

11 comments:

  1. A work of art!

    You can add it to DM Muse and possibly be immortalised.

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  2. Genius! Maybe I'll work one up for Battletech. :-)

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  3. A work of off the wall genius!

    Hey take a look at these, and consider the gauntlet officially thrown! ;-)


    http://brazosevilempire.blogspot.com/2011/04/federation-ssd-1.html

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  4. Nice work, Don! FYI, sometimes when I try to go to your blog, it automatically sends me to the Full Thrust webring page.

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  5. Yeah it sends me there too every now and again!

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  6. So when can I invade your parsec
    of space? We need to do a modified version of Glen's Cross Over battles.
    My Feds Vs your and my Carnies!

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  7. I'm not free till next month due to work etc, that and we need a bit of time to work out the scenario...)

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  8. One hit on the septic tank on starship that size and I would abandon ship!

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  9. I'm a bit late to this party, but I've added my own version of the non-critical hits table here: http://colgar6.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/damage-control-to-disco-lounge.html . It's not quite the same as the original; I've added a number of items of my own.

    Many thanks for the original idea!

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