So, this last week the PCs, in trying to escape an Imperial Navy Peregrine-class Frigate, found themselves just 37,000km from the nearest terrestrial-sized planet and decided to disengage the safety interlocks and leap into hyperspace anyway -- they were pretty sure they'd be killed or captured if the Dauntless caught them, and weren't certain that they'd die if they jumped too close, so they went with that.
Due to various issues, I handwaved their being successful in making the jump. But I'm trying to figure out a reasonable difficulty scale and sense of consequences for a misjump too close to a planetary mass.
I tend to think something like: within geosynchronous orbit, hyperspace gravity effects will just instantly destroy a ship. At geosync, you have a -15 or some crazy penalty like that to your Navigation: Hyperspace roll, with the difficulty scaling down as you get closer to the 100,000km limit.
For consequences for a failed roll within the unsafe distance, I would tend to think that missing the roll by just a few (say 3) would be an inobvious misjump, going the wrong direction for a few hours before it becomes obvious that you've made a mistake. More serious failures on the dice roll would result in damage to ship's systems or weird psychic effects to the crew, and of course, catastrophic failure should result in the ship's destruction. Of course, I don't intend to end my campaign by destroying the PCs' ship because of someone rolling an 18 in a dire circumstance, so I would probably just catapult them across space and time to somewhere horrible and fun.
Anyone else have any opinions about this sort of thing? I'm definitely open to other input.
jk
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