James_Kiley Posted April 2, 2003 Report Share Posted April 2, 2003 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain Obvious Posted April 2, 2003 Report Share Posted April 2, 2003 If you have somewhere horrible and fun in mind, go ahead and handwave some more. Based on what you've already told us, you've been more than fair already. They don't need any chances of getting where they're trying to go without further delay... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aroooo Posted April 2, 2003 Report Share Posted April 2, 2003 Traveller and Star Wars RPG's had good mishap charts for jumping too close to a gravity well. While I have not picked up TE yet, I'm sure the principal is the same. I can email you some examples when I get home tonight if you think it will help... Aroooo Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James_Kiley Posted April 3, 2003 Author Report Share Posted April 3, 2003 I have both Traveller and SWRPG, I will have to check both. Thanks for the pointer! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DigitalGolem Posted April 4, 2003 Report Share Posted April 4, 2003 I've designed a couple of different FTL drives with the "side effects" limitation, which occurs any time the drive is used improperly. So the PC's know roughly how much trouble they'll be in when they do something crazy. I've also got a random table for "variable side effects" to keep things interesting.... DGv3.0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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