Starship Combat Experience?

[SCUBA Hero]

I think the Hero System combat rules for vehicles, and in particular starships, are a bit wonky.

 

Has anyone used Hero System for starship combat? If so, what house rules (if any) did you use?

 

Rep to those who post actual examples of starship combat.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Starship Combat Experience?

 

I'd have to dig up the chat logs, but we've run a number of combats with various tweaks using the Hero System.

 

There haven't been any serious issues at all using the Vehicle Rules (which, personally, I've never considered wonky).

 

And adjustments to the rules we've made are:

Independent Turrets are treated separately - act on Operators SPD/Dex, not Vehicles.

Inches times Non-Combat Multiplier = maximum Inches/Phase Velocity to easily (not completely realistically) emulate the idea that there's not real top speed in space.

 

We do use the Gunner must succeed with a Skill Roll to Target, and then Fire. Targeting is maintained until the opponent succeeds at a Piloting vs Piloting Roll to "break the lock."

[The Weapon]

Re: Starship Combat Experience?

 

I think the Hero System combat rules for vehicles, and in particular starships, are a bit wonky.

 

Has anyone used Hero System for starship combat? If so, what house rules (if any) did you use?

 

Rep to those who post actual examples of starship combat.

 

When I saw the title I thought that it was about how useful combat experience would be in a starship combat. How useful would it be? I mean as long as you can calculate vectors is experience really that useful? Especially with battles lasting all of 5 minutes of actual shooting.

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Starship Combat Experience?

 

It's been a LOOOONG time, but I used to do a fair bit of various vehicle combats in my pre-Star Hero Star Hero campaign, and we integrated the original Star Hero system in when it finally came out. All the campaign weapons scaled up on a pretty consistent scale from hand weapon to the heaviest ships weapons, so there were a LOT of active points getting lobbed around. We had a pretty intricate system worked out, but it was fun

 

I'll try and put my thoughts on how 5th can be better used to get what you want. It can be done, but it takes a fair bit of frontloaded work to get things tweaked to your taste.

The Traveler HERO guys here on the board did a pretty bang up job of just that from what I've seen, by the way. There are worse folk you could ask

[shadowcat1313]

Re: Starship Combat Experience?

 

I have run several starship combats with 5E, it works pretty well

 

we use several house rules, more dealing with equipment than anything else

 

1. Sensors are run out of fixed multipowers instead of the VPP used in regular star hero.

2. lasers are fixed mode weapons instead of using multipowers.

3. Electronic Warfare is done as a contest of skills, instead of dice of suppress or dispel.[this is a modified version of whats in Champions 2]

 

the way we run things, missiles tend to be the big ship killer, although HE and detonation laser warheads are the standard.

 

4. Missiles are built as weapons systems instead of vehicles.