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Wing Commander using Star Hero: 5th or 6th ed?


Tigratrus

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My 14 year old has been working on a Wing Commander campaign for some time.  He initially built it on a very simplified system he dug up from an abandoned Wing Commander RPG project. Since then he's rebuilt it all in Star Hero 5th ed, and we played through a few of the initial campaigns. Great fun. :-)

 

We're struggling a bit with implementing shields, waffling between using Ablative shields, or working out a house rule to handle the behavior of shields in Wing Commander. We've got a few ideas on how to handle it such as using the body done by the ship based killing attacks as a deduction from the shield strength etc.

 

We had two basic questions:

 

1. Is there a compelling reason to go from 5th ed (had the book from decades ago) to 6th ed?

2. Has anyone done anything along these lines that we could get some lessons learned from?

 

Thanks in advance for any assistance anyone can provide. :-) 

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Either one would be easy to use for Wing Commander. The dogfighting rules are pretty much the same (minus the removal of hexes from 6E). The trick is getting the damage versus defense right. As I recall, Wing Commander wasn't exactly consistent between titles anyway so you can tweak until it feels right.

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Thanks all! We ended up going with 5th ed and have been making minor tweaks as needed for balance.

 

The primary tweak so far has been to count the "body" rolled on the ship's killing attack damage (even though all the damage is actually body, we count the body as if it was a normal attack for shield/armor reduction purposes ) as damage to the shield/armor capacity. It's always possible for the damage done by the attack to penetrate all the way through, but only the "body" counts for reducing shield, and then armor defense. It worked remarkably well. 

 

We decided that the PC really should be remarkable as you're supposed to be the rising ace of aces. So in order to keep it from being unbalanced, I built the PC as a speed 6 while everyone else is speed 4. It's a hefty advantage, but doesn't really feel OP. The special effect is that he's heavily augmented with cutting edge hardware including skeletal reinforcements (con 23) and a nervous system that runs faster than normal. Not superhuman intelligence at all (Int 18) but he has more time to consider everything, and when connected to his fighter, he has vastly faster reaction times (spd 6). He can also handle a somewhat higher G than normal due to the increased Con etc. not vastly more, but enough more to make a difference. 

 

The fun part (as it often is) is the disadvantages. He's a humorous combination of manic and over-focused. Has to make an ego roll to break out of focusing on one thing to notice something completely different. So playing solitaire while on autopilot is a BAD IDEA. :P Talks a mile a minute all the time too. Both the PC and his wingman NPC have a small upgrade pool to make minor changes to their fighter's load out etc. Obviously the PC has some more major upgrades to handle the increased speed etc.

 

Anyway, it's working very well, and so far we couldn't be happier with how well it simulated the actual feel of the combat missions. He's running the actual campaign from the first game (getting all details off a Wing Commander wiki) so all the encounters are accurate representations of the game.  The events onboard the Tiger's Claw are very different though, having a lot of fun working out ways to excel at darts and playing pool using Trigonometry and Physics (we homeschool) combined with the enhanced Dex and benefits of the neural augmentation. Shotglass (the bartender) has countered by having a 1/2 scale dart board added next to the regular one. :-)
 

Good times.

 

James

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  • 4 months later...

Old post but new to me :) 

Fantastic idea to base a campaign on the Wing Commander universe. Played the original pc-games way back when released. Yes I'm that old...

Immediately decided to make this my first foray into GM:ing Hero System. The closeness of the carrier makes for a geographical manageable setting and all the characters excellent stand out npc:s. 

Think I found the wiki you mentioned with all the information.  http://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Main_Page

Thank you for the inspiration.

 

Cheers,

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We're struggling a bit with implementing shields, waffling between using Ablative shields, or working out a house rule to handle the behavior of shields in Wing Commander. We've got a few ideas on how to handle it such as using the body done by the ship based killing attacks as a deduction from the shield strength etc.

Ablative and Regenerative Shields. A staple of Computergames. However, I doubt it's validity for P&P games. I went over all the options in this old thread of mine:

Shields at 40%! Or why we do not need Star Trek shields

 

Pick your poision.

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