On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 2:42 AM, Knapp <magick.crow@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 6:00 AM, Rupert Boleyn <rupert.boleyn@gmail.com> wrote:

I've never been a great fan of those, ever since running across that in Champions/Hero in the Big Blue Book days. It seems too arbitrary (yes, I know all design rules are arbitrary) and arse about face.

I was the same way, at first. Particularly as I had/have long shared your concerns about munchkin players. But then I realized that Savage Worlds already took this into account, by advising the GM that he shouldn't let his players design ships/vehicles unless he was willing to supervise their work.

A game like SW is very flexible and open. This means that it would not even list a Meson J in the first place or what effects it might have or limits which then means that the ref must have made it up or brought it into the universe and he must spell out how it works. Mostly the game would not even bother have a J vs an A. You would just have a HUGE ray gun and no HUGE ray guns do not work on SMALL fighters.

That's basically it. The basic game only fully stats out those weapons which PCs might conceivably carry with them (if only as a team), with the largest real gun being the M2 Browning HMG (at 84 pounds) and the largest energy weapon being the "Laser MG" at 15 pounds.

Weapons bigger than these are assumed to always be mounted on vehicles, so the basic game only notes their range and damage values, with the largest real weapon being the "125mm Tank Gun" and the largest energy weapon being the "20MGW Pulse Laser."

You have to turn to the game's supplements for vehicle building rules. Pinnacle has only recently published its Science Fiction Companion and I haven't yet purchased this yet. But (presumably) the vehicle building rules in it are refinements of those in their earlier SciFi Toolkit PDFs. So I expect they still use nebulous "spaces" rather than fixed mass/volume values for components. Since a fighter-sized ship would be allowing only a handful of "spaces," nobody is going to get a weapon of any size into one . . . unless they maybe made it into nothing more than a (barely) flying weapon.

Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident." Robert A. Heinlein

"A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the advice." - Bill Cosby

"We know a little about a lot of things; just enough to make us dangerous." Dean Winchester