Update on the Starsiege Role Playing Game

[Weatherlight]

http://forums.vugames.com/thread.jsp...47896&tstart=0

Jerkoffs. HAPPY NICE FOLK!

[Darkwolf]

YAY!

[barak1001]

A suggestion on incorporating engines:

Not sure if you've ever seen the rules for Mechwarrior's Miniature line (Not battletech, which was completey hex based), but how they do it is really simple.

The vehicles top speed is rated by a number, and a flexible tape measure (like tailors use) is used along with a map.

If the vehicle has a speed of 10, it can move 10 inches on the flexible tape. End of story. It makes combat movements pretty easy to follow.

I also played a board game years ago, called Richthofen's War. It handled movement pretty nicely. Though each player would have to have a datasheet representing their herc if you did it that way.

In a nut shull, the game was played on a hex map. The planes had numbers on their counters for the amount in movement point cost it would take turn to whatever side. Imagine it had a 1 at the front, 2's on each side of it left or right, 3's on the back sides, and 4 on the rear of it. Those aren't real numbers, btw. If you wanted to turn that vehicle to the rear it would cost you 4 movement points, if you wanted to turn to the back left it would cost 3, and so on.

You also had to move forward each time you spent points turning. Based on your current speed. So if you were going a speed of 30, that would be the total movement points you had to spend. Each vehicle had a deceleration and acceleration rating which gave how much they could take off or add to their movement points in one round. Their current speed was represented by putting a coin or counter on a bar scale on the data sheet for the plane.

This actually represent inertia. In order to do this with vehicles that can stop, you could simply have the vehicles have different stats for top speed and turning rate. In fact you could have bar scales just like RW did. Segmented for different speed classes. Then have the turn rate go down as the speed class goes up. It would completely solve how to handle turn rates at a stop. The only rule change would be that they had to spend all of their movement points, but turn points were optional.

I know this sounds really complex, but it's actually not, and made game play very straight forward and simple to figure out.

I'd also suggest you get someone with some basic programming skills to perhaps make a companion disk to go with the game, so that they can visually see movement on a generated infinite map, rather than with a clunky paper map.

[Maestro]

Sorry for the late reply, my life has been hellish lately. Great work James, keep on truckin' buddy.

[Maestro]

I demand updates.

[Weatherlight]

I don't have my notecards on me, but several breakthroughs have been made in terms of making it unique. I forget what was discussed privately so I'll list as much as I can think of right now.

1. Cybrids will not be a playable race. This may latter be restricted to Promethean Cybrids. This is simply because the thought patterns and behaviour of Cybrids are too alien to roleplay. Also, this circumvents the (in D&D terms) Chaotic/Evil characters that are made simply so the player can be a sick fuck. Metagens, who have accepted certain aspects of human nature may be playable. I just haven't had enough to work with yet.

2. Players will be able to buy an attribute maximum as well as their current rating in that. So I may only ever have a maximum of a 3 strength, while VC has a 6 because of his... aerobic excercises.

3. Cybrids will not have this racial cap, they will be restricted by their Tech Level Access which will work into their standing (i.e. <Chooser-of-Tactics: Ninth>). Better parts means better performance, and with the uncovering of the Pluto cache, Cybrids have jumped a good 300 years in technological evolution.

4. Humans will get a human-only stat (currently) known as 'Instinct'. This is to reflect the honing of a human spirit in ways that would be impossible for machines. This can range from hairs standing up on the back of your neck to gut reactions and "eyeballing" a situation. This has several mechanical purposes, the first is that Instinct can be used to anticipate tactical maneuvers (ambush, feint, etc), social situations (against subterfuge, etc), and perhaps even "skill checks" where the character goes with his gut reaction. This will be limited to certain number of uses which will most likely hinge on the ranks in the attribute.

5. Character creation will be a point-build system.

6. This game will impliment a series of 'packages' that will determine the basics of a character. This is very similar to the Spycraft and Star Gate SG-1 roleplaying systems. There will still be leeway for character customization, but this system will give the player a foundation (and will help circumvent stupid characters).

7. The proposed rating for this is MA. It will be a horror story, and graphic about it.

8. It will incorporate as much of Starsiege as it can, but there will be alterations to the storyline (some almost drastic, but mostly minor) as the story itself doesn't hold up well to scrutiny... ignoring the fact it was never finished in the first place... and that it was written for a video game, not an RPG. I doubt anyone will take issue with these revisions as they help make more sense of the universe.

9. The game will be a hex based map which a printoff of will be available with the .pdf I'm distributing it in. It will also include papercraft vehicles as many people don't have minis and this will be a minis heavy game. After coming up with this idea myself, I found that Mutants and Masterminds did a simple version of this but I like how I'm presenting it better. Because I thought of my idea, thus making it superior.

10. Infantry, Vehicle and Naval engagements will all be playable. The scaling will be on a multiplier of 10. So if a Herc weapon that normally has a damage rating of 4 is fired at infantry, it is considered to have a damage rating of 40. By this same token Naval weapons of rating 5 are considered 50 to Herculans, and 500 to infantry. Infantry to Herc will be scaled down as appropriate. This does not apply to Alien Cache weaponry which is considered Herculan weapons. The reason for this is several pictures in the Compendium showing some Arab-lookin' motherfuckers blowing the hell out of a Paladin with Cache rifles.

11. The Human Campaign as presented in Starsiege will be included as an adventure in the .pdf. This is going to take a half-assed laize-faire approach to the events of the story. The events of the adventure will not effect any major changes in the course of the game's storyline. The details of the Human Campaign will be considered "hands off" for the most part. This is not to say I (we) are going to be pretentious cocks and not let the players make a difference.

12. The skill system will be similar to what someone pointed out to me was almost identical to EVE: Online. I liked how EVE did it a little better and decided to save myself some effort and just rip them off.




That's all I can think of right now. I might update later.

[grey wolf]

nerdgasm.

[Maestro]

nerdgasm.

Seconded. Thanks a lot James. If you need any help writing technobabble bullshit for anything just let me know.

[Weatherlight]

Went back and reviewed my notecards and came up with a few more things that are considered <set//finished//concrete> for the time being.


Character pre-requisites. See Exalted 2nd Edition: The Dragon-blooded character creation for examples. I thought that was a damned nifty idea... and stole it.

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Skills will be broken up into three tiers and for the time being are called Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced. I'll rename it Rudimentary, Something and Something later on. Work with me people.

The "success" for die start at 5 and 6 (yay too much Shadowrun lately). However, as a player progresses along he will gain access to higher levels of learning and skill. This currently affects the target number needed for success. This will follow the three tiers of skills.

1. Basic skill only - basic skill target number 5, 6.

2. Basic skill and Intermediate skill - Basic skill target number 4, 5, 6; Intermediate skill target number 5, 6.

3. Basic skill, Intermediate skill and Advanced skill - Basic skill target number 3, 4, 5, 6; Intermediate skill target number 4, 5, 6; and Advanced skill target number 5, 6.

For example the character has "Basic Mechanics" as a skill. To earn a success he would need a five or six. If he also had the the "Intermediate Mechanics" skill he would need a four through six to score a success on his Basic Mechanics skill, but still need a five or six on his Intermediate Mechanics skill.

This sounds like it is going to be a problem, but each new tier of skill requires levels in previous skill. So "Intermediate Starship Mechanics" might require five ranks in "Basic Starship Mechanics", four ranks in "Electronic Engineering" and three ranks in "Imperial Technology and Design".

I'm going to try and pace it so characters will have an Advanced Skill or several Intermediates 3/4ths of the way through the adventure included in the core rulebook. The numbers are subject to change, because I haven't really had alot of playtesting yet.


I'll think of more later.

[Falcon]

I've got to say, WL, this is some pretty impressive work. Can you give a brief rundown on the Exalted 2nd Edition Character pre-requs, for those of us who have never used it?

[Weatherlight]

In terms of Starsiege it's this:

Imperials have more points to use to build their character. For this example, let's say 400 (just making shit up here). Colonists, however, would only have 350. However, there is a catch to playing an Imperial. Yes, you get more points and by the time you finish making an Imperial character to compare it to a Colonist character sheet you might come out 5-10 points ahead (you're from the planet where most assholes have a silver spoon in their mouth all their lives... go figure you'd come out ahead). Now the real question is "Where did the rest of those points go?" It goes into the shit that every Imperial is taught from the day they can understand basic sentences: History of the Empire, pre-Empire Metanational Politics, the Code Duello, Imperial Bureaucracy and Administrations, etc etc.

It is the basic skillset every Terran will have had bred into them as to not disgrace their families.

Now why did the Colonists start with less points? They don't have near the requirements that Dirtborn do. They all have a formal education, sure... but most of them aren't forced to learn millennium old dances for the day they are inducted into the Knights. They will have some requirements, just to make sure the players create functioning characters... but will have more freedom for customization.

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Now I realize that some of you will not have played/heard of the Spycraft/SG-1 RPGs so I'll tell you a bit about the Macro and Sub-specialties (these of course will be renamed and retooled a bit so I don't get sued).

Macro-specialty examples

1. Imperial Knight
2. Terran Defense Force
3. The Imperial Legions
4. Martian Rebel
5. Venusian Rebel
6. Mercurial Rebel
7. Independents/Freelancers

Now, based on what you choose you will get a certain number of skills that are (to relate this in an applicable metaphor) "class" skills based on simply being a Martian Rebel or an Imperial Knight. Every Martian ever born knows how to mine. Maybe they haven't done it themselves, but their fathers or brothers or uncles did. Imperials will know the formal military etiquette procedures like the back of their hand simply for having gone through the basic training every soldier does.

Sub-specialty examples

1. Technician
2. Officer
3. Soldier
4. Pilot
5. Emperor's personal bitch (Knight)

This works like Macro-specialties, but on a smaller more career focused level. These bonuses stack with those gained from Macro-specialties to help get a concrete character basis. It also helps differentiate between a Technician who was born on Mars, and one who is from Earth.

So a Terran Defense Force Technician and a Martian Rebel Technician would have certain things in common... but also some differences. It helps to avoid the general flaw that most point buy systems seem to have. "Oh, you're from Mars huh? That's strange, your character sheet looks exactly like mine..."

There would be pros and cons to everything you choose, but with some work and playtesting it should go pretty well.

[Maestro]

I worship regularly at your shrine James.

[Bloodyboots]

I am highly, highly impressed. Keep up the good work, I'm near drooling.

[Weatherlight]

This is a personal message to myself, using the forum as scratchspace because the university doesn't want to open my gmail account right now.

For those of you who are interested, this is something Nabterayl sent to me a long time ago as a bit of history concerning the Starsiege Universe. This is not to say that I'm going to use it, but I'm reposting it here as it seems that the former 2845 forum database has eaten some things I had saved there.

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Private corporate armies would be nascent to nonexistent in this period. Eventually the largest corporate militias will become forces capable of waging at least small-scale interstellar war (c.f. MissionForce) but right now they don't really exist beyond the security guard level. Instead what you'll find are security companies\\mercenaries which might be employed solely by one client but which are not, technically speaking, a corporate-owned private army. There's also the issue of manpower to consider. Effective mercenaries require military training, and the only entities right now which have the knowledgebase and facilities for that sort of thing are the TDF, Imperial Orders, and FCF. The Starsiege resulted in a serious drawdown in the number of human veterans, and the regular services are expanding ferociously right now. Consequently the mercenary companies are in direct competition with the government for qualified personnel. As a consequence of that, what qualified mercenaries there are have a favorable bargaining position compared to their corporate clients, so it makes most sense to stay in independent companies. Such a company can still negotiate an exclusive contract, but if a better deal comes up down the line they can move to that because there simply aren't enough security contractors to meet demand.
To a certain extent logistical support would be provided by the actual arms manufacturers themselves, just as it is now. Licensing security companies is actually a powerful regulatory tool for the Empire; a company which loses the right to bear anything other than lasers and sonics is effectively ought of business. Another likely source for logistics would be the actual client. In four hundred years militia units will have signature vehicles and weapons which are not necessarily state-of-the-art even for corporations, and it's likely that one of the reasons for that is that they have long-standing ties to particular manufacturers. The seeds of that sort of thing would be sown now, to sprout later. And finally there'd be the black market, which is not something a contractor could base his logistics around but could be used discreetly and infrequently to fill in gaps in supply.
The experience of the Rebellion teaches us that it is possible to retrofit civilian starships as makeshift HERC carriers or warships, though any thought of taking on anything other than unarmed vessels in such a ship would be foolhardy. Missiles on a private vessel would be very hard to come by owing to their expense. Combined with the superior sensors any military vessel is sure to have and the refitted ship's almost certain lack of shields, a real warship from either side would most likely blow a refitted raider out of space with missiles before any jury-rigged energy weapons could effectively reply. Additionally, warships from either side will increasingly mount XGE drives, which if properly handled will allow a navy ship to fly circles around a refitted civilian ship. XGE drives are new enough and top-secret enough that there is effectively no possibility of one slipping into private hands, so for the foreseeable future navy ships will have a decisive maneuver advantage over any sort of jury-rigged warship. HERC weapons could be jury-rigged for use in space, and would be powerful enough to threaten at least small vessels. On the other hand actual naval weapons will far outrange such weapons, and of course they get larger than HERC weapons too.
The legal meaning of nobility is gaining a property right to shares in the Empire itself, which is why Imperial Orders get access to the best equipment. There isn't an open market on this stuff, and in point of fact owning an actual armored vehicle would be a huge deal for a private security company, one that the vast majority would not have the clearance for. Now, as the Rebels showed in the last war, there are lots of HERC-like industrial vehicles running around that can be retrofitted, though finding HERC-scale guns would be just as hard as getting your hands on a bona fide HERC. Certain low-level weapons that aren't strictly HERC-only would be possible though expensive - e.g., light lasers and small-bore autocannons (analogous to, say, a minigun, which you might find on a helicopter but is hardly going to threaten a military armored vehicle). A noble house would undoubtedly have connections to military contractors, but keep in mind that in court there's a difference between a noble house and an Imperial Order. One of the things that does is build in a level of regulatory finesse: nobility can't own HERCs because that would be dangerous, but a knight of an order (all of whom just happen to be nobility) can own HERCs. This gives the Emperor a way to slap a house on the wrist by stripping them of their arms without going so far as to strip them of their nobility.
Infantry arms and vehicles (e.g., the Badger or the Argus - though the Argus itself is state-of-the-art stuff, which a security company is no more likely to own than Blackwater is to own a Comanche) are more openly available. Lasers and sonics are available to anybody, and it would be standard practice for a mercenary company to get licensed to bear military-grade weapons such as HVGs, rocketguns, and candleguns (though getting their hands on more recent developments like blaster rifles would be a real feat, since there aren't enough of those even for the military). Likewise for body armor. It's even possible that a company might own some old power armor (power armor != SCARAB; think the exosuits that medium infantry in 2845 will wear) though of course current-generation exosuits are also in short supply and being exclusively supplied to the military at the moment as part of the Artemis Edict. Demolitions gear, owing to the potentially low-tech nature of demolition, would be another tool that mercenaries wouldn't have too much trouble acquiring. The demolitions gear used by the TDF would be on the restricted list, but you don't need state-of-the-art gear to blow stuff up.
Anti-HERC gear is not really a legitimate thing for mercenaries to own, although of course we all know from the Turkhazak incident that they can find their way into illegitimate hands. Those Hellflowers, by the way, would have had to have been stolen from a nuclear weapons cache - easier to do then than it would be now (though hardly easy), since before the Starsiege Earth was bristling with weapon caches which have since been used up. The major sources of anti-HERC weaponry for a mercenary group would be the light lasers and ATCs I mentioned earlier (which, as I'm sure you'll see in the game, only sort of qualify as &quot;anti-HERC&quot; weaponry), plus less spectacular man-launched missiles purchased from the black market or possibly scavenged in the aftermath of a battle. The idea of private individuals owning weaponry that can seriously challenge a military armored vehicle might not be viewed with quite the horror that we would view it in the US today (people in the 29th century are far more comfortable with weaponry in everyday life than 21st century Americans are), but it would still be viewed with extreme discomfort. Deployable and fortified weapons would all essentially be on the level of infantry weapons - i.e., the available fortifications wouldn't stand up to a single hit from a real HERC weapon, though they might stop Cybrid or human small arms cold. What you'd find in the way of &quot;deployables&quot; would be things like machine gun HVGs, sustained-discharge heavy sonics, candleguns (which are portable in the way that an M249 is portable), 20mm autocannons, and heavy lasers such as you might find on a SCARAB (not that that will mean much to you for a while - what I mean is a laser that's heavier than a man would carry but lighter than a tank would).

Our intention (though who knows if we'll hold on to the ability to develop this IP long enough to realize it) is that as time progresses and the Corporate influence grows, my intention is that the FCF will be quietly absorbed into the private Corporate militia forces - thus giving birth to the status quo we see in Cyberstorm. That is, however, a ways off from the current time period.

[Weatherlight]

http://rapidshare.com/files/53362701...e_rpg.rar.html

For some reason MD saw fit not to include .rar as a valid filetype for tJY's upload.

Jackass.


There is the digitized first attempt at a Herc sheet, and some other shit that I may or may not have been drunk while writing.