Hammer Escorts vs Vaylen Pie Rats Firefight!

[Countercheck]

For the discussion.

[Paul B]

I like pie.

p.

[Paul B]

Lord Abu "Abusive" von Twink

Hammer Lord, age 44
7 lifepaths: Born to the League, Student, Hammer Engineer, Hammer Master, First Officer, Lord-Pilot Hammer, Hammer Captain

Statz:
Will 6
Perception 6
Agility 4
Speed 3
Power 3
Forte 4
Superficial 2, Injured 3, Maimed 7, Mortal 9
Steel 7, Hesitation 3

Circles 3
Affiliations: 3D Hammer
Some unspent circles

Resources: 5

Skilz:
Artillery 6
Bargaining 3
Close Combat 2
Command 6
Crew-wise 3
Doctrine 3
Hammer-wise 5
Helm 6
Interdiction-wise 3
Munitions 2
Officer-Wise 3
Ship Management 3
Space station-wise 3
Spaceport-wise 3
Strategy 6
Tactics 6
Vehicular Weapons 6
Zero G 6

Traitz:
Capitalist at Heart
Corvus & Crucis
Harried
Hammer Lord
I know this ship like my own hands
Number One!
Officer
Seen it All
Well-read

Personal tech:
Boarding Armor (ie Ballistic)
CEBW sidearm

Contemplating some kind of tactics-boosting tech but nothing's coming to mind right now.

[Countercheck]

I'm thinking the Vaylen commander is going to be his illegitimate daughter. HULLED illegitimate daughter. Hulled illegitimate 10 year old daughter. Who is playing pirates. Complete with hook, eyepatch, and tricorner hat.

[Paul B]

Rock. I was thinking about something similar, with the Vaylen aping "arrgh maties" style piracy -- great minds and all that, right?

p.

[Countercheck]

Yup. I'm torn between them being all submariney or all xebecy.

[Paul B]

Or you've got the modern-day scumbags who hang out around Thailand, Laos, Cambodia etc. I'm sure ye olde pirates were viewed as equally scummy in their day; I wonder how they got to be so romanticised? Stupid Robert Louis Stevenson...

EDIT: I haven't looked yet; is there more variety in a Vaylen burn for Hammer characters with Infiltration, Recon, sneaky stuff? Or are you going to try and burn some stealth tech into your ships? Or is it going to be a surprise? :-O

p.

[Countercheck]

I might burn some stealth into my ships.

Eh, modern pirates are no fun. They steam up to big freighters in their little trawlers and say "If you don't give us $50,000, we'll put an RPG into your bow. It'll be really inconvenient and cost you $100000 to fix, so cheaper and easier if you just pay us now."

WHich is actually how hard sci fi piracy would work. Pirates fire a cloud of kintetic projectiles into the path of freighter, which needs to expend expensive reaction mass and power to avoid them. "If you don't give us $50,000 credits, we'll do it again."

[Paul B]

Played any EVE Online? Greatest PVP MMO ever conceived, unless you just want to putter around and check out the universe. Everyone's a pirate or in an escort protecting themselves from pirates. It's actually a fucking evil place to spend your free time in, and I can't tolerate the stress it produces in me just trying to get from system to system. Probably I sympathize too much with the victims to be a good victimizer.

The piracy gig in EVE is that you have a) honorable pirates who threaten to gut your ship unless you hand it over, and then allow you to escape in a life raft and b) cutthroat murderers who won't parlay and just blast the shit out of you by camping in high-value/low-security areas. The a) group can be negotiated with and are tolerated by the community, the b) group cannot be negotiated with and seems to get off on being stalked by bounty hunters.

I'm still trying to dial in how common spacecraft really are in this game. The restrictions on which PCs can have ships suggest they're expensive on par with, say, private jets. (That's one of my SF game gauges I use to explain macroeconomy to players: how common are starships? As common as cars? Commercial trucks? Private jets? Princess cruise ships? Aircraft carriers?)

If they're on par with private jets, or in medieval-speak, as common as privately owned merchant vessels, I'd imagine anything worse than a tiny bit of damage done to a ship could conceivably ruin the owner's finances. Alternately, the assumption is that if you own a ship, you're fabulously wealthy by default because of the very ship itself (i.e. you can leverage the ship's value for loans and such).

Or we're back to the South Pacific Modern Pirate model, in which a trawler is just the delivery system for an asymmetrically-priced attack element (i.e. a $500 RPG that can sink a $500k ship). Conceivably, space could be crawling with trawlers.

This is where the game's resources mechanics make everything fuzzy. It's not clear to me that the price difference between a trawler-type in-system shuttle is really that far apart from an armed patrol craft. Well...they're half price according to the rules (Ob8 for a shuttle, Ob16 for a patrol craft -- does that price include the Artillery(1) weaponry?).

EDIT: I'm cross-posting this to the Hammer thread over in General.

p.

[Paul B]

Got any characters or ships burned yet? I'm thinking through my escorts right now.

Also, you cool with the Hammer Lord bringing 5D crewmembers along? I've been looking over the Hammer LPs and find it very surprising how hard it is to get a guy who, you know, can actually fly Hammer. The only LP that give me helm/pilot is Lord-Pilot Hammer. Are all my patrol guys really Lords? :rolleyes:

That curious restriction, all by itself, is kind of changing my view on how the Hammer works.

p.

[Countercheck]

So long as my 6 year old clan leader can too =)

[Paul B]

I'm really looking forward to seeing what you can do with a legal Vaylen burn. Should be quite educational.

What's the Hammer Lord equivalent for the Vaylen? Usurper or something?

p.

[Countercheck]

Usurper gives you ACCESS to the hammer and anvil lord traits, much like Forged does.

It is very easy to cheat dreadfully when making a vaylen. At the same time, there is only ONE lifepath that has Tactics. Am reconsidering putting the leader in a human body... but no. Reconsidering is for pansies. Hmm. Can I have the child be second in command, or if the child is first in command, can she have the 2ic make her rolls for her?

[Paul B]

Usurper gives you ACCESS to the hammer and anvil lord traits, much like Forged does.

It is very easy to cheat dreadfully when making a vaylen. At the same time, there is only ONE lifepath that has Tactics. Am reconsidering putting the leader in a human body... but no. Reconsidering is for pansies. Hmm. Can I have the child be second in command, or if the child is first in command, can she have the 2ic make her rolls for her?

I got interested in the ins and outs of legal Vaylen burning and realized I have no idea what the fuck is going on with those rules. I just posted a slew of questions to the character burner board. My last campaign, I kind of fudged and just burned up regular humans and then stuck a worm in their head. This time around, there aren't any Vaylen (yet) so it hasn't quite come up.

So when you say you're reconsidering putting your leader "in a human body," what does that mean exactly? As in, a human burned up with the Empire Characters settings and LPs?

I'm looking through the Vaylen settings now...very interesting. Lots and LOTS of Wises but very little of the real deal. Commander (Vaylen) and Prince (Human) gives you Command -- Prince gives all kinds of good stuff; probably a good jumping-off spot. Ahh...you have to go way over to Ksatriyen to pick up an Angiris LP (which Prince can get you into!). Crazy. I think I'm more interested in the characters than the tech you come up with!

I'm pretty sure by-the-rules the commander is the one who makes the unit rolls, and only receives help from the 2iC. Maybe you need to make two units/two objectives? That might make for an interesting fight. It looks like you're going to need a Ksatriyen crew to do the bulk of your flying and fighting.

p.

[Countercheck]

hmm. Second in command will be the little girl. She'll be the actual commander, as she's higher status and has a human body, but the field commander will be a bug.

[Paul B]

Bug! LOL. Sounds fine to me.

http://img.epinions.com/images/opti/41/f5/pr-Pest_Control-Schultz_Bug_Spray-resized200.jpg

p.