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mj12games.com/forum → Defiance → VSF
Just had a skim of these... but wanted to ask the experts.
How do you think Defiance would stand up to doing Victorian 'steampunk' tabletop?
I have rather limited experience with the genre specificly. What features should it include that makes it different from other scifi settings?
Ironchicken,
The current rules are diverse enough that you should be able to mimic most effects in a VSF universe. In the upcoming supplement, I am adding in specific genre rules for "Industrial Fantasy", which will more easily allow for spellcasters and "golems", but whether these things should be considered VSF or "steampunk" is a matter of taste.
Please let us know if you build a VSF army. I personally would love to see the results!
-Demian
If most troops have some sort of ranged combat ability then it will work.
I have rather limited experience with the genre specificly. What features should it include that makes it different from other scifi settings?
Normally unreliability of technology and vehicles...
Well you could use low kill numbers, limited ammo, and stoppage rolls to mimic a little of that. I'm not sure how you'd go making vehicles unreliable, but maybe if you gave them low armour and a field save, so that the damage they took was more random?
Hmm. D:VG doesn't go well together with unreliable, I'm afraid.
Smokingwreckage outlined some way to make weapons less effective (much as I've considered doing for my pre-supplement Industrial Fantasy experiment -- although we'll have to see if it actually can beat the supplement "to the door" or not 
), but aside of the increased chance of stoppage (i.e. using split feed rate weapons only for FR>1) there's nothing that actually makes them unreliable in the way I understand the word.
For vehicles, nothing much can be done, with the current rules anyway. Some tinkering can be done (in addition to predominant use of field saves to make their staying power less predictable as outlined above) with the AFV damage tables. Use of the mecha genre rules would extend them to mechas as well, although technically those mods are recommended for 15mm or smaller only.
Also, the aforementioned supplement might help some. It should contain some more "ad hoc tinkering" style options.
Hmm. D:VG doesn't go well together with unreliable, I'm afraid.
<snip>
...there's nothing that actually makes them unreliable in the way I understand the word.
Most VSF rules seem to have some form of jamming or stalling rolls to represnt the over-extension of technology within the genre. Kind of a save verses breaking down, where failure forces the crew to spend the turn fixing it rather than being useful.
It would be a simple thing to add but assigning points and maintaining balance is always more difficult.
Assigning the points is fairly simple as long as the game effect is turn-by-turn and easily defined statistically. For example, a vehicle that will be non-functional 30% of the time would have a frame cost of 0.7x.
Things get trickier to balance when you add in "special effects" like "must move forward at full speed without firing" vs. "roll randomly for each figure to see if they get stunned", etc.
You took the foot right out my mouth!
No, that's not quite it...
Anyway.
Was tinkering (in the bus this morning, so it was only in my head obviously) with an idea of making a variable effector weapon based on this very same principle.
Calculate the cost of the weapon with and without the effector. Add the "unreliable ammo" rule: Each time the weapon is fired, roll a D10. On a roll of 1-5, any shots from the weapon do not benefit from the designated effector the weapon has. On a 6+, the ammo works normally and the designated effector is used to work out the damage. The cost of the weapon would be the average of the cost without effector and the cost with.
Doesn't work with low effector costs, but when it does work it's a fairly simple way of introducing an element of unreliability and should yield a "correct" result, pointswise.
Now you're thinking like a statistician, tnjrp!
I like the idea of unreliable effectors...
mj12games.com/forum → Defiance → VSF
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