Siege-scale combat

[fletch137]

Has anybody here played the old WEG version of the Star Wars RPG? I was inspired the other day by a vague memory of the scaling rule for vehicle and starship combat and how that might be used in siege-scale or mass combat in DCC.

The basic gist was that, as a craft got larger, it gained an increase in damage but a decrease in ability to hit something of smaller scale. So while a star destroyer had continent-shredding turbolasers, its chances of hitting a snubfighter were pretty slim.

Anyways, that idea came to mind while thinking of DCC's dice chain, and I began wondering if a similar technique could be used here for mass combat or damaging large constructs.

Fer instance, rather than giving a ship a whole lotta HP to represent its sturdiness, declare the ship to be "craft" sized. PCs attacking a ship get +1d to hit ('cause honestly, how could you miss?) and -1d to damage. "Fortification" sized could mean +2d for the PC to stab it, but it would take -2d from the little weapon that was being used against it. Meanwhile, a catapult would also be listed as a "fortification" sized weapon, so it would attack and do damage per normal, but suffer a -2d to hit a man-sized opponent while inflicting +2d damage on a hit.

Where this thought ultimately went was to give a classification to units of soldiers. Your warrior could single-handedly take on an army, and get +3d to hit it, but would only do -3d damage to the mass of enemy soldiers. And as before, the soldiers would have a harder time hitting the single warrior, but would do a much larger dice of damage if they hit. Best bet? An equally-scaled trebuchet would have no penalty to hitting such a large cluster of soldiers and would do its unaltered damage.

This would open the door to siege-scaled monsters, where the PCs would have to "scale up" to attack a sea monster with their ship's ballista or find their castle walls being battered down by a humongous dragon while the heroes dart "safely" between its slowly stomping feet.

Thoughts?

[finarvyn]

I was a big fan of 1E WEG Star Wars when it first came out. (1980's?) Haven't played it in decades, so I don't recall the specifics for the rules for ship combat, but what you say sounds interesting and I'll have to hunt through the closet for my rulebooks to take a peek.

[GnomeBoy]

You can only scale up a d20 by +2d to a d30 before the dice chain runs out -- unless we invent more dice! Or do percentiles come after the d30...?

Still, hitting the top could start adding +2, +4 +6 etc. to that d30.

[Tortog]

I used to play a lot of 1E WEG. I loved its ability to go back and forth between small encounters of a few individuals all the way out to planetary scale for those who wanted to play with really big toys. In fact, I still have the design schematics for a capital scale asteroid mining vessel called the Whumpus. It got converted into a mobile hypernode relay to facilitate the rebel communications network. I'd still be playing it if I could find folks in my area willing to play....

{shameless plug } I have to say that the scalar function of their system was an influence in my designs for Critters, Creatures, and Denizens. The essence of the book tries to take DCCRPG to a siege or safari scale. In the CCD I work under the supposition that you don't really need more then 15HD for any critter if the players are capped at 10. Especially when you consider that 10HD PCs are so rare as to be 1 or two per epoch. I also stay within the confines of the established dice chain for the same reasons. I present the information needed to scale any of the critters in the book from size smallest to size colossal and many of the entries have listings for several sizes in case you need a sized huge dog or a medium sized elephant. Just because I know that somewhere out there Chicken-zilla is coming to a small hamlet near you.... In fact, I've been planning on running some 'encounters' style sessions at my local game shop. I think I'll use that as one of them.