Re: B5: Infinite range heavy beams? - Reply

Tom McCarthy wrote:

>>We played a game with the EarthForce SourceBook spaceship combat rules
last night, and the very first shot of the game caused a controversy.

>>From 70 MUs away, a Narn assault cruiser fired a 2-dice heavy beam
shot at
a Centauri Primus Cruiser. As the rules are written, that meant each die
had a
-11 on it, but if either rolled a 6, then that would be rerolled for
more damage
with no modifiers. Since assault cruisers recharge very quickly, they
could afford
to take long, low probability shots like this. Many of the Centauri
players
thought this to be an exploitation of the rules, and that the heavy
beams should
be limited to range 36 or 42 MUs, or that penalties above -6 should be
applied to
the rerolled die.

>>Have we misread the rules, or are we misjudging what we see as a
possible
flaw in them? <<

To which Indy, masquerading as "Ahhhhhhh... carbon monoxide..." (?),
replied:

>Hmmmm... good question; hadn't thought of that before (like I've had
the rules
for more than a couple few days). If I were ruling, I'd say the beams
cannot
hit after you reach the -6 penalty range. -6 or -7, anyhow. Definitely
-7. This
should offset the auto-hit aspect of the weapons at range 6 or less. <

I'd disagree with the "can't hit" idea, if only because we've seen
very-long-range
shots taken by Narn ships in episodes like TLTS. My feeling for the
situation
would be to remove the re-roll at VLR (defined as above), but allow some
damage to be caused if a 6 is rolled. How much? Dunno -- maybe 1/2 D6
worth?
>From a practical physics point of view, VLR beam shots have good points
and
bad ones, both resulting from the tendency for a beam to spread: on the
one
hand, a wider beam is easier to hit with; on the other, when you _do_
hit, less
actual energy is put on target (the ship may be smaller than the beam!).
So let's
keep the VLR capability, but tweak the rules to keep it from throwing
the
system out of whack.

Phil
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