Re: [GZG] Threshold checks - how I do them

On Mon, October 31, 2005 13:06, Ground Zero Games said:
>>On Mon, Oct 31, 2005 at 09:49:54AM -0000, Samuel Penn wrote:
>>
>>>That seems a slow way of doing it... If you have 4 PDS, roll
>>>4d6 in one go, etc.
>>
>>Depends on the players - we've found that stopping to decide "are
these
>>three beam batteries really identical or do they have different arcs"
>>takes longer than just rolling the dice.
>
>
> Yes - but for systems that are ALWAYS identical, like Firecons,
> Screens, PDS etc, there is nothing to stop you rolling several dice
> together, which I assume is what Sam was getting at

Possibly :-) I haven't played much FT since FT2, where all beam
batteries had 3 arcs[1], so it was simpler for us :-)

We also did things like used different coloured dice - red's are
FireCons blues are PDFs, then roll the lot together, or if there
are two different weapons, the die that lands to the left is the
system on the port side, the die that lands on the right is on
the starboard side.

We trusted everyone to do their own threshold checks though,
which makes snap decisions such as this easy. If you've got to
explain what you're about to roll to someone else, and have them
agree the method, then it's quicker to roll independently.

If you really want speed, and you have a lot of ships, another
option might just be to have a fixed number of failures at each
threshold level, and let the ship owner decide what is lost.
It won't give the same results but in a big battle, whether No.4
superdreadnaught has lost its main weapon isn't as important
as in a small battle, where you have only one SDN.

[1] For the nitpickers, all ships ended up being designed to
    have 3 arc beam batteries, not that the rules only allowed
    3 arc weapons.

-- 
Be seeing you,		  Web: www.glendale.org.uk
Sam.			   IM: samuel.penn@gmail.com

_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-l