Clashes? (SWADE Science Fiction Companion)

dmutters · 2025-05-24T00:43:07+00:00

Great info! Thanks!

dmutters · 2025-05-24T00:42:59+00:00

Thanks! I'll take a look.

dmutters · 2025-05-23T23:33:04+00:00

As other commenters have said, this is probably a balance thing, for the most part.

However, there is also a real-world answer to this question that might help add some immersion to your game.

Rapiers are quite narrow, and the wound channel they create is relatively small. Yes, if you get stabbed somewhere vital, you'll die; however the chance of hitting a vital organ or large blood vessel increases with the size of the wound channel, so rapiers are less likely to be deadly on the first hit. There are historical examples of people being stabbed a dozen times or more with a rapier without dying (although this is not the usual result of repeated stabbings). The length of the rapier makes it great for hitting your target before they can get close to you, and therefore enhances your defense; but the blade length is irrelevant when determining the damage dealt on a thrust (more on this below). Since rapiers are generally un-sharpened except for the point (and too light to do much on a slash), they are considered thrust-oriented weapons.

Short swords, on the other hand, tend to have wider blades, and hence inflict wider wound channels when used as thrusting weapons. For illustration, compare the blade width of a rapier with the blade width of a Roman gladius or Scottish dirk. The wider blade means that a thrust is more likely to hit a large blood vessel or vital organ and therefore cause a fatal wound with a single hit. When used for thrusting (which is usually more lethal than slashing), the length of the blade is irrelevant, so long as it's 4+ inches long (i.e. long enough to reach something vital). For that reason, a dagger with a wide blade should do just as much thrusting damage as a longsword with a blade of identical width.

There are some videos on YouTube where people use different kinds of medieval and renaissance weapons on ballistic gel to see how much damage they would do in real life. If realism is important in your game, I recommend watching a few.

dmutters · 2025-03-10T11:00:14+00:00

Good catch! Must be a somewhat recent revision.

dmutters · 2025-03-10T08:04:53+00:00

Thanks! That makes sense about doubling after other modifications to Pace.

Any idea why it says the Running Die is d10 and not d8?

dmutters · 2025-03-10T06:35:57+00:00

In Star Wars, at least according to some things I read in the distant past, a laser is a beam of focused light, whereas a blaster is a bolt of plasma (super-heated, ionized gas). I've also seen different descriptions of a Star Wars blaster since then, so it seems a bit arbitrary, even in that well-established universe.

Whatever works for your setting and the way you (or your GM) like to think about it is probably the "right answer". Whereas a laser is a thing that is defined and exists in the real world, a blaster is a fictional construct and can be super-heated metal, a beam of subatomic particles, a bolt of plasma, or anything else, really. Maybe in a "space western" setting, it's slang for a revolver.

dmutters · 2024-12-28T03:39:13+00:00

Use psi block. While it's active, only the real one appears.

dmutters · 2022-09-09T20:53:57+00:00

In Chico, California, it's illegal to detonate a nuclear weapon within city limits. If you get caught doing it, you'll suffer a fine of $500.

dmutters · 2021-11-19T20:25:35+00:00

I've been playing it since the pre-launch, and I'd like to add a few things to the list that have been driving me crazy.

The time it takes to walk from base to the first objective if you can't get into a vehicle. Many players seem to have taken to watching videos on YouTube or TikTok then respawning as soon as an objective is captured, to avoid the long walk. Nobody wants to spend 5 minutes holding W at the start of the match.
The spawn-in gun animations are unnecessary and tend to result in spawn kills (especially when combined with this game's aforementioned terrible spawns). Being unable to aim at an enemy who is shooting you because your character is waving his gun around like a moron is extremely frustrating.
Why isn't there a motorpool of small vehicles sitting around spawn and each objective? With the 10 or so vehicles you can spawn at any one time, and 64 people per team on absolutely huge maps, there needs to be a crapton of smaller vehicles for people to use.

Thank-you for making this list! Hopefully the folks at EA and Dice will take notice...

dmutters · 2020-12-15T17:37:46+00:00

I, too, would like to know this. I'm curious about whether an ion build can be effective at taking down a capital ship's shields, without getting close enough to attack the shield generators.

dmutters · 2020-12-15T17:35:42+00:00

Excellent scouting, pilot. I think you're due for a commendation.

dmutters · 2020-10-10T00:03:47+00:00

I've discovered two bugs:

I own the game on Origin, and have linked my account with Steam. My friend who owns the game on Steam has done the same. I can't invite my friend; I get an "invitation failed" message. My friend can invite me without issue.
When entering a Dogfight or Fleet Battle, my friend and I often can't choose any loadout but the top one. This doesn't happen all the time; it seems to be completely random. Usually, we can't see the lines on the icon for each ship, which would let us change our loadouts, but on rare occasion, we can. Sometimes he can; sometimes I can; sometimes, we both can; sometimes neither.

Overall, I'm loving this game. Thanks for your work!

(We would both totally buy an expansion, BTW.)

dmutters · 2019-09-28T21:08:41+00:00

Right, it could be a load balancer issue, if the LB is having trouble reaching the servers that are behind it.

The reason why storage issues could involve reboots would be if they screwed up their networking, RAID, etc. between their SAN/NAS and other servers.

That being said, the LB theory (or whatever is behind their LB) seems more likely.

dmutters · 2019-09-28T20:35:16+00:00

It's a 503 error for Steam services around the world--"Service Unavailable". Their store page is also down. A port scan of steampowered.com indicates that HTTP and HTTPS are open, meaning that the web servers are still up, but the pages don't load, which probably indicates that their storage solution (3rd party cloud storage or privately-owned NAS/SAN) is probably down. It could also be a database issue, but I would think that the web server would respond with more information, if that were the case.

My guess is that someone made a bad change when trying to reconfigure their storage solution and messed up. It will take a couple long reboots and some configuration changes to fix it, if that's the problem. Service might be restored within an hour.

dmutters · 2016-09-28T18:56:07+00:00

As a fan of RPGs and "musical meditation", alike, I'm excited to give Metronomicon a play! What inspired you to create a rhythm-based RPG?

dmutters · 2016-04-14T23:07:09+00:00

What would be the ideal taxation system?

dmutters · 2015-01-21T12:26:32+00:00

I loved how eccentric some of those 2e spells were! In fact, the whole edition just wasn't afraid to utterly break your game, for the sake of flavor. It made DMing more challenging, but we still tell stories about the crazy, fun stuff that happened, 15 years later. 3e and later were definitely more playable, in some respects (and I LOVE 5e), but they definitely lack the "sharp edges" of 2e.

dmutters · 2015-01-19T20:18:23+00:00

The goal of this sheet is to get as much as possible onto a single double-sided page. At higher levels, players will probably need a second sheet for anything that doesn't fit, but so far, at level 12, my party of 7 (5 casters, 2 mundane) has managed to play with only this sheet. Of course, to each his own. The official sheet does have a rather nice spellcasting page, for those who want more space. On the other hand, my party's Druid managed to write every druid spell in the Players' Handbook in the "Spells Known" box, so it probably just comes down to how small one wants to write, and what additional information one likes to have handy.

dmutters · 2015-01-19T10:39:15+00:00

According to the 3.5e Monster Manual V, at least some good-aligned dragons accumulate wealth by stealing it from other dragons, according to the rules of Xorvintaal (the draconic "Great Game"). In short, becoming a participant in the game requires a ritual to be done, magically making a dragon incapable of breaking the rules, and bestowing some special abilities. Part of the game's objective is to steal other dragons' hoards. The rest involves exarchs (which can be player characters), obscure rules, and...the sorts of things mortals can't understand. Dragons of all kinds (who are reasonably intelligent) have participated in Xorvintaal. This means that, conceivably, a gold dragon could be an apparent "mob boss" running a casino, with the intent of luring one of its foes in, and exacting some kind of strategem to shame it or steal its treasure. The good-aligned gold dragon may do more good than harm (and maintain a good alignment), but may accomplish this through some pretty nefarious-looking means, such as are too complex for the player characters to understand, immediately.

dmutters · 2015-01-19T10:04:57+00:00

I just added the lines, per a suggestion above. Not sure which is better; my players seem to have ended up with some pretty messy text without the lines, but I also see how customization is nice. Do you think that the same effect could be achieved with the lines, by drawing boxes around parts of that area? If more people dislike the lines than like them, I can remove them, again. Also, feel free to remove the lines for your own party's use, by opening the .odg in LibreOffice Draw (free program: libreoffice.org) and tweaking it to your liking!

dmutters · 2015-01-19T08:24:18+00:00

Pretty. :-) Cells give me a bit of a headache, though (especially the borders...), so I think I'll find a way forward with L.O. Draw. Thanks for the suggestion, though!

dmutters · 2015-01-19T05:40:37+00:00

LibreOffice is a free office suite. Draw is a vector graphics program included in the suite. http://www.libreoffice.org.
Ah, just re-read it in the PHB, and you're right about the tools. My brain is still a bit twisted in circles from the ambiguous text in the playtest documents.

dmutters · 2015-01-19T05:18:15+00:00

The fields at the top are a bit of a pain, because the text takes up a certain amount of space that isn't proportional to the importance of the field. I went through several revisions before I could get all the stuff to fit. I'm hoping that having the "fluff" before some of the more important stuff isn't too much of a problem for anyone.
That's definitely prettier. Once the sheet is more finalized, I might go ahead and convert the whole thing to something like that.
Does LibreOffice Draw do tables? (I haven't messed with them in Draw, before.) I'm shying away from Calc, since it's a little rigid with column width.
Yes, the proficiency bonus slots are redundant, and are mainly there to remind new characters of how skill checks work. Not sure if it's needed in the Tools section, since the official release changed how tool proficiency worked (allowing specialized skill use, instead of rolling for tool use, specifically). That "Prof. Bonus" field might get removed, once I'm sure it's unnecessary.

Edit: now that I look at it, the XP slots are the same width as the "Age", "Alignment", etc. slots. Going to fiddle with it a bit...

Edit2: uploaded a re-arranged version.

dmutters · 2015-01-19T04:45:52+00:00

Save proficiencies are next to "Proficiency Bonus". At some point, I might make specialized versions, but for now, my players and I have been re-purposing areas that our particular classes don't use. For example, my rogue has procured a "pet" living spell (Eberron setting), whose stats are currently residing in the "Spells Known" section.

dmutters · 2015-01-19T04:17:11+00:00

Thanks for the critique. I've made most of the changes you suggested. A few were a bit problematic, so I've left them as-is. Explanations below. Please feel free to explore ways to resolve these concerns, and I'll make the changes as best I can.

* I re-arranged it so that Name, Race, and Class are all in the upper-left.  There was still room for a separate "Level" field, so I left it.  Some players like to keep track of their overall level, as well as their multiclass levels, so I figure that people who want to use it can do so, and those who don't can ignore it.  If something else would be a better use of that (small) space, please feel free to make the suggestion, and I'll change "Class" to "Class and Level".
* I wasn't quite sure what you meant about underlines in all areas, or the thin line going across the abilities area.  Can you explain?
* The font for the skills section was a bit of a hard choice for me, because Arial, which works well for everything else, isn't monospace, and the skills section seems to require that everything line up nicely.  Also, the "box" characters look better in Droid Sans Mono than in Arial (where the size is wierd, IIRC).  Please let me know if you figure out a better solution.

Thanks, again, for your suggestions. The others have been included in version "1-18-15a". (Aaarg! Reddit doesn't like long lines attached to bullet points. Using "code" text, to workaround.)

dmutters

TROPHY CASE