Whirling cavalcade of death.

In recent sessions of my Star Trek RPG campaign, I've come across an interesting phenomenon, which seems a little absurd. One of the PCs is a security officer with a lot of ranks in Unarmed Combat - Starfleet Self-Defence has a habit of pulling out a ridiculous number of actions in a given round. The character's skill level completely offsets the -5 and the -10 penalty for additional actions (still having +4 even after the -10 penalty). Given that Defence scores are so low in the game, the character can (and has) taken down whole rooms of NPCs before they've even had the chance to act.

It seems strange that a character can chain such a large number of actions together without apparent difficulty. Have I misread some rule somewhere which would restore some measure of sanity to personal combat in my games?

How do you handle damage in unarmed combat? Do you use something like the 1, 2, 3 hit opponent rule variant? Otherwise I couldn't explain how the character could take out even one NPC in a single round.
Nontheless, since that security officer has an effective skill level of 14 he exceeds the major Trek characters and comes even close to epic characters like Aragorn from LOTR. Situations like this are the reason why GMs should keep an eye on PC development.
The standard advice would be to put the character into situations where his high combat skills won't be of any help (or let him fight against people with equal or even higher skill levels next time :D).
One last question. How did you handle initiative? Certainly at least some NPCs must have been able to strike him first.

Yeah unless he has some sort of special damage bonus or one of the special unarmed combat fighting manouvres he should be doing very little damage with an unarmed combat manouver?!

On the flip side of that one of my PC's has several of the Andorian fighting styles and he really IS a cavalcade of worling death BUT he still usually fails to take down an oponent in a single hit (the type I would dare to actualy face off against him!) So I am at a loss to know how he does it...

Or are you using some sort of numpty NPC rules which means they only have a few hit points etc?

I also usually rule (because the rules are unclear here ) that all bonus manouvers go LAST - ergo any PC who tries that trick can still be taken down before they can do it!

Generally the player burns courage points on the initiative roll to virtually ensure that this particular character goes before any NPCs. When I said that she could drop entire rooms of enemies in a single round, I neglected to mention that this happened in ranged combat with a phaser. The same principle of chaining many attacks together applies, and still seems over the top to me.

I use the regular hand-to-hand combat rules, so no, she doesn't drop entire rooms of NPCs with her fists. But it she is perfectly capable of wounding or incapacitating a single opponent by simply chaining an unlikely number of attacks together in a single round against that individual opponent.

As for the idea that I should have restricted the character's development, I don't like the idea of telling a player where he/she can or cannot put the advancement points he/she has earned. This particular character lacks skill in a lot of areas, and I'm happy enough to let a player over-specialise as it were at the expense of other areas. It still seems a little mad to me that even a highly skilled character can easily chain together 4 or 5 attacks in five seconds.

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Originally posted by Mazza
Generally the player burns courage points on the initiative roll to virtually ensure that this particular character goes before any NPCs.

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I thought that's a NO NO.:confused:

Ok well fix the rules as I said. To be honest I actually run through the actions so that each character gets a turn followed by the second action in a turn, so that any character can only get *1* attack or dodge in before someone can act against him...

But then that's just how I like to run the rules, you do everything at once.. But still i would say if it's a problem then make all additional actions at the endof the round no matter what!

As Reg's signature says, munchkinism is a problem with the players not the rules; they have clearly minmaxed their characters to ludicrous levels!

Now your basic problem here is that they aren't challenged by what they are fighting; ok a few sigmple solutions:

Shield what they phaser... your player hits once... and realises that she's just wasted an action dice because her phaser can't cut through no matter how many additional actions she takes! (this is the same fun shenanigans you can do in Vampire - make your players spend their celerity actions and gimptheir character to high heaven in blood points... and then have the protagonist use obfuscate and POOf they've just wasted half of their blood LOL)

Use up their action points on something else!

If your player is a one trick pony, make them do something NOT combat related.. Security officers defend but they are also the police force - have her investigate stuff.. what you mean she's put all of her development picks into unarmed combat and armed combat ? Oh how handy for her pathology skills then ! :D This should also be good for non combat monsters too ! :D (imagine how annoyed the security officer would be if the doctor or science officer solved their crime for them! :D)

and the best one of all... have the NPC's use tactics.. Ok so your character uses her UBER actions to burn through the numpties like a hot knife through butter.. Ok no problem, there's a sniper hidden round the corner just waiting for her to finish her whirling attack :D ... Or the most basic - space them out ! Your character has to spend an action moving from one to another ! if she can only attack every OTHER action then she's going to hit a wall! Not all NPC's are stupid and not all of them don't plan an ambush by standing round in a large group ready to be picked off by your security officer! Make your NPC's think for themselves, andyour PC's will rapidly realise they are in deep doodoo!

If your player relies on the fact she can take them all out in a single round, won't she be annoyed when their friends hear the commotion and come round the corner in the preceeding round! :D

Just get creative, there's more to the rules than just a basic target number!

I'm fond of giving non-player characters the Blends In edge and have them make use of every scrap of available cover. :)

And spending Courage on Initiative is definitely not allowed in the rules as written. This is Star Trek, not Star Wars.

Courage Points allow players to improve their test results (or avoid certain events or penalties), not improve initiative results. My first piece of advice is to stop allowing this player to spend courage on initiative.

However, even if you do allow it as a house rule, the player certainly is not spending her courage "heroically" every time she uses it. Or you could deliberately create scenarios where heroic spending of courage is simply not possible. Also, you may want to think about strictly limiting how fast she recovers them--like say after filling out lengthy reports to the captain about why she took out a room full of people. ;)

Hope that helps!

LQ

Initiative is a test result, it is a Swiftness test and therefore is subject to normal rules pertaining to those tests (physical test modifiers, fatigue, being wounded, etc.).

Good point, GoB. Missed that one. Initiative is essentially a Quickness reaction test, as I just looked up in the NG. Not that I doubted you! ;)

However, IMHO, Courage should not be used for Initiative all the time as it appears the player in question is doing. Nothing heroic about that!

LQ

P.S. [Off-topic] Gandalf, I'll have some mail for you tonight for Beyond the Final Frontier. Finally! :D

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Originally posted by Mazza
When I said that she could drop entire rooms of enemies in a single round, I neglected to mention that this happened in ranged combat with a phaser. The same principle of chaining many attacks together applies, and still seems over the top to me.

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This part confuses me. Even if the player had burned courage points to get initiative and had a skill of 14 with Ranged Combat: Energy (Phasers), and let's assume they had the Quick Draw trait or their weapon was already out and in hand...

How could they possibly burn down entire rooms of enemies? For every attack after the first two there is a +5 modifier to the TN, not including any additions to TN for the enemy being behind cover, moving, range, etc. Even without the additional modifiers, and lets just say the TN is 10, his attack TNs will look like this:

Attack 1: TN10
Attack 2: TN10
Attack 3: TN15
Attack 4: TN20
Attack 5: TN25
Attack 6: TN30
etc...

The odds are highly, HIGHLY against him burning down entire rooms of enemies...unless they're really small rooms that can only hold about 5 or 6 people. A 14 in a skill may sound like a lot, but after you factor in range, cover, and movement of the enemy, it ain't as good as you might think. I might get 2 or 3 definite hits, but after that, it's going to be questionable. Unless the enemy just stands there, as in my above example. Bad guys can dodge too...

Varne

Security Officers with the Responsive professional ability get one additional combat action at no penalty and, if they possess the Capable professional ability as well, they can reduce their penalty to -3 per additional action instead of -5. I know, as my character in Aslan's forum game has both. He only has a skill of +5, but with attribute and assorted other mods, he averages around +10. He can take five actions and still be at +4. If he is using his Subdue professonal ability to stun people, he can take six actions and still be at +4.

1. A character in a point based system who is overly strong in one area is certainly weak in another. Exploit those weaknesses. If the character complains, explain that this is why well-rounded folks do better, overall.
   
2. Exploit the law of unintended consequences. Perhaps he takes out a room full of enemies -- and their friends far away hear this and retaliate by murdering their hostages. How will that look on the after action report? Role-play that.
   
3. Deny the character promotions when other characters are getting them (unless they're doing the same thing). Explain that his superior officer doesn't thing he's well rounded enough (see also above).
   
4. Place the character in a situation where someone else's well-being or survival depends on him, particularly, on a skill he hasn't got. If that dependent character dies, it wasn't YOU that killed him. Player/player interaction can be made to serve your purposes.
   
5. Bring in the Pro From Dover. This is the guy who's as good as the offending character -- or better. Cheat if you have to, to create him.
   

These are heavy handed tactics, not appropriate for every situation (or even many situations). But sometimes when the illness is profound, the cure is painful.

As others have said, you must pay attention to the levels of skills and abilities. I don't agree that minmaxing is exclusively a player problem, but it's certainly impossible if the players aren't willing to take advantage of the rules.

(I believe that categorizing minmaxing as exclusively a player problem is a cheap way to evade responsibility for building a balanced, tested system. It's impossible to make a system foolproof, because it's a handful of designers against hundreds or thousands of players, some of whom are as smart or smarter. But pushing the problem entirely onto GMs isn't the correct choice, either. The right approach, to me, is for the designer to work *hard* to get balance in the system, to the best of his ability, and then let the GM's handle the rest of it.)

In my opinion, the best way to deal with characters like this is to stop it happening in the first place.

Your character wants to concentrate on a skill? That's fine. But who is he going to get to teach him? Somethings you just can't teach yourself and you're going to have to find someone to teach you. As you get better; that person becomes harder and harder to find. In a Starfleet Character, this becomes difficult to do - you have duties that prevent you going off on searches for people to teach you things. In a non-Starfleet character (who probably still has duties) you have to roleplay the entire seach. Making players roleplay there advancements makes them consider more carefully what they do with them.

It takes a commited player to want to powergame a skill; especially with combat skills, especially if you encourage the roleplaying aspect. If nothing else, they might begin to feel bad for taking the group on such a self-centered adventure.

It's worth a try and I found it's things like that that worked in previous games.

It's a problem with all games that anyone can ramp up their skills to make them uber hard at combat, take the tricks cheats and feats and what have you to make them phenomenally amazing at combat and poor at little else.. it's munchkinism / powergaming/ minmaxing and all games suffer from it, because it's the players not the system.

The problem comes from that of ballance, especially in 'hit the mosnter' games (though D&D 3rd is good it's still open to abuse if you are a munchkin :D) The one thing Startrek has in it's favour is it has allot of potential to be SO much more!

Scare your combat monster.. Have a game with NO combat, have lies deceit, rechary, spies, seduction, science, engineering, technology, biology, medicine... all o these things with difficult challenges... and no combat ! :D That will make them reassess their skill spending !

Oh yeah, don't be afraid to play the Star Trek game! It's Trek! How many episodes are there without a single shot being fired? Many. Make Admirals/Captains/Higher-ups 'tell them off' for using non-Starfleet agressive tactics!

That'll learn them.

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Originally posted by Fesarius
Bring in the Pro From Dover. This is the guy who's as good as the offending character -- or better. Cheat if you have to, to create him

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Bingo! My general rule in gaming is that players who minmax or find loopholes in rules will face NPCs doing the same or equivalent tactics. Works with a lot of things: ultraviolence in Trek, using phasers on disintegrate and using all avialble weapons in ship's combat. I call this "Do unto others..."

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Originally posted by Fesarius
(I believe that categorizing minmaxing as exclusively a player problem is a cheap way to evade responsibility for building a balanced, tested system. It's impossible to make a system foolproof, because it's a handful of designers against hundreds or thousands of players, some of whom are as smart or smarter. But pushing the problem entirely onto GMs isn't the correct choice, either. The right approach, to me, is for the designer to work *hard* to get balance in the system, to the best of his ability, and then let the GM's handle the rest of it.)

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Amen Fesarius. Getting sloppy with the rules and creating all kinds of minmax opportunities is a sign of poor design. A design that honestly attempts to deal with these issues and/or is otherwise sound but has some unforseen or unwitting loophole potential is a different matter entirely. Sometimes this can be attended to by having a strong GM hand in the character creation process or in requiring players to start with and maintain a "theme" with their character that responds to changes in the game rather than what happens to be the most effective loophole. Neither of which are easy with certain types of players however.

I have noticed that a lot of systems (though not all) created in the last few years have suffered from this minmaxing problem as well as rather arbitrary lack of balance in areas like character creation. These aspects seem to reflect the predominant "trend" in 21st century game mechanics. As has been mentioned too however in the last few posts, this is where Trek at least stands out -- it carries a lot of potential for non combat adventures that de-emphasize this kind of minmaxing.

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Originally posted by Tobian

Scare your combat monster.. Have a game with NO combat, have lies deceit, rechary, spies, seduction, science, engineering, technology, biology, medicine... all o these things with difficult challenges... and no combat ! :D That will make them reassess their skill spending !

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And if you simply must have combat, think about making it ship-to-ship combat, where his Unarmed techniques will be rather... useless.

I'd like to add a caution.

You should ask yourself first whether you need to correct this problem. If it's not interfering with everyone's enjoyment, maybe you shouldn't do anything about it.

You also need to consider the possibility that the player will realize what you're doing -- and you need to have a response ready for such an accusation. It could be, "Who, me?" or it could be "Yep. I wanted you to experience a different facet of the game, so that you'd understand the value of well rounded characters." The player may state that he developed his character as he felt such a character should be developed -- and since you didn't disallow any of his choices, you tacitly approved of it. NOW you're getting into the hazy realm of "Yes, but even the GM can make a mistake."

Certainly GM's do make mistakes, but ideally, they're like the umpires in a ball game -- they don't make many mistakes, and they don't make bad ones. You could find yourself caught between the need to appear infallible, or nearly so, and the need to keep a mistake from spiraling out of control.

Sadly, there are no good answers to some of these problems, because they almost always depend on the specific situation. Your best defense is to anticipate arguments the player will make, and prepare, in your mind, your counterarguments. Unless you are an excellent debater and can think very fast, you don't want to be developing campaign metastrategy on the fly.

In any RPG there needs to be a certain amount of communication between the players and the GM, thus allowing for trust. If you have communicated to your players that not every episode will be a massive fight and that there will be episodes that involve thinking on higher than neanderthal levels, then the players should know full well to make well rounded characters.

If you then have one player that has put all his points into one skill, there is nothing to hold you back from pimp slapping that player's character. In some cases, I've given a warning to the group as a whole. And if worse comes to worse, you are the GM of the game...use what I like to call "The Finger Of God." If the infraction by the offending player is bad enough, it would really suck if they had a transporter accident...for instance. Whether the other players go through the logs to find out after the fact that there was indeed a malfunction with that transporter pad is really besides the point: said character still has his pancreas on the outside.

If on the other hand you have NOT communicated to the players that they will need well balanced characters, you really can't justifiably do much when a pissed off uber gimp comes into the game with a STR of 18 and a 2 in all other attributes. In this case, if the uber gimp has a transporter accident, you just look like a sore loser and risk ruining what could have been a fun game.

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Originally posted by Tobian
Scare your combat monster.. Have a game with NO combat, have lies deceit, rechary, spies, seduction, science, engineering, technology, biology, medicine... all o these things with difficult challenges... and no combat ! :D That will make them reassess their skill spending !

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I agree and I do this on a regular basis. The player just sits around complaining about having nothing to do, they don't reassess anything. Maybe I've just got a thick player. The player contributes quite a bit roleplaying wise to the group, but the character is definitely overly specialised on hand-to-hand combat.

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Originally posted by Fesarius
I'd like to add a caution.

You should ask yourself first whether you need to correct this problem. If it's not interfering with everyone's enjoyment, maybe you shouldn't do anything about it.

You also need to consider the possibility that the player will realize what you're doing -- and you need to have a response ready for such an accusation. It could be, "Who, me?" or it could be "Yep. I wanted you to experience a different facet of the game, so that you'd understand the value of well rounded characters." The player may state that he developed his character as he felt such a character should be developed -- and since you didn't disallow any of his choices, you tacitly approved of it. NOW you're getting into the hazy realm of "Yes, but even the GM can make a mistake."

Certainly GM's do make mistakes, but ideally, they're like the umpires in a ball game -- they don't make many mistakes, and they don't make bad ones. You could find yourself caught between the need to appear infallible, or nearly so, and the need to keep a mistake from spiraling out of control.

Sadly, there are no good answers to some of these problems, because they almost always depend on the specific situation. Your best defense is to anticipate arguments the player will make, and prepare, in your mind, your counterarguments. Unless you are an excellent debater and can think very fast, you don't want to be developing campaign metastrategy on the fly.

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Well, it certainly doesn't interfere with the player's enjoyment, but it definitely interferes with everyone else's enjoyment of the game, including mine. Everybody else hates standing by and watching the character deal with almost all the villains by herself while they stand around and scratch themselves - they feel it is like the player is hogging all the fun to themselves. My episodes tend to not have more than one or two fight scenes, if any, and so naturally everybody looks forward to getting their hands dirty as a change of pace. And this sort of thing lessens my enjoyment of the game because all the sense of drama is gone from combat - it is just a given that the security officer will win just about all the time, and if she isn't there, then the rest of the crew will get creamed.

I don't really like the proposed solutions of a "a pro from Dover", because like I said, I don't run a combat oriented game. I don't generally have my heavy as a combat monster, I prefer heavies with a brain between their ears instead, if I have a heavy at all.

What does this character do in other situations (social, academic, etc?) I tend to agree with what has been posted here about using a more cerbral approach to game planning. Perhaps not having any fight scenes for one or two sessions migh be in order, to show the PC that they can't always get out of all situations with there fists. Hit threm with traps and tricks that need to be thought through...instead of being broken through.

Yes, the problem is if you put anyone into that situation and for whateve reason the Security chief fails, then the others will die horribly!

My best advice is to go with the twist, suprise your PC with clever tactics.

If she rolls an amazing initiative, gets the drop on them all.. have them surrender.. as their friend gets the surprise drop on her from behind.. one shot with a stun setting will soon knock her out!

There of course is the other possibility.. Ok so she knocks them all out BUT it's still possible for someone to resist a stun.. and then pretend to be unconceous.. Then carefully they aim, rasing their bonus (and mitigating the penalty from the stun) and BAM one unconsceous security officer! :)

and as I keep saying - forcefields forcefields forcefields ! :) Your enemies can gloat on the other side of one, giving your other PC's time to think a way round the problem (such as a security computer test etc).

As always it's possible to use even the most useless NPC's, which have much lower abilities to outwhit your players... Sure in a head on combat she will win.. what happens if they don't go head on! :)

I wonder how she'd do against the 'arsenal of freedom' :)

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I wonder how she'd do against the 'arsenal of freedom'

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Die horribly I would imagine. The resolution to that episode was about as classic an example of thinking your way out of a problem rather than fighting your way out as I can think of for the entire TNG run. Both the surface and the space weapon platforms were ultimately defeated by brains and not brawn.

One other way to show the error of the hand to hand solves everything mentality is to throw aliens that grossly over match a human like a very large Nausican or Gorn. This is just a form of the "Pro from Dover" plan, but it makes it look a little less obvious, especially if you think your player is slow on the uptake.

Personally, the best way I can see to handle the situation is to inform the player that you believe he has interpreted the rules incorrectly and that the various modifiers involved are not cumulative. It's your game, you're the GM, your rules interpretations are the operative ones.

Further, it sounds like you let him use modifiers from unarmed combat skills while using a phaser - is that correct? If so, why? That seems quite unreasonable to me...

No, I didn't let the player use unarmed combat modifiers to the character's phaser rolls, I really meant combat in general, because the character has quite high Unarmed Combat: Starfleet Self-Defence and Ranged Combat: Energy Weapons. For some reason I didn't say anything but unarmed combat in the original post. The character has the ranks in both.

There really aren't too many fight scenes in my campaign - if that was the case, I would be having this problem with all my players instead of just this one because everybody would pour all their focus into their combat skills. I suppose I can make those fight scenes I do have more devious, and the times I have done that in the past it has been good fun and quite challenging and all.

I know how to get around the character's ability to transform into a whirling ball of certain doom, that isn't the problem. I don't mind that the character is so skilled that virtually every punch thrown or every shot fired is an almost certain hit. What annoys me is that there is no real upper limit on action points, and so the character can just go crazy until either there is nobody left standing or it is no longer worth trying (and it is more frequently the former than the latter). It gets pretty silly.

I'm thinking about introducing a house rule whereby if you take extra actions one round, you sacrifice an action the next round, but I really hate introducing house rules when there isn't necessarily inherently broken in the system, which seems to be the case since it is just this one problem character.

To be honest I don't see your issue with action points; you only (usually) have 3 at any one adventure... You only re-gain them by doing something heroic...

Your science officer turning into a whirling dervish of death, who has a combat skill of 2 is heroic - a combat veteran who has a combat skill of +14 taking out some bone headed bad guys is NOT heroic because he can, before rolling his dice, beat their defence bonus! The defenition for me is to award a player / character for doing something beyond his capabilities, where he has had to risk his life, put himself in danger, saved the life of a dying alien or saved the ship from exploding - those are what you should award action points for!

Whatever the rules say Startrek is meant to be about people pushing themselves, challenging fate and cheating death.. if it's routine to do that.. then they shouldn't be awarded for it... On the flip side, your security officer defusing a bomb, solving a murder mystery, realigning the dilithium matrix before it explodes.. IS heroic because they acted in an area they had no experience / tallent / skill in! or to the converse.. your security officer trying to take on the afore mentioned 'arsenal of freedom' WOULD be heroic because it was virtually impossible!

The Pro From Dover doesn't have to be someone who's more of a combat monster, just someone who's ... better in some fashion. For example, I have a character who has driven my players batty because (although they don't know it yet), he can become intangible for short periods of time (and with certain other adverse consequences). He could also be someone who's "studied" the character, i.e. can take advantage of what YOU know about how the character operates.

And as Tobian says, Action Points come back when YOU decide they should, not when the player wants (or needs) them back. How quickly I return them depends on what I think of the action for which they were used. Some don't come back until the next game session.

And, of course, there's raw honesty: tell the player you make a mistake and, while HE may be having a ball, no one else is. Tell him that his character is threatening the future of the game, if you believe that's true. If he's got any consideration for others, and any maturity at all, he'll concede the point, and permit his character to be toned down a bit, or even replaced.

I still like the Pro from Dover option (although the others mentioned have been very good too). It might be used in a one on one situation, where the player is in their field of advantage, and the other Crew are involved in another aspect of the adventure (See the example below). It also does not have to be someone that breaks the rules either, just use the same exact rules that the player does; only you as the Narrator have an inherent advantage: you can always make more :)

The player uses multiple actions to do more than one thing with a moderately good score even after the mods. Have the bad guys do that too, only there are more bad guys than good guys, each firing two or three times. Individually they might suck and not hit anything, but sometime someone is going to get lucky with doubles. Have the bad guys use their bonuses to max out on an initiative roll or whatever just like the PC. Create a threat race that operates at a slightly different temporal state than the rest of the universe, which allows them a special ability to preempt one other action per round, or 10 rounds or Scene. Or a threat race which have all of the inititative boinus edges as part of their basic racial template. etc. etc.

Also, you don't think that the bad guys are noticing who is causing all the damage? Have then attack this one PC en masse until the PC is taken out. Is this not the tactic that most PCs use? Narrator's may want to spread the attacks around for play balance but why do the Bad guys have to suffer like that? This is especially helpful if you spread the exra actions out (I always do that after 1st ed Shadowrun) so that those with extra actions only get them one at a time in between everyone else's actions.

Example: The players are on detatched duty, basically Deadheading their way from Point A to Point B (OR if there is a PC Captain in your crew, they are sharing a Leave at the same time while the ship is investigating a gaseous anomoly in the Fuggitabbatit Sector) when they are stopped and boarded by Pirates (using a cloaked ship of course). Let the HTH PC chew through a bunch of them while the others are kicked back. Let them be Mr/Mz Impressive. Then the Pirate uses a alien sound device to knock the PCs all unconscious (the Pirates of course all wear bulky headgear that protects them and even if they are all out cold by this point there are more bad guys on their ship).

When the Crew wakes up the Pirate band have brought them to a world which still engages in gladitorial blood sports. The world is technically prewarp, but the Pirates (and other races in the system that do not belong to the Federation) have been visiting them for many years. The HTH PC is forced to fight their alien champion... the Pro from Dover. When the HTH PC defeats him (if), there is another... and another... Meanwhile, and I would actually do this while the fight is going on, having one or two rounds of HTH PC's combat for every miniscene for the other players, the rest of the Crew have an opening for escape and must secure some means of getting offworld (the Pirate's own vessel for instance). Jumping back and forth like that can make for some very interesting 'cut scenes'. The Badass HTH PC will have a chance to shine and the other PCs will have a chance to do something that is more meaningful. If the PC gets skewered in the process of fighting all those alien badguy champs, well, you live by the sword...

LOL Publis, I like it! :)

I just have the Du du du du du du du du du du du music playing in my head.. bring out the monster cotton buds :D

Yes I space all of the actions out, I don't let players use them all in one go, as it doesn't make any sense to me that someone can shoot 5 times before anyone else can act! That's just silly and powergamey. We do exactly the same with D&D 3rd too (well ish). It stops this exact same effect happening in D&D which can seriously overpower fighters at higher levels... if you give it to them as presented then yes they do munchkinise their initiative because who goes first wins!

I also agree with the damage thing too.. if one character is decimating their coleages; out of raw anger they are going to attack her/him first out of raw anger! I can't remember but isn't there a multiple attacker penalty / bonus if they attack him en-masse ?

Well, i actually play in this group, and so i would like to explain a few things.

1) The character (Female Betazoid Security officer) is not simply a combat machine and nothing else. She actually started out as an investigator, and has the ranks to do this competantly. Throwing other stuff at her is ok, she can do it. The player just forgets to. We have a security officer, a science officer, an ops officer, a command officer and a tactical officer. we all specialise, because we each have seperate duties and therefore support each other. Also, the player has decided to make the character a doctor as well (Sort of a battlefield medic) she is as rounded as any of us.

2) the rest of the crew support in combat. in one combat, she fought with the UBER baddie, whilst my Vulcan science officer nerve pinched down the henchmen with my meagre ranks in ponn'iffla and Nerve pinch. we do get to do stuff.

3) It makes perfect sense for the character, she was raise on a colony that was occupied by klingons.....before the Khitomer accords. (Not a pleasant home). She can understanably be a little blood thirsty.

What Mazza and i really object to is that it makes no sense to have the player say "Shall i go for the fifth attack? Ah f*&k it, i might roll high." and watch in horror as the klingon commander falls flat after the third round of combat.

And yet, it is perfectly legal in the rules. I don't have the ranks in Ponn'iffla to make it feasible, but i could always hope to roll boxcars and get a lucky shot in, and pinch them unconscious. Maybe if we said any action after the second gives a cumulative -1 penalty to defense, that would help slightly?

Well then if you think the rules are broken, change them.

I don't think it says anywhere exactly where those actions take place but I've always read it they happen in linear time.. Example.. Your security officer takes 5 actions.. she spends 4 of those actions aiming, and lowers her difficulty..... Technically this is possible in the rules..

Now to me this says that your actions occur throughout the whole round not JUST on your initiative..

A less severe example.. You fire and move.. So you fire and move in the space of your entire initiative ? a picosecond of time?

yes you are skilled at combat BUT that doesn't make you into superman!

I'm also going to point out too that no matter what your security officer rolls on her initiative the bad guys can still DODGE and still PARRY - in fact they can do exactly the same back as your PC can.. they could dodge and parry 5 times in a round if they rolled high! (ok technically parry as dodge is a once only roll)

Technically speaking (I would have to check the rules to see if this was legal) but they could actually spend one action dodging (increasing their defense) spend one action to parry (also increasing their defence by their skill in the combat plus roll!) giving them an extremely hard difficulty to hit.. Now the trick comes when.. if any of those NPC's have any actions left (or are good enough to such up the penalties) after your PC has gone on to her 5th action THEN they get to give her a good kicking....

As they say.. If they find loopholes in the rules to allowe them to be kick ass hard.. find the same loopholes in the rules that the enemy can exploit!

Find a system, based on agility, that defines just how many extra actions you can take.

i.e. Someone with an agility bonus of +1 could make 1 extra action.

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Originally posted by Tobian
To be honest I don't see your issue with action points; you only (usually) have 3 at any one adventure... You only re-gain them by doing something heroic...

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You're talking about Courage Points here, I was talking about actions, ie, the number of actions you can make in one round. And no, obviously this character doesn't get back courage points she burnt on her initiative roll.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Tobian
Well then if you think the rules are broken, change them.

I don't think it says anywhere exactly where those actions take place but I've always read it they happen in linear time.. Example.. Your security officer takes 5 actions.. she spends 4 of those actions aiming, and lowers her difficulty..... Technically this is possible in the rules..

Now to me this says that your actions occur throughout the whole round not JUST on your initiative..

A less severe example.. You fire and move.. So you fire and move in the space of your entire initiative ? a picosecond of time?

yes you are skilled at combat BUT that doesn't make you into superman!

I'm also going to point out too that no matter what your security officer rolls on her initiative the bad guys can still DODGE and still PARRY - in fact they can do exactly the same back as your PC can.. they could dodge and parry 5 times in a round if they rolled high! (ok technically parry as dodge is a once only roll)

Technically speaking (I would have to check the rules to see if this was legal) but they could actually spend one action dodging (increasing their defense) spend one action to parry (also increasing their defence by their skill in the combat plus roll!) giving them an extremely hard difficulty to hit.. Now the trick comes when.. if any of those NPC's have any actions left (or are good enough to such up the penalties) after your PC has gone on to her 5th action THEN they get to give her a good kicking....

As they say.. If they find loopholes in the rules to allowe them to be kick ass hard.. find the same loopholes in the rules that the enemy can exploit!

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I really do appreciate the hints about what I can do with NPCs to make them less "push-overy", but with this particular player, it is a non-issue - the character will almost certainly go before them, and they won't have a chance to do anything before they're gunned down or beaten into submission.

Ok then give her 6 NPC's :D Can't get em all ! :)

Your dodge check doesn't go in the order of initiative you roll it when you need to dodge, so she can't go before their dodge :D

Also stupid statement really but also give them cover. Cover + dodge will give her a MUCH harder target number to beat...

For example say they run into the bad guys in your generic cargo bay. Put a series of gantries round the cargo bay and an assortment of boxes. If your players are knowingly assaulting said warehouse / cargo bay (meaning the NPC's know they are coming) they will strategically position a number of NPC's around the gantries 9with 50-75% cover and behind the crates 90% cover. If the bad guys employ a Thoron emmitter (how else would they have masked their ilicit smuggling operations from sensors) or a dampening field.. then the players won't know who is where before hand (with the aid of a transporter.

Have the players walk into a pool of light, with most of the cargo bay in shadows... So this will give most of the bad buys a huge bonus to their stealth rolls (probably a +5 or +6 situational modifier).

Try that scenario and yoru security chief can't get everyone in the first round, nor can they beam anything in or out, nor can they 'nuke it from orbit' because their starships sensors won't know it's there either.

Although this might not matter in most situations, here are the discharge times for phasers fired at different settings from the TNG technical manual.

level 1 0.25s
level 2 0.75s
level 3 1.025sl
level 4 1.5s
level 5 1.5s
level 6 1.75s
level 7 1.75s
level 8 1.75s
level 9 1.5s

from level 9 on discharge times drop again

I suggest using this together with the already existing or upcoming recharge table.

One word: SNIPER.

She can't fight what she does see and after the sniper fires, she won't be fighting anything, except maybe to remain conscious.

As GM you are NEVER at a player's mercy. She can only take so many actions in a round, make sure there are five times as many NPCs as actions she could possibly fight in a round.

The D6 rules have a rule for massed fire, the idea being it is more difficult to dodge fire from more than one shooter. Use a house Mass fire rule to have your Bruce Lee wannabe so busy dodging fire she can't attack. PCs never run a story, the GM does. You've got way too many resources to ever have a PC dictate how an encounter goes.

Jem Hadar and Borg have personal shielding, have some enterprising Alpha Quadrant race or group have a crude version of the personal shield. Have it fail on a roll of 1 on a D6 to represent it's fragile nature, but if she's facing 20 thugs with personal shields, she's not going to take out more than one or two of them before being riddled with phaser fire, if you are feeling nice, you could use stun, I personally wouldn't to make the example very clear to the player.

Another trick: have the enemies capture a PC. Then, using cosmetic surgery or some other trickery, the PC is made to look like an alien and placed in with the henchmen. Imagine how the player will feel when they read the note: "You killed my brother on . I have elected to take my revenge by arranging for you to kill someone you value, as you have now done."

There are other, similar gambits that can have a chilling effect on the character's willingness to shoot first and ask questions never.