Whirling cavalcade of death.

[Mazza]

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?

[Ergi]

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 ).
One last question. How did you handle initiative? Certainly at least some NPCs must have been able to strike him first.

[Tobian]

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!

[Mazza]

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.

[Ergi]

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.

I thought that's a NO NO.

[Tobian]

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 ! This should also be good for non combat monsters too ! (imagine how annoyed the security officer would be if the doctor or science officer solved their crime for them! )

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 ... 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!

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

[RaconteurX]

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.

[Liquidator Queeg]

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

[GandalfOfBorg]

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.).

[Liquidator Queeg]

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!

[CaptainVarne]

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.

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

[RaconteurX]

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.

[Balok]

<ol>
<li>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.
<li>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.
<li>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).
<li>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.
<li>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.
</ol>
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.)

[Lezta]

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.

[Tobian]

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 ) 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 ! That will make them reassess their skill spending !