Urban Warfare in the Trek

[Voran]

Warfare in Trek is a very plot affecting thing. Realistically, you'd think you can do stuff like use your ship in orbit to give you aid. But then things like the plot of AR-558 had it that the Defiant had to leave orbit and deal with Jem hadar fighters, which also conveniently left orbit as to not give the Jem Hadar an unfair advantage.

In general, I can't recall any eps (TNG and beyond) that really had ships supporting groundside battles, they always were 'somewhere else' or 'happened to get blown up' or 'there's a big shield around the planet'.

Lets assume for example a ship happens to be in orbit in support, and no plot preventions to inhibit them to fire down on the planet in support. Then we'd move on to more internal prohibitions.

Mechanically, per the game system, stun affects all types of the same species equally. Sickly old dude gets stunned for just as long on the same setting as healthy young dude, or baby in cradle..dude... If you looked at it more, its easy to see this is more for ease of game mechanics than what would be 'realistic'. You shoot a baby or preschooler with phaser setting 1, and it should probably be more dangerous than shooting uppity adult dude with the same setting.

Fed types at least would probably worry about collateral damage from something like 'stun the city block' since there'd be too many variables in people to worry about. What if our stun setting kills kids, or drops the dude with the 24th century pacemaker? Sure evil dudes or Klingons wouldn't care, but they probably wouldn't use stun in the first place. Fed types would worry about and be considerate of such possibilities.

[The Tatterdemalion King]

Mechanically, per the game system, stun affects all types of the same species equally. Sickly old dude gets stunned for just as long on the same setting as healthy young dude, or baby in cradle..dude... If you looked at it more, its easy to see this is more for ease of game mechanics than what would be 'realistic'. You shoot a baby or preschooler with phaser setting 1, and it should probably be more dangerous than shooting uppity adult dude with the same setting.

Although it's not in the mechanics, you can kill healthy adults with Stun if you shoot them point blank (STVI). A guy with a heart condition will probably have to make a Stamina check to avoid complications if stunned, too–which is a cool twist to throw at players if they need to capture the crazed elder Trill delegate in engineering.

Fed types at least would probably worry about collateral damage from something like 'stun the city block' since there'd be too many variables in people to worry about. What if our stun setting kills kids, or drops the dude with the 24th century pacemaker? Sure evil dudes or Klingons wouldn't care, but they probably wouldn't use stun in the first place. Fed types would worry about and be considerate of such possibilities.

And what would throwing the energy at advanced technology do? The Iotians didn't have any plasma conduits or disruptors hanging around. For all we know, they could've narrowly avoided ignited some car gas tanks.

[JALU3]

And what would throwing the energy at advanced technology do? The Iotians didn't have any plasma conduits or disruptors hanging around. For all we know, they could've narrowly avoided ignited some car gas tanks.

What ever the GM/Narrator thinks is appropriate. Maybe it explodes. Maybe nothing happens . . . maybe it interfers with is normal operation and creates something unexpected to happen to the energy or the more advanced device . . . maybe it's their equivelent to a remote . . . and causes something to turn on . . . or make popcorn or something.

[The Tatterdemalion King]

What ever the GM/Narrator thinks is appropriate. Maybe it explodes. Maybe nothing happens . . . maybe it interfers with is normal operation and creates something unexpected to happen to the energy or the more advanced device . . . maybe it's their equivelent to a remote . . . and causes something to turn on . . . or make popcorn or something.

All the fish in a nearby stream float to the top.

And the ambassador's poodle explodes.

[Voran]

An OMG, You Killed Kenny! Thing might be useful, though that depends entirely on the tone of your game.

Still, in some ways (many ways) it falls on us to take things a bit further, in order to justify why you can't do 'realistic' things as readily as one might hope in the game setting.

Sometimes realism can be fun, and can be a nice reward for players who use logical thinking or clever use of environment/situation, but the world setting does have its own Roddenberry imposed, or perhaps more importantly, budgetary costs for FX, imposed restrictions.

We rarely see true urban fighting in trek, probably due to the costs associated with such sets. The tone of TNG was exploration/thoughtful, and it took until DS9 before we got gritty/warfare, but even there we note that settings were largely along common themes: Something happens on the DS9 station set, something happens on 'alien planet' in the rock quarry area that's cheap for us to shoot the scene at, or onboard a cobbled together ship-set.

I figure if going for realism, in gritty urban settings, we'd be seeing far more use of photon grenades and stuff like that.

The idea of transporter jammers being common place seems to be a consequence of gameplay realities. Just like teleportation in a DnD setting, from a player perspective if you've got mages in your party, your ability to move anywhere past a certain casting level strains disbelief sometimes, as the GM is forced to go "Um...yeah they've got wards in place" to prevent groups from bypassing half the story and just porting into the bad-dude's lair.

I can see the thinking behind transport jammers though, especially for secure installations. And even for non secure locations, if we use Insurrection as an example, setting up jammers isn't too hard.