ASTA

Sacrilege War (Apocalyptic Grimdark Fantasy - Interest Check)

Just bring the GM hammer down on people that are trying to create Sue-like species.

For me, when I'm drafting a custom species, I strive to pay close attention to the cons and pros that are inherent to the numerous attributes that I might apply to my creation. For example, I was planning on apping in with the Mason's Pride, a veteran shock force comprised entirely of thirty-two primordial, master-crafted gargoyle statues that operate as life support units for dismembered and decrepit human bodies. Armor-like stony skin, an acute resistance to magic, a short-ranged field of otherworldly energies that literally causes demonic entities and malicious spirits to undergo harm, and in possession of enough physical strength to move their six tons of living granite bulk with haste and efficiency (their dimensions I basically cribbed from Michelangelo's David because of sheer laziness) makes them out as nigh-unbeatable warriors, but if you take into account that their creator is dead and consequently took her knowledge with her to the grave, you now have a 'faction' that cannot replenish its losses whatsoever. It's a doomed collective from the start; raw attrition will kill them before the RP comes to a close. It's one of Wernher's 'Epic Downfall' moments I guess.

Plus their size makes them shitty for indoor combat. The possibilities are endless. But I like to keep things consistent and realistic to a degree.

Sacrilege War (Apocalyptic Grimdark Fantasy - Interest Check)

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Sacrilege War (Apocalyptic Grimdark Fantasy - Interest Check)

Looked like an excellent roleplay until I started seeing flaws/traits/strengths/weaknesses/ect slots in the 'Host/Species' template.

Random bitching about the games industry

Halo stopped being relevant after Reach.

And how Nintendo is even relevant in 2014 is beyond me.

As for Assassin's Creed:

>Assassin's Creed

>Good

>Ever

From Stardust, To Stardust

WilsonTurner said
Ah, I suppose you all are right.How do I meet these vul'krum, anyhow?

The M should be replaced with an additional U followed by a single N.

As for meeting them, they don't exactly have a set 'area' where they are (I haven't determined this yet honestly). For now, consider them a plot device. If I remember my last IC post, a small murder finished fighting the forces of some random NPC alien civilization, and is now in FTL transit. They could appear somewhere near a moon owned by your faction, but be wary of what I said when it comes to the vul'kruun and their way of interacting with aliens.

To retcon some things (and to make doing things with my nation easier), I'm going to say that it's not impossible to reason with them, but their longing to RIP AND TEAR and SLAUGHTER EVERYTHING really hampers negotiation possibilities. That and their language is less vocal and more about pheromones, subsonic noises and body language.

But when in doubt, hand-wave everything for the sake of plot is what I say.

From Stardust, To Stardust

WilsonTurner said
So you're ungodly fast, you can warp in and out quite quickly, you've got good, strong armor, you've got supersmart swarmer missiles...So what are the cons? Besides them each being loners? Cause you're saying that you're really fast, you're hard to kill, you're hard to avoid getting killed by, and you can FTL in and out quickly. What balances it? Making them each loners is hardly a balancing act. They are smaller craft, I assume, and can be have a crew trained and ready to operate very very quickly.Really, if something threatens, then your peoples could just band together out of fear for extinction, and it'd be impossible to beat you. Not without some really powerful laser weapons or other instantaneous types to disable before you can run away.

1) Never said anything about them being loners. If you see one star crawler, you can assume there will be more lurking about somewhere. Like their handlers, vul'kruun military spacecraft operate in moderately-sized packs to maximize effectiveness during the hunt. This elevates the level of missile spam, which mutually improves the odds of causing causalities to xeno scum.

2) Never mentioned the size of these ships. Not going to specify exact lengths, widths or mass either. You and Duck both have an infamous and rather vicious habit of power-creeping whenever you two are faced with something especially daunting. However, being based on Orion craft, they can range from large to huge in bodily dimensions and tonnage. You can't really do 'small' with an Orion drive, because the engineering limitations and characteristics intrinsic to the drive system itself do not scale down very well. NSWRs, however, can function relatively well when properly machined into petite forms and applied to minute-sized space vessels.

3) I wouldn't say the missiles are hyper-intelligent, but each one can effectively make decisions on its lonesome, and can receive information from its parent missile bus, another missile bus, its siblings and comrades, or other star crawlers. I don't see the problem, especially when you consider that vul'kruun starships practically command themselves in and outside of battle while digital intelligence constructs are not expensive for them to produce (though, since they mine planets and asteroids for raw material, nothing other than their FTL fuel is expensive nor difficult for them to create); the crew is just there to maintain the ship and to tell the on-board systems what to engage, what to monitor and what to avoid firing at.

4) They're already united. Not through any particular political or martial agenda, but through their own psychology and biological evolutionary traits. If you come to them with a promising deal of some sort that involves betraying their entire species, they're going to register you as a prey animal first and a sapient species second. And react in kind. Vul'kruun don't really fit in with the usual species present in the RP when it comes to alliances; they also do not follow the human psychological model in its entirety, and are guided more by aggressive primal impulses and bestial instincts rather than rational thought and cognitive reasoning.

5) I don't know what a laser is supposed to do. Could do some serious damage with a gamma ray laser or an x-ray laser though, but sufficient armor density, ablative layering, sections of 'water' armor, and sheer mass can nullify these weapons to a solid echelon. Plasma shields are a bit different; plasma shield density and other factors might come into play, but I'd have to do more research. I'm trying to keep the hard science to a very low level. And I'm bound to get some things wrong as well.

Cons? I don't know. Realistically, Orion drives might not be as fuel efficient as other drive/engine systems. They need to be refueled with propellant charges and pusher plates do need to be maintained and/or replaced. The fuel used in vul'kruun FTL drives, known as Mes, is expensive because it is a chore to manufacture even with particle accelerators constructed with the prime intention of producing it. Low ship 'endurance' perhaps? I don't know. Vul'kruun don't have artificial gravity, so they have to rotate crews out periodically to prevent space sickness and bone deterioration from setting in and causing hard-to-correct or irreversible damage to the crew members.

As I said, I don't fish around for weaknesses and strengths. I just go with what my shit can and cannot do, because I almost always crib it from real-life (with a few tweaks applied of course).

EDIT: The only real way to balance a free-form RP is to ban specific technologies. Time travel is an obvious one, but if I were GM, I'd forbid the use of:

Non-traditional artificial gravity

Wormholes

Railguns that can fire projectiles faster than 0.5 percent of c (and even this is pushing it)

Dyson technology

Magic

Magic-like technology, such as fields that can disrupt the strong or weak nuclear forces

And standard ship-borne FTL

From Stardust, To Stardust

Kyelin said
Ethereals have two main advantages: immortality and multi role ships. They aren't afraid to be 'killed'. And their ships are able to change roles. Their main disadvantages are the long wind up from FTL travel, making them vulnerable at arrival destinations, and the fragility of their ships, due to not caring about losses

I don't really take into account the weaknesses or strengths of my creations. These usually come into play if you design them well instead of trying to come up with arbitrary limitations. Instead, I dub strengths and weaknesses as 'attributes' of a character or a nation.

But, since Kyelin did it:

Depending on the load out of the craft, vul'kruun star crawlers basically carry enough dakka to effectively neutralize starships that outweigh them by dramatic margins---using only one nuclear shaped charge or a nuclear explosively-formed penetrator. In addition, they're ungodly fast (Orion drives and Nuclear Salt Water Rockets have high fuel efficiency and excellent thrust), they sometimes prove difficult to hit with guided munitions (the 'stutter' effect and the variable yield of the Orion's propellant charges gives star crawlers fitted with them irregular acceleration rates if so desired by their handlers), and they're wrapped in dense, composite armor (ablative layers, space armor configurations, electric-reactive armor, ect). Cold plasma shielding and ECM suites help as well.

Oddly enough, it only takes 12 vul'kruun to crew one of these, with all twelve crew members able to handle one with just four Earth weeks of training.

As for combat doctrine, they avoid spaceship battles and instead opt to appear unannounced within strike range of a lightly-defended xeno population center, cut loose with a few dozen high-capacity FTL-capable computer-controlled missile buses and then leave without a trace. If a xeno fleet is spotted, they usually turn tail and run away. Giant enemy starcraft (like all these dreadnoughts and battleships I keep seeing talked about in the IC) are killed using the 'net' method, which details abruptly surrounding the vessel with missile buses. Escape becomes unlikely, while point-defense is overwhelmed by the intelligent missile swarms (which permits them to concoct devious attack patterns and tactics as they make their way towards their target).

There's a bunch of other crap I left out, but that's about it. It should also be said that vul'kruun don't have captains or admirals or fleets. When you see a gang of their ships assaulting something or someone, that group formed as a response to the detection of suitable prey. I think I designated these groups as 'Murders'.

Fitting I suppose.

In other news, I finally got my computer back! Now I can post ICly here again!

From Stardust, To Stardust

Lol.

From Stardust, To Stardust

WilsonTurner said
Also, what is everyone's specialty? The area that they excel in, which everyone else couldn't best in a fair, equal fight, for example, an Explorer Dreadnought with Valkian armor would be superior to the armor on another Dreadnought, while another Dreadnought, say Duck's, might be unmatched in variety of weapons, while say, Kyelin's Dreadnought would be unmatched in combat options, because he can instantly communicate or act as a defensive ship or etc.We need to have a list of what we're good at, and what we're bad at, otherwise we'll all end up being OP or powergaming at one point or another. Now am I stupid, or right?

Not stupid or right, but it's non-applicable for my faction.

From Stardust, To Stardust

Listing every detail about a faction's military forces in a nation sheet is an unreasonable expectation.