Re: Critical Hits

>

I've been thinking about critical hits lately and I thought it was
> strange that a medium catapult shot ship shaken has the same
> effectiveness against a mosquito as it does against the spelljammer
> itself! (or even just an armada for that matter).  Now obviously some
> critical hits (hull holed, lost crewmember, possibly even sj shock)
> make equal sense regardless of the size of the vessel (though is it
> fair that a vipership manned by just the helmsman has an equal chance
> of losing a crewman as an ogre mammoth stuffed to the gills with
> thousands of kobolds?).  Ones like loss of maneuverability and ship
> shaken, however, seem like they'd require more than just a good
> catapult/ballista/bombard shot to take effect on a vessel as large as
> an armada (and for the maneuverability loss for a ship with such huge
> rigging).  What do you guys think?

I was thinking that a system where d20 (or something) was rolled and the
damage from the weapon was added. The critical table would start at 21+
(each number being a specific result) but specific ships would have
ship-specific criticals that would occur if a 19 or 20 were rolled - thus a
scorpion ship would have a unique critical of 20 - claws are disabled.

The number of unique criticals would me a measure of the ship qhality -
classic designs like the Hammer or Squid ships would have no additional
criticals (that's why they're classics) while at the other end of the scale
Gnomish ships would have lots of potential results (eg. Hamster Overboard)
and possibly even some, like Spring-Speed-Steering-Regulator-System #1
damaged, that would even improve the ships performance.


neil barnes



Quote from actual Critical Table:

3. Hit in part of brain used for Geography Projects. No Effect

(Copyright Alex Ulster, 1990)