Late to the party: RPGaDay 2019 prompt 5

“Space”

Ah space. My old nemesis. I’ll tell a couple of stories for this one I think.

When I was working on the Ginnungagap, I started trying to think of justifications of why firearms might not do a lot of damage. My best answer was ‘space’.
If you’re running around in a spaceship with some kind of ballistic weapon, you’re more likely to damage the hull and cause an atmospheric loss issue than if we just have lasers that deal force or radiant or necrotic damage.
OK, they’ll probably still cause issues, but I liked the idea that ‘of course we don’t use ballistics, that’s super dangerous!’ and we can stick it to the ship-to-ship weapons or something.
It’s a bit hand-wavey, but it works for now.

My other big space adventure, which I was reminded of the other day going through some old papers, was Star Wars.
Somewhere around 2010 I played in a d20 Star Wars game set during the Legacy Era – over a century since the original trilogy.
It was great fun playing a Duros named Kif, piloting the ship around and generally being a bit rogue-y. And then I started reading all the rules…
At one point, the party ran into one of the big Sith enemies from the rules/setting (Darth Talon). We splatted her in two hits, before she got to do anything. He quietly doubled her hitpoints so she got to do something, and it was some cool Sith powers. But then she got wiped out again by the end of my turn.

To be fair, but the end of the run, my pilot had a Yuuzhan Vong eye implant, gained force powers, had built himself a couple of lightsabers, and built a hybrid tech/Vong ship that had a small Death Star Laser built in to it (and had won the Pan-Glactic Sabacc Tournament to pay for it!).
He wasn’t really min-maxed, and I built it in to his story for a long loooong time (I think we were playing once a week for a good few months, the ship goal was there from day 1).

I recommend the setting, the rules got a little easy to abuse if you checked all of the books.