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I've been watching videos on youtube about the Mass Effect series of video games and the ammo system changes from game to game came to mind. I strongly preferred the "overheat" style regenerating with cool down ammo mechanics moreso than the later finite numbers/reload ones. That made me think about tabletop RPGs and realize that I don't believe I've ever played one with the overheat style mechanic as well. Does anyone know of a scifi RPG that uses it?

 warboss wrote:
I've been watching videos on youtube about the Mass Effect series of video games and the ammo system changes from game to game came to mind. I strongly preferred the "overheat" style regenerating with cool down ammo mechanics moreso than the later finite numbers/reload ones. That made me think about tabletop RPGs and realize that I don't believe I've ever played one with the overheat style mechanic as well. Does anyone know of a scifi RPG that uses it?

The SW RPGs by fantasy flight.

They don't bother with keeping track of ammo or whatever. If you fail to a certain degree your blaster jams/runs out of power/overheats and you need to spend an action to clear it/recharge/vent the blaster so it's usable again.

Thanks as I didn't know that. So can you jamp/run out/overheat on your first shot firing if you roll badly enough with the FFG SW game? I'm curious to see if rate of fire (or whatever mechanical equivalent it has) affects the chances of it happening. I'm guessing with FFG that it's a handful'o'custom dice effect where if your roll some number of some bad icons then it happens but that's just based on my experience with their other games.

 warboss wrote:
Thanks as I didn't know that. So can you jamp/run out/overheat on your first shot firing if you roll badly enough with the FFG SW game? I'm curious to see if rate of fire (or whatever mechanical equivalent it has) affects the chances of it happening. I'm guessing with FFG that it's a handful'o'custom dice effect where if your roll some number of some bad icon then it happens but that's just based on my experience with their other effect.

I am going off memory so bits of this might be wrong.

First these are the dice.


You build a dice pool to do an action.

So lets say you wanna shoot your gun. You have 3 skill in gun and 2 in agility (the attribute for aiming).

the 3 skill will give you 3 ability dice. The 2 agility will upgrade 2 of them to proficiency. Did you take time to Aim? Grab a boost dice.

The GM sets the difficulty and hands you a number of difficulty dice. He might spend things or the enemy might have stuff that upgrades any number of those to Challenge dice. Is the room all foggy and vision is poor? Take a Setback dice too.

So you roll this pile of crap and look at the symbols. These are the symbols on the dice.


Triumph only appears on proficiency dice. Successes and advantage appear on Proficiency, ability, and boost.

Despair only appears on Challenge dice. Failures and Threat appear on Challenge, Difficulty, and Setbacks.

Triumph are automatic successes with a extra good thing happening (critical success). Despair is an automatic failure with extra bad happening.

Triumph and Despair cancel each other out. Success and Fail cancel each other out. Advantage and threat cancel each other out.

You can spend Advantage to activate abilities on your gear and stuff or for fortuitous circumstances. You shoot that gun and with enough advantage he drops a primed thermal detonator at his feet and ends up hurting the guys around him too as an example. But whats interesting is you can fail the task but STILL have advantage to spend. You didn't hit that guy but you did hit the pipe next to him and it sprays steam out filling the corridor and now you have cover and a chance to escape.Or you can just spend it to give the next guy to attack a Boost dice.

Threat is spent by the GM for all kinds of negative circumstances. You could succeed at killing that guy but in his death his blaster goes off and takes out one of the supports of a bridge your trying to cross. Now instead of just running across the bridge everyone has to make rolls to maintain balance and not fall as it sway around wildly.

One of those Threat things the GM can do is overheat/run out of ammo/jam/ etc etc...


If this was being translated to a D20 or whatever. You could just assign a number. On a 6 or less the weapon stalls and an action is needed to use again.

Oh, wow... that's not at all what I was expecting. Thanks for the detailed explanation. I was thinking that it would just be a certain number of "bad" roll results on custom dice (like a natural 1 equivalent) depending on the rate of fire. That's alot like (to use a comparison I'm somewhat familiar with) spending threat for effects by the GM in the Modiphius RPGs like Star Trek (although how they're generated is vastly different).

I was thinking that maybe some games had an overheat style counter system where you generate and dissipate heat based on your actions. That's a bit more 90's style tabletop game mechanics style than the more streamlined current trends that don't require individual counters.

Yup.

I am not a huge fan of the FF system because it slows the game down. Every time anyone wants to do anything there is a lot of building the dice pool and then comparing symbols. You have to do math 2-3 times to ind out if you succeeded or not or if threat or advantage had been generated and then decide how you want to spend it.

Its cumbersome.

But what I DO like about it is the narrative elements. The fact that you can fail the shot but still get advantages. Or Succeed but make things harder for yourself. The dice help build the story with that stuff in unexpected ways that nobody plans for. THAT part of it is good.

I didn't want to comment specifically since I've obviously never played it but, from a fresh perspective, it does indeed look cumbersome. Building up two separate pools with three separate comparisons (albeit simple arithmetic but still...) seems like alot for what other systems use a single die for. Admittedly, as you said, the added narrative elements figure into that but it seems like a bit much and definitely not what I was expecting when you first mentioned it.

It's not as bad as you are probably thinking. Obviously it takes a little getting used to the symbols and whatever. And chances are your dice pool isn't THAT big. That 3 skill and 2 stat isn't 5 dice. It's still just 3 because of the upgrading dice. Which helps.

But like you said, other games use a single die. add a number.

True and my lack of experience is why I wasn't willing to bring it up myself. My first impression though matched what you posted.

I'm curious if other RPGs have an automatic "overheat" style mechanic that isn't GM dependent but rather a function of the rules similar to in video games. I'll admit that my experience with the more narrative rulesets is very limited so I don't know if the tradeoff is worth it.

 Lance845 wrote:
Yup.

I am not a huge fan of the FF system because it slows the game down. Every time anyone wants to do anything there is a lot of building the dice pool and then comparing symbols. You have to do math 2-3 times to ind out if you succeeded or not or if threat or advantage had been generated and then decide how you want to spend it.

Its cumbersome.

But what I DO like about it is the narrative elements. The fact that you can fail the shot but still get advantages. Or Succeed but make things harder for yourself. The dice help build the story with that stuff in unexpected ways that nobody plans for. THAT part of it is good.

I disagree. Its only like that for the first few sessions while you are getting used to it. One you've got it down its not really significantly slower than other systems. My group has been playing with it for years and we'll only take a maximum of 3-4 seconds to get our result. It is a challenge for anybody who is used to DnD style RPG systems, but I've yet to see anybody really struggle with it.

I do agree it is awesome for narrative building.

As far as building the dice pool. Most of the time you are well aware of what your pool is for any specific check, so you'll have it ready to go and just be waiting on the GM to give you the difficulty. The book has 7 levels of difficulty. Simple(0 purple), Easy(1 purple), Average(2), Hard(3), Challenging(4), Daunting(5), and Impossible(6). Generally speaking though, you will almost never see a check with difficulty above 4. Certainly not in something like combat, where melee attacks are always Average checks and ranged is based on distance from the target(where range = purple dice). So even for stuff like basic attacks you don't even need to ask the GM for the difficulty, you'll already know it based on the distance. So you'll just be asking if he has any defense or levels of nemesis.

The narrative benefits that the dice bring definitely outweigh any possible issues caused by needing to roll more dice. Like the time I rolled a triumph on a ranged attack, which I used to hit one of the frag grenades on the Stormtrooper's belt...


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 warboss wrote:
True and my lack of experience is why I wasn't willing to bring it up myself. My first impression though matched what you posted.

I'm curious if other RPGs have an automatic "overheat" style mechanic that isn't GM dependent but rather a function of the rules similar to in video games. I'll admit that my experience with the more narrative rulesets is very limited so I don't know if the tradeoff is worth it.

Well the 40k RPGs have overheat and jam mechanics apply to just about all ranged weapons. But all of them still have ammo, its just if you roll bad your gun might jam and if the gun in question is a plasma weapon...

I would definitely check out FFGs new generic Roleplay system, which is what the dice that Lance845 showed are actually from. The Star Wars dice faces do look slightly different, but they have identical mechanics. In my experience it is fairly intuitive once you start using it.

One very nice thing is that in this system even low level enemies can still be a genuine threat to a player. The minion system lets even trash tier enemies be a threat to high level characters. Unlike say DnD where a 10th level character can for all practical purposes be invincible vs level 1 opponents. So you don't have to necessarily have a silly arms race of opponents who just keep getting more absurdly powerful just so the players have a challenge. A 1000+xp party can still have issues if they're facing a bunch of Stormtroopers.

On the flipside, its also nice in that its actually fairly hard for a PC to die. Mechanically, a player has to take quite an excessive amount of damage before death becomes a possibility. The only way to die is to roll a couple results on the D100 crit chart, and the Chart actually goes from 1 to 150. So unless there are bonuses to the roll you can't actually roll Death, something like lost limbs, or stat penalties. Stuff that gives bonuses on the chart are if you are currently suffering any Critical Injuries(+10 each). Certain weapons give bonuses on the crit table, like Lightsabers which have Vicious 3(+30 on the crit table).

It really strikes a good balance between making PCs fairly squishy, enough that anything can be a legitimate threat, and making them durable enough that there isn't a huge risk of death. Healing is also very limited. Outside of a Force User who takes the Heal/Harm power, the only way to heal HP in combat is with Stimpacks. The first Stimpack used each Day gives 5 hit points. The 2nd gives 4. The 3rd gives 3. And so on such that the 6th stimpack gives nothing. The only exception is Droid characters, who get Repair patches instead. They only give 3 hit points when used and can only be used 5 times total, but don't diminish with subsequent use.

I've been running a Genesys game (FFG's generic version of their Star Wars RPG engine) for almost a year now. It's set in a Steampunk fantasy world The World of SMOG; there are a pair of board games set in that Universe which I enjoy greatly, so I decided to go beyond and run a game in it.

Anyway, I have to echo the "it sounds complicated until you actually do it" statement. It's not nearly as complicated as it sounds, in the end. You pull out counteracting dice, look at what's left and tell the story from there. It works pretty well, although as a more narrative system there are definitely a few systems that are open to abuse (looking at you Auto-fire). If you like heavy story games with an emphasis on shared story over hard crunch, you could do worse than the Genesys / Star Wars system.

I dont think its overly complicated in practice, just more complicated then i like. I want all the crunch in a table top rpg to be near non existant. Its there to help facilitate the game. Not get in the way of it. And the narrative elements of Ffg system are great, but dice pools in general always add SOME complication and slow down inherently by their nature.

Not saying the system is bad. Just what the system is. Im not against it and enjoyed it when i played with it. But when i have my choice of game i prefer a single quick roll with a central universal mechanicto resolve everything. As few tables to reference as physically possible (none. The least possible is literally none.).

Yeah.. I agree.. It starts out and looks almost impossible for the GM and players to wrap their minds around the dice.. but It takes no time at all .. plus i think
it is one of the best systems for flow...The only complaint I have with the FFG Star Wars system is how the micro transaction the books with weapons and alien races..
But I think Disney has a hand in that...

 Genoside07 wrote:
Yeah.. I agree.. It starts out and looks almost impossible for the GM and players to wrap their minds around the dice.. but It takes no time at all .. plus i think
it is one of the best systems for flow...The only complaint I have with the FFG Star Wars system is how the micro transaction the books with weapons and alien races..
But I think Disney has a hand in that...

Why? The first game came out before Disney purchased Lucas and FFG is well known for releasing many supplements with additional characters/options.

Just to prove my point. The original publication of Edge of the Empire was in August 2012 (their first beta printing) and Disney didn't purchase Lucas until December that year. The supplements for Edge released steadily over the next year or so and the game was always designed to be released as 3 games with their themes fitting episodes 4/5/6. (Edge of the Empire was life on the rim with smugglers and gak. Age of Rebellion puts you knee deep in the Rebellion and the Core systems mimicking the themes of Empire. And Force and Destiny has a focus on the Jedi and Sith and mysteries of the Force having the most thematic synergy with Return of the Jedi).

Blaming Disney for something Disney had zero hand in is ridiculous.

Plus it’s perfectly in line with other rpgs. They always have tons of expansion books and stuff.

I’ve never played the pen and paper version of Mechwarrior, but the video game adaptation had a heat system.

Some weapons had ammo, but I always preferred laser weapons that had “unlimited” ammo but generally created more heat than other weapons. If you get too hot, you suffer damage or shut down.

Was that Mechwarrior heat system only for the actual mecha or did it apply to all the weapons including the hand held human carried ones?

Last week, I found a Mass Effect dnd 5e conversion online. Although it utilizes the thermal pack ammo system of later video games, it does have an overheat system in place for the ME2/3 weapons that were a throwback to the earlier game like the collector weapons. It shouldn't be too hard to carry that over to the others as well. I have no experience with dnd 5e let alone this mod so can't comment on it in practice.

https://n7.world/phb/weapons