I’m running a campaign that will eventually feature the species that one of the crew is (A creation by that player), and a weapon on their starships that I’ve been working on but can’t nail down one of the mechanics. It’s called the Positron Blaster Lance. In lore, it fires a big angry deathbeam through space that can hit multiple targets along it’s firing path, i.e. attacking a line of zones. It’s powerful, devastating, and really hurts. It’s an energy weapon that’s powerful so it eats a talent, but it also takes a talent because it takes this big bulky equipment. It’s damage is tabulated like a torpedo attack and it’s base difficulty to hit is 3 with a range of medium. So far the profile I have for it is:
4CD vicious 1, Calibration, Devastating, High-Yield, Power 3, Threat 2
It eats a ton of power, and adds to threat because it’s powerful, and scary.
I’ve read the books in depth for ideas on how to make it work. Antiparticle weapons exist in the game. They either give Vicious 1 or Penetrating 1 as far as I can see so that’s easy enough. And since shooting something with antiparticles would basically cause them to either explode or just rip them apart at the molecular level, Devastating and High-Yield seemed appropriate (Also pretty much nothing uses Devastating so I thought it’d be a good use for it). The thing I can’t figure out is mechanically how it would attack multiple zones in a line. I’ve thought about increases to difficulty to include more than one zone. That felt weird and not in the spirit of the rules. I thought about being able to buy extra zones with momentum and then effects rolled can hit things in more than one zone. That felt like you could roll fewer effects than what you were looking for so I scrapped that.
Currently I’m at back where where I started in very the beginning: A damage effect called Lance that lets you hit extra targets like Area but you can affect targets in other zones that must be in a line of zones aligned with the firing ship. That seems balanced enough considering the costs to fire the thing. However I can’t help but feel that while that’s the simplest and most “Lore meets Crunch” solution, that it’s still too much. Again, one of my crew is from this species and I want to run a campaign in their navy later if my players like them well enough so I want this to work if it can. None of my players know about any of this, it’s still a ways off; I want it to be a surprise, especially for the player who’s character is this species (I really like their species)
Thoughts? Alternatives? Have I created a monster?