I would like to dual wield hand phases but don’t know if I can
Flavour, wise you can. Mechanically it’s a task to fire a phaser and you only get one of those for free. The swift task spend seems like a fair and balanced way around this if that is the way you want to go
Maybe Create Advantage.
If you have a security detail with you they act like Create Advantage (each red shirt does not get a separate attack) and two phasers could be handled the same.
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Maybe both? If you just want to make “one attack” at one individual but going all guns blazing, it could be an advantage.
If you want to actually shoot different individuals, you can spend momentum for additional attacks (well, that’s the very short version, but you get the idea).
RPGs generally deprotagonize anyone who dares to attempt ambidexterity. Mainly because if they don’t, everyone would always be ambidextrous as there would be literally no downside to it. In order to balance play so the one handed option is as valid as a two handed option, there either has to be some tradeoff that equivalently “buys” the extra attack each round, or it needs to be nerfed in a way that effectively makes its numeric output equivalent in the long run. It is, after all, a game, and giving options that make all other options blatantly sub-optimal or pointless is not fun for anyone.
But, listen to me rambling on like an armchair theorist.
Personally, I’d just houserule up an equipment trait. Dual Phasers: When you make an attack action, you make two attacks against a single target, BUT both of those attacks are at +1 difficulty because it is actually supremely hard to precisely aim two things at the same time, even for a trained expert.
Since the base difficulty for ranged attacks is 2, this forces the player to spend momentum, feed me threat, or get some form of help in order to actually hit with either attack. If they spend it and roll well, yeah, they’ll probably annihilate that guy, but they earned it.
That’s not what “deprotagonize” is supposed to mean.
You can use a determination to perform another task immediately. Also i beleive in the rules there was somthing similiar to this that stated that the second task will increase in difficulty
Maybe add an escalation cost in there as well and perhaps increase complication range by 1.
Just throwing ideas out but if used as Create Advantage you can set phaser to area charge and get a better chance to hit.
Also, a lowered difficulty gets a better chance of momentum to spend on another attack.
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No. It isn’t. I was rather exaggerating.
Theres probably also an arguement for increasing the complication range, for similar reasons to the difficulty increase.
But yeah, I wouldn’t be too upset if this was how someone ruled this. As you say, as long as there is some cost to make it less of an - always go to, far more optimal - option.
I’d maybe even settle for someone having to give up a talent slot to be able to do this without a penalty increase
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Considering that the number of emitters or arrays on a starship make no difference, how is having one hand phaser vs. two hand phasers likely to make a difference?
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Well, in one PIC episode Seven dual wielded two phaser rifles successfully.
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Have you tried aiming two handheld items vs one? A computer can do it no problem, but most characters aren’t computers so it takes a lot more skill/practice
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So the ship can do/does it with no benefit, but you think that doing by hand should give a benefit?
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The ship’s weapons are based partly on scale, so there is a sort of built in benefit to having more emitters, albeit not that big of one.
Personally I don’t really see why any character would bother, but that shouldn’t remove the possibility. If they go for it, then they are doing something abnormal, which should have additional cost and additional benefit.
Of course this is all down to the GM, so if you don’t agree then you are very welcome to rule it differently in your game
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I always figured shipboard weapons are operated much the same way they would be in EVE Online. Tap a target in optimal range, tap the weapon you want to shoot at them. Double tap for sustained fire. Computer does the rest. Of course, I also think it should be possible for a ship to split its damage output between multiple targets, but we can’t do that by core rules either.
And, at risk of going way off topic, starship weapons only deal slightly more damage than handheld weapons. For example a PC has the potential be rolling 9 CD on their type 3 phaser attack, while a shuttle might only be rolling 4. This means that in vehicle vs character conflict, which I don’t think the developers imagined would ever really happen, some characters are more dangerous than some smaller vessels, potentially on par with some smaller starships.
My only explanation is either,
A) PC weapons are just handheld equivalents to shipboard weapons, in which case dual wielding as I write it would be way overpowered.
B) Starship combat and personal combat are on such a different scale that they are both incompatible with each other and incomparable to each other.
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My point was that a Scale X ship with Y emitters/arrays isn’t much different from another Scale X ship with Y+1 emitters arrays. In a similar way, a character with a second phaser (Y+1 emitters/arrays) isn’t significantly different from a character with a single phaser (Y emitters/arrays).
I was not implying that hand phasers can be used to destroy shuttlecraft.
No, what I’m saying is that what those damage dice represent for starships should not be comparable to what they represent for personal combat. I used the example of trying to interface the two combat systems to show how ludicrous it is to compare the two at all. Yes, there’s very little difference between ships with different numbers of phaser arrays, but in ship combat the number of phasers isn’t as significant because of what they’re made of, the scale of the weapons, the presence of shields, etc. It just doesn’t make sense for it to be relevant to personal combat whatsoever.
Otherwise you can shoot down an akira class with 5 security, a type 3 phaser, and the sharpshooter talent. Which is rather silly.
They can’t be simultaneously comparable and incompatible.
@JAMalcolmson Yeah I generally look at this in the same way the Star Wars RPGs handle it, in which they have 1 point of starship weapon damage being equal to 10 points of character damage, and the same with soak (resistance).
In which case it might be possible to shoot down a shuttle, but anything beyond scale 1 leaves you trying to burn through effectively 20 resistance…
@HappyDaze I understand what you were saying and it is an interesting point. I think that particular element highlights that this isn’t intended as a combat sim. There specifically isn’t a stat in this game for how many emitter arrays are on different classes of ship.
The closest ship comparison I can get with this system is a tactical officer firing weapons with one hand, and using the other hand on another console to fire a second time. That would be separate roles with an increase of difficulty for swift task (and probably override as well)
I’m not talking about damage at all. It’s obvious though that we have a failure to communicate, so I’m just going to drop it.