It's time for the second installment of The Sweatshop, and this time the focus will be on Robotech and Macross II, the Palladium games ostensibly adapted for anime mecha action. As usual, the Palladium rules leave quite a bit to be desired, but I'm going to focus on the single aspect of guided missiles for this episode.
To explain what I'm going to patch today, let's say you're watching Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles, the original Robotech series, or Macross II. The character in the show is facing down half a dozen enemies in their Veritech/Valkyrie. They quickly lock on to multiple targets and blossom forth with a missile volley. Multiple enemies die in a wall of fireballs. Once again, this never happens in the RPGs when playing by the rules. The most targets you can attack in any single action is ONE. Some may say the blast radius rules solve this problem, but blast radii for the short range missiles and mini-missiles are inadequate to the task of replicating the destruction of the widely spaced enemies blasted in the respective films. Many enemies would have to be in a romantic embrace in order for multiples to be caught in the blast area. Even if they were, damage to targets merely in the blast radius is halved, so we once again run into the problem of the inflated Palladium MDC values. It's time the break out the wrench again.
Luckily, there isn't any real reason why we can't follow the most obvious course of patching. In the films, characters can fire single missile volleys at multiple targets. My group called this the MLS rule (Multi-Lock System), and we used it for many years.
The attacker designates his targets. He can designate as many targets as he desires. Then he chooses the number of missiles to fire. This can be any volley size his mech may normally fire in a single attack. The total number of missiles are then evenly divided among the targets seleced.
We nearly always ruled the volley size had to be evenly divisible by the number of targets, but it doesn't hurt if it's an uneven amount as long as the missiles are targeted across the selected enemies as evenly as possible.
The attacker then rolls a single strike roll. This strike roll applies to each mini-volley against each target. From there on, the normal rules apply. The target could possibly dodge, shoot the missiles down, or just die.
This alone greatly increases the ability of PCs to emulate the activities seen in the show. But it has another benefit.
(The following notes are based on the old Palladium rules for shooting down missiles. The official rules in the current Rifts and Robotech RPGs are actually different, and not entirely bad! I'll add a brief discussion of the new rules at the end. But, since I've used the following method for years, I decided to include it, even though I'm referring to and refuting an outdated rule.)
One iconic bit of Robotech is shooting down incoming missiles. The New Generation segment has the most dramatic example of this practice, as Scott is known to blossom forth innumerable contrails to intercept huge missile attacks by Corg.
In the game, this doesn't happen the same way. Incoming missile swarms aren't met in the air by similarly large countermissile swarms. The response is typically a single missile targetted to detonate a single projectile of the incoming volley. The reason why is because the size of the countermissile swarm is irrelevant because the way the rule is written. Any use of a missile to intercept an incoming missile volley destroys the single missile targeted and has an 85% chance of destroying every other missile in the incoming swarm. This is the same whether it's a single mini-missile or 44 long range missiles.
MLS comes to our rescue in this, because it allows the character shooting at an incoming swarm to target each and every missile in the incoming volley. This creates a situation where the number of countermissiles fired will explicitly eliminate an equal number of incoming missiles. From there, we can use the normal Gun Pod versus Missile rule which states any remaining missiles have a 45% chance of detonating.
My players like sure things, so my experience with this house rule shows players will fire a number of countermissiles large enough to eliminate the enemy swarm. If they fire fewer, they'll fire as many as possible or at least enough to make the remaining incoming missile damage survivable. But the simulation of the show's masses of missiles filling the sky is created by the rule, and therefore things feel much more appropriate.
I tend to make the chance to destroy the remaining missiles less depending on the number of incoming missiles remaining. I generally apply a 5% penalty per extra incoming missile. So, if there were 4 leftover incoming missiles after the countermissile attack, there would be a mere 30% chance for them to be consumed by the countermissiles as well.
But you could create a system where you roll for each remaining missile separately. You could roll a d6 for each remaining missile. On a 1-3, it's destroyed in the blast along with the rest. On a 4-6, it survives.
The point is, there are any number of ways you could handle the leftover volley. It depends on your comfort level and how many dice need to be bouncing across the table.
(As promised, here's the rest of the story.
Shooting down missiles with a gun pod has drastically changed in Rifts and Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles. Instead of a flat 45% chance of destroying the entire volley if you've managed to destroy one missile, there is now a variable chance to destroy the incoming volley. There's still a 40% chance to detonate the whole thing, a 30% chance to detonate half the missiles, and a guarantee of destroying at least one additional missile. This is actually quite a bit of an improvement over the old 45% or nothing rule.
Shooting down missiles with countermissiles has changed slightly and now features a note that an equal number of countermissiles fired in response to a volley has a 100% chance of detonating the entire attack. If the number of countermissiles is less, there's still a 75% chance of destroying the entire incoming volley.
I feel this second change is inferior to the MLS solution. The countermissile firer can still only target one incoming missile. If there is only one less countermissile than the incoming volley, then the result is still only one incoming missile destroyed and only a 75% chance to destroy the rest of the volley. If you can't match the incoming volley, might as well just fire one countermissile because there will be no difference between firing 1 and 500 if there are 501 incoming.)
Tags: Palladium Robotech Rifts Macross
