On Fri, 18 Oct 2013, Onno Meyer wrote:
Johannes replied to me:
You could have tractor beam traps on the ground. The ship comes too close
and the IFF is not responding correctly, it gets held. Someone with a
proper authroisation has to realease it.
At TL11, you could easily have 100 tons thrust on a 20-ton ship. A tractor
beam to hold that ship is 161 tons for 500 yds. range and a whopping 5,121
tons for 1,000 yds. range.
There is a lot of space underground, and you don't need to have stick a
lot of it out. I was thinking of a permanently installed device here, not
some trap set specifically for the pcs. Either part of a Goa'uld security
system, or something left from the Gate builders, that some Goa'uld
managed to reactivate, or it just sits there and occasionally catches a
ship of any faction.
Something the party has picked up (because it is a valuable technological
artefact that needs to be analysed at home) in some way sabotages the
ship.
A self-inflicted technobabble damper. You can do that a few times before
the players get paranoid :-)
Or the device is some robot, that starts interfacing with the ship, or
tries to rebuild itself with components it finds in it's vincinity.
The cave so suitable to hide the ship does have a hidden door that locks
the ship in, and the enemy has the remote control.
I'd only do that if they fail some rolls.
Sure. But the same applies to get boarded, to get ambushed while on foot
ect. And if it is plot important, the GM can always cheat at rolls.
Some spy sabotaged the ship controls.
Or the power plant. A hyperdrive ship has power cells. If they are full,
they can handle life support for a long time, but engine use can drain
it quickly.
How do you get a spy in? A logical timebomb from Earth? That could help
to make the spy last longer, because there are more suspects. Or an
infiltrator from the "low-tech" villagers who need the help of the
heroes.
OTOH, I learned from painful experience that it is a good idea to give
a parked ship "plot immunity". If the party does the stupid thing and
doesn't leave any player characters behind to guard the ship, that is
good for the flow of play.
I was primarily thinking about the mole in the star gate center, who
programs the ship computer to fail during the mission. But some local who
gets transported would be a good candidate too.
A burgler in the parked vehicle indeed can induce party splits. You could
mitigate the danger, by giving a reason for the security of parked ships,
a tight security system, that needs a stated list of components to switch
off (electronic key, password, fingerprint.. ) and then have the party
find out who did it, by reconstructing who could get at which component
when.
That would be definitly a once only aproach though.
Whenever possible i make the opponents amateurs, it makes GMing much
easier. What works especially well is amateurs who try to compensate their
lack of experience with refining their plans more and make them ever more
elaborate and complex. That gives the party something to find out, and my
own errors are hard to distinguish from the intentional errors of the
villians.
The Goa'uld have millenia of experience at intrigue and back-stabbing.
But propably little experience with opponents, who are neither the usual
peasants or minions, but don't have Goa'uld attitudes and culture either.
So some might start treating eartlings like they would treat an enemy
Goa'ulds Jaffa, or human leaders, like rival Goa'uld.
Which might lead to cultural misunderstandings regarding how easy it is
supposed to get someone to defect and what are proper incentives. A pc
might get it easy to convince the system lord, that he now works against
earth now for a while at least, because the new position is such a better
step on the career ladder. He might expect the turncoat to defect back
later, but sure not before he has taken a good sampling from the
privileges he just got.
With security there often is a discrepancy between what is in the protocol
and what is actually done. If the pcs are for some reason not in a
dedicated high end high security prison, this can allow the pcs an out.
If the prisoners are awaiting the personal attention of the Evil Overlord,
few henchmen would dare to slack off. Perhaps the other way around -- the
special prisoners get the golden cage, which has a few gaps.
Or because the EO is around, getting the prison guards inspection ready is
the ultimate goal of everyone.
There might be more parties at work then the pcs and the EO. The EOs
guards might steal on the job for instance, maybe they switched a working
security gadget for a damaged one, to sell the working one on the black
market, and then reported equipment failure but the replacement has not
yet arrived. Or they need extra hands to move thier loot, and they figure
prisoners at gun point would do just fine.
With Jaffa, it could always be that they don't understand how the gadget
works. They look like medieval villagers with a few ancient gadgets and
a old masters teaching young apprentices. I don't believe that is a way
to create a scientific mindset.
Or a guard keeps the damaged equipment secret, because he fears to be
punished for damaging it.
So what does all that tell me?
* Insert some single points of failure, like a single power plant.
That can be justified by the extra weight of separate systems in
a small ship.
* Some spare passenger seats to allow the occasional NPCs.
* Make it small or cramped enough that bunking down inside is not
attractive.
* On the other hand, a separate cockpit could allow all sorts of
mischief.
Why avoid bunking down inside? Party + NPC(s) spending the night inside
gives a saboteur yet an other time to strike. Or a transported NPC can't
sleep decides to walk once around the ship, get's captured and someone
else comes back. Redshirt with a smoking habit would be a good candidate.
Yet an other idea would be to have command codes, that allow you to remote
control the ship. You'd need some explaination, how the enemy got at the
codes.
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