Welcome back to our tales of the Lighthouse, the wandering space station operated by the Galactic Concord to keep peace in the delicate frontier of the Verge in the Alternity Star*Drive universe!
Eleventh Session – Subplots are visited upon us en masse as we starfall towards Hammer’s Star. Crazed cyborgs rampage and the station populace begins rutting like crazed weasels. And we have the first real combat for like three sessions. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
On the one hand, I like that our custom subplots help drive the campaign. On the other hand, this game session was just chaos. People weren’t listening, interrupting, yelling off topic stories about whatever damn TV show they watched last night… I don’t mean “not behaving optimally for people to roleplay” or “enjoying socializing with friends,” I mean “acting in a distressingly impolite way.” At one point I seriously considered punching another player in the head if he interrupted me again. Then I considered just packing up and leaving. Then I decided to just quietly ride it out. Sigh.
Twelfth Session – The Lighthouse starfalls to the Hammer’s Star system. The normal shenanigans and subplots ensue until an entire klick fleet appears and Captain Takashi gets to yell “FIRE ZE MISSILES!!!” again and again until they stop moving.
I think we’ve discovered the best way to use the Alternity space combat mechanics… Ranges vary widely on normal weapons, from 1 to 12 hexes. The Lighthouse itself can’t really move in combat and has short range beam weapons, so if anyone gets through our screen of defending ships we’re in trouble. But missiles move like 6 hexes a round, and thus can get . So really you just want to fire all missile tubes at once before the other ship(s) are even anywhere on the tactical map; the chance of any significant weapon hit taking out major systems is very high. We lost one of our two destroyers because we “played nice” and didn’t insist on engagement at very long range.
Geek Related 