So we're balls deep in a space battle. Two ships in our fleet down, four of theirs sent to space davey jones. Just our last ship versus their last ship. It's down to this last round. We can't take another salvo from them. We can't escape even if we wanted to. Rogue trader calls down. Hit'em with everything we've got. Boosting the macrobatteries, the lance, and the missile tubes. We fire everything and the kitchen sink. Power is siphoned from all non-essential decks and systems. Everything that can shoot goes for it. Dice are in our favor. Massive damage. His engines are crippled and his crew took a massive hit. Fires and decompression everywhere. But it wasn't enough. We failed to take out his biggest guns. This was it. We were toast.
"This is horseshit!"
>Those are the rules, and you're out of guns to shoot.
The DM explains in a subdued manner. The table is silent. We had these characters for over 3 months now. We were heavily invested in them. Other players start talking about their final goodbyes to their families. I slam my fist on the table.
"This is bullshit. We've got one macrobattery and one missile battery left"
>They're on the other side of the ship. They aren't in the firing arc. And you don't have enough movement left to turn around, even in your ship could do that much of a turn.
Everyone is morose. So close to victory. Talk of new characters starts up. In desparation I grab the ship sheet to see if there's anything we can do.
"I want to roll the ship"
>What?
"If we roll the ship like this" *demonstrates with the lovingly painted ship mini*, " then we can line up the firing arc of the other guns"
>There's nothing in the rules-
"We have maneuvering thrusters don't we? Right here on the sheet. Best Quality Augmented Retro-Thrusters. "provides enhanced maneuverability"."
>>48267783
Continue...
>>48267783
Rogue Trader's player takes the sheet from me. He looks at it. "He's right, we did get those."
>Those wouldn't help you.
Our resident space geek pipes in. "Actually, they'd have to be positioned like so, " he points to the spots on the model where they would go, "so if you output thrust here and here you could easily roll the ship"
>Even so...
"I'll burn a fate point"
Everyone stops and looks at me.
>That's your last one. If this fails you're done for.
"If this fails we're toast anyway."
>Fine. It's going to be a -60 Hellish test.
I cast my dice. The fate of thousands rests in this dice roll. The dice bounce. Once. Twice. Then they roll to a stop. Then I grin. A chuckle bubbles up in my throat, then exploding out of me into full blown hysterical laughter.
>001
With a skill born of desperation, my character grabs the controls and rolls the ship around it's central axis. The metal groans and shrieks at this abuse. Finally coming to a rest after a 180 degree roll. The emperor's will be manifest, the guns fire, scoring crits on his munitorum and warp engine. The enemy ship, having already taken so much abuse, succumbs. A cascade of explosions flows up and down his ship. Massive amounts of atmosphere are vented, bodies and ejecta float freely. His warp core destabilizes, and his entire ship, explosions and all, are sucked into the warp.
Silence falls on the bridge. No one can quite believe what we pulled off. At last a cheer starts up. Soon congratulations are passed around the gaming table. But it is a somber affair. We always agreed that if any of our characters burned their last fate point they would be retired rather than continue playing as essentially a guided NPC. A pyrrhic victory. A battle won, but a valued crew member lost. The win was bittersweet.
>>48267783
>>48267959
I refuse to believe even a setting as retarded as 40K wouldn't have ships with the capability to barrel roll. Hell, that's practically your bread and butter in zero gravity
>>48267989
I agree, just because the ships themselves look like ships of the line (and play it out like that in bfg), doesn't mean that during combat you wouldn't be able to do it during a free form game like rt.
>>48267783
I like your style op, but you dm is a bit of a dick making you burn a fp to take the test, and not just allow it with a test or burn a fp to have it happen without the test especially at -60.
May the emperor continue to watch over your blessed vessel.
>>48267783
>>48267959
What happened afterwards? A happy ending to the campaign? A new character for you and a continuation of where you left off?
>>48267989
In defense of the rules, it's a pretty central part of ship design. The weapon locations you have available determine what arcs those weapons can hit. Which in turn affects how the ship is piloted in combat. And yes, the rules are there to create a deliberately archaic element of slugging out out with broadsides, rather than a Honor Harrington true-physics zero-gee environment. If the players can get away with constantly spinning the ship like an O'Neill cylinder, so as to fire both port and starboard broadsides on the same target, you're chucking a big part of the setting specific flavor out the window.
The maneuvering thing could be pretty easily handwaved. The rotation thrusters aren't powerful enough to roll the ship completely in one combat turn. Or the macrobatteries can't line up their salvo when the ship is fastrolling relative to the target.
Now having said that, the core reason to burn a fate point is to save your character(s) from certain death (though not without cost). So burning AT LEAST one fate point would be acceptable for letting the players change a "ship explodes" result to "you limp away to fight again, your ship a mangled wreck."
>>48268128
Well there was a big memorial service. We spent an entire session on it. They renamed the ship after him. The Starwind's Victory is still the flagship of our fleet, which has grown to a good 23 ships now. An alliance spanning 35 systems has come together to erradicate the pirate menace that blew up our original fleet. The Rogue Trader gave Starwind's wife and two children an entire estate on his home planet in memory of his sacrifice.
Several in game years have passed and the eldest son has taken up the mantle of starship pilot. He was on the bridge of the flagship as we set off to eradicate the final base of the pirate king. In the final transmission right before we blew his ship (a boss battle in and of itself), the Rogue Trader said, "This one's for Starwind" right before all of our ships simultaneously fired into him. It was very cinematic.
>>48268322
If facing is as important as you're all making it out to be, the ability to rotate the ship would be the first thing on every admiral's mind. How the hell else is the ship supposed to shoot things 'above' or 'below' it? It's obvious that the devs thought of space combat as two dimensional like naval combat, when it just isn't.
>>48268531
40k combat isn't real combat. Shocking, I know. The rules are there to make combat "feel" a certain way. Just the same as when you charge through lasgun fire to chop an enemy in half with your chainsword.
And you're making assumptions about the way these fantasy spaceships are engineered. You're imagining a scenario in which rolling a 2-kilometer-long armored spaceship is trivial, as though spaceships can flip their orientation around like an F-16. It's just as easy to imagine a scenario where you turn your face with the most guns toward the enemy and keep it there, for the sake of getting the most firepower downrange with the least energy expended.
Star Trek is a fictional universe in which battleships can spin on a dime and pewpew in every which direction. Fine for Star Trek. But not all fictional universes are going to subscribe to the same feel.
>>48269059
Are you forgetting that 40k spaceship rounds take half an hour or more?
>>48268531
As per the rules, the way to shoot things above or below is to use "void units" of ship movement to ascend or descent in the third dimension. Of course, depending on interpretation, this could be more like a sloped climb and less like a vertical ascension. I don't speak for everyone here but I personally feel like space combat (not just in 40k but in many games, shows, and movies) has been portrayed as more of submarine simulator than actual space movement.
