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I once played a game where a fellow PC killed the final boss with an interdimensional ballistic missile (IDBM) with a nuclear warhead. This was a homebrewed 3.5 game. We eventually found ourselves in something similar to a near-future Earth, and one of the PCs (a wizard) slowly developed the ability to make nuclear weapons and a portal through which he could launch them. He finished just in time for the final battle (we were lvl 16 at this point). The GM managed to make the combat fun for everyone, but that weapon could have easily ruined the fun if the GM hadn't done such a great job.
Now I am about to GM a Starfinder game, and the same player will be at the table. Only this time, the game already contains nuclear weapons.
Nuking the BBEG's dungeon from orbit seems so obvious and easy. Even if you don't kill the BBEG, you're going to do a lot of damage.
How would use of nuclear weapons be deterred or countered? Obviously the best solution is to talk to my player beforehand (and I plan to do that tomorrow). But I would like a solution that does not break the game's verisimilitude.
The best idea I have at the moment is that important structures and settlements all install anti-missile weapons (with the point property) with an AI gunner. This would provide a lot of protection. Additionally, anyone who launches a nuclear strike would likely become an intergalactic criminal.
Has anyone else had this come up yet? I'm curious what other people think.
Getting the materials without getting traced would be tricky.
Item level also helps convey the fact that buying equipment is more involved than just placing an order. Even finding the items you desire isn’t always easy, and those who have access to things such as powerful weapons and armor tend to deal only with people they trust. Legitimate vendors don’t want to get reputations for selling hardware to pirates or criminals, and even criminal networks must be careful with whom they do business.
In SFS there is a concept called Infamy to track how cruel/bloodthirsty a character is. Nuking someplace would easily get two Infamy if not more. Infamy reduces the maximum Item Level of equipment the character can buy -- people are a lot less eager to deal with the infamous.
You could institute something like this in your home game. That would make such actions have consequences.
I would also think it reasonable to expect some defenses on any settlement, but so far nothing has detailed what those are. There is a quick throw-away line about station defenses in Incident at Absalom station -- they don't call out what the defenses are, just that something happens outside the defensive perimeter. Not having some sort of defenses would leave a settlement vulnerable to the first space pirate that came by.
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In SFS there is a concept called Infamy to track how cruel/bloodthirsty a character is. Nuking someplace would easily get two Infamy if not more. Infamy reduces the maximum Item Level of equipment the character can buy -- people are a lot less eager to deal with the infamous.
I really like the idea of infamy. I'm going to use this in my game. Thanks!
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Therefore, the best villains hide their secret lairs under orphanages.
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A few things here
1. Unlike the real world anti missile space lasers are a reality in this world.
2. Nobody wants a nuke shot on there planet. The fallout, radiation sickness and radioactive wasteland left behind are huge problems.
3. Even if your BBEG lives on a deserted asteroid if your PCs shoot a nuke any space government whether or not they are the target is going to shoot the nuke down for several reasons.
A. They cant be sure who or what is being targeted.
B. They don't want the problems listed above in 2 above
C. In a world of crazy tech and magic you never know if a
superhacker can divert the missile.
4. There is no way you can know if you actually got your target if you use nuclear bombardment
5. As mentioned above using a nuke would get you mad infamy.
6. And most important to your PCs. Nuking the BBEG from space nets you zero xp or loot.
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2. Nobody wants a nuke shot on there planet. The fallout, radiation sickness and radioactive wasteland left behind are huge problems.Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been rebuilt and are inhabited (by over a million people in Hiroshima) without the long-term effects being noticeable. A tactical nuclear strike just doesn't lead to Fallout-level consequences, but it should be plenty for many bosses. It's not that I don't think governments are going to be happy for it to happen on their planets, but the consequences aren't necessarily as bad as your point suggests.
That's a very dangerous oversimplification (70,000 people killed outright in Hiroshima with an estimated 1,900 dying since then due to cancers attributed to Little Boy's radiation release), and in regards to an actual tactical nuclear strike, outright wrong.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are safe and inhabitable for numerous factors, the main one being the fact that the bombs were detonated in the sky rather than directly hitting the city. And then there's also the fact that there isn't a singular nuke "design", there's plenty of differing ways the materials are used (and how much) and fission taking place.
Compare to the Chernobyl zone which is estimated to be uninhabitable for up to 300 years.
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Also, nukes aren't actually all that powerful.
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2ujcb?Mr-Owl-how-many-nukes-does-it-take#1
In the game Alpha Centauri they were called 'Planet Buster' bombs.
They could outright destroy many hexes of territory, but the flavor of what they used was a bit different, and the bigger the power on them, the greater the devastation.
Using even *one* even during 'allowed hostilities between factions' immediately turned every other faction against yours, including strong allies and partners... and the devastation (even for a strategy video game) was... significant and sobering.
Oh, and of course Planet would retaliate against the user, too, because that wasn't cool.
Because a lot of times your goal isn't just kill the villain, it's "Kill the villain so you can get his stuff and from that figure out who was giving him orders so you can find the next villain." Wiping out the enemy base from orbit wipes out all of your clues to the larger plot.
Also, nukes aren't actually all that powerful.
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2ujcb?Mr-Owl-how-many-nukes-does-it-take#1
I find it's not the best idea to try to find out how powerful a weapon is based off its damage against a wall, especially when they exaggerate their hit points much more in this game compared to any other object. If we only use this sort of metric, then Disintegrate would be, top to bottom, the best damaging effect in the game, easily.
If a GM finds that such a weapon doesn't do as much damage to a structure as they'd like, they could just simply apply this rule, since it's a very valid use of it:
Certain attacks are especially strong against some objects. In such cases, attacks deal double their normal damage and might ignore the object’s hardness
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At least real city destroying nukes. The tactical combat ones in the starship rules clearly aren't even on the level of a Hiroshima bomb.
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AFAIK Starfinder nukes are only marginally more powerful than conventional explosives. Like, 4d8 vs 5d8 type marginal.
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Now I am about to GM a Starfinder game, and the same player will be at the table. Only this time, the game already contains nuclear weapons.Nuking the BBEG's dungeon from orbit seems so obvious and easy. Even if you don't kill the BBEG, you're going to do a lot of damage.
How would use of nuclear weapons be deterred or countered? Obviously the best solution is to talk to my player beforehand (and I plan to do that tomorrow). But I would like a solution that does not break the game's verisimilitude.
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Right, serious discussion time. Forget nukes for a sec, they up the game, but they don't fundamentally change anything. Here's how modern warfare works, and how Starfinder warfare should work if it isn't really, really stupid (*cough*nuclear weapons can't punch through a wall*cough*).
Do you know that it exists and that you want it dead?
Do you know its location precisely enough to employ whatever you are willing to use on it?
Are you willing and able to commit enough forces or ordinance to defeat defensive measures?
Are you willing to suffer the expected collateral? This includes political rammifications, lost opportunities to gather intel etc as well as civilian lives lost.
If the answer to all of the above is yes, then congratulations!
It is F#*$ing Dead.
No ifs, no buts. If you want it dead, know where it is, have the s#*$ to kill it, and are willing to suffer the consequences, then It is F#*$ing Dead Really F#*$ing Quickly.
If you as the GM find yourself in a position where the PCs are seriously considering using ship based ordinance on your villain without it being basically a suicide mission, then your villain has truely earned a merciless, bloody death. Don't like it, don't put Urist McSpaceBinLadin in the fortress of space doom on the planet of lava and terror and not enough AA batteries to deal with massed Rods From God. Put them in a random quiet villa somewhere in SpacePakistan, within a few miles of a military Spaceport.
It's also important to acknowledge the bit on "shooting starships" in the rules is that you're not allowed to actually target people with ship weapons and can instead treat it as a hazard against people.
Why is this important? Because not every high CR enemy is going to be located in a place that has heavy defensive counter measures to protect it from getting bombed from afar.
Say you're the GM with a 13th level party that recently escaped from a CR20 Kyokor. Say your party think to themselves "hey, let's nuke this bastard!" and proceeds to bomb it with a Heavy Antimatter Missile Launcher. Are you going to let the Kyokor just simply die?
That's part of the reason they suggest to treat it as hazards. If we use environmental hazards AKA trap damage, a tier 13 ship's explosive weapon attack would probably clock in at a CR13 trap (14d12) damage. This level of damage would annihilate regular people and most lower CR encounters instantly, but the Kyokor should not be among that death count.
Honestly, it's just bad form for the game to allow players to regularly have access to weapons that instantly kill anything, regardless of its CR, and the fact that you wouldn't gain XP is irrelevant. This is why this particular rule exists.
Honestly, it's just bad form for the game to allow players to regularly have access to weapons that instantly kill anything, regardless of its CR, and the fact that you wouldn't gain XP is irrelevant. This is why this particular rule exists.
I look at it more as if the PCs have access to that sort of weaponry, then as a GM it's my responsibility to make sure that the PCs have a vested interest in not just using them to nuke the site from orbit. Something within the blast radius that they need intact, or a similar reason.
If not...then why not? Let them nuke the BBEG and move on to more interesting things.
For those talking about access, just remember that the Vesk put nuclear missile launchers on their fighter craft. Getting nuclear weaponry is not particularly difficult if it's fighter mountable on a low end spacecraft.
For those talking about access, just remember that the Vesk put nuclear missile launchers on their fighter craft. Getting nuclear weaponry is not particularly difficult if it's fighter mountable on a low end spacecraft.Except those clearly aren't what we think of as nukes. They're not city destroying.
Out of curiosity, what brings us to that conclusion? They don't have any description, like other starship weapons, so that's probably up to the GM, really.
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In the game Alpha Centauri they were called 'Planet Buster' bombs.They could outright destroy many hexes of territory, but the flavor of what they used was a bit different, and the bigger the power on them, the greater the devastation.
Using even *one* even during 'allowed hostilities between factions' immediately turned every other faction against yours, including strong allies and partners... and the devastation (even for a strategy video game) was... significant and sobering.
Oh, and of course Planet would retaliate against the user, too, because that wasn't cool.
Oh how I miss that game and my stockpile of Planet Busters. I was in a stalemate war with one faction, and the rest of the factions were friendly but not helping. I lost my patience with the constant taking/losing/taking of the enemy's capitol, so I nuked it. EVERYONE turned on me... so I planet busted every other faction. I had stockpiled enough planet busters to take out practically every city that wasn't mine. Yea, I was the supervillain. Glorious finish to that game..
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Out of curiosity, what brings us to that conclusion? They don't have any description, like other starship weapons, so that's probably up to the GM, really.For those talking about access, just remember that the Vesk put nuclear missile launchers on their fighter craft. Getting nuclear weaponry is not particularly difficult if it's fighter mountable on a low end spacecraft.Except those clearly aren't what we think of as nukes. They're not city destroying.
While starfinder doesn't exactly go into this level of realism, a interesting thing to note is that at least as far as space combat goes, nukes (especially tactical ones) actually wouldn't be all that impressive, as without being surrounded by many thousands of tons of atmosphere to create a shock wave, it would just be a bright flash of light. So a starship based nuke's primary means of damage would be from thermals (whether over saturating the ships cooling systems or ablating the hull outright) and radiation, with ranges measured in the hundreds of meters to a few kilometers. So tactical nukes being not being that much stronger than conventional starship missiles would not be too much of a stretch.
Though that tidbit doesn't really help the OP's argument of: "What's stopping people from nuking them from orbit?" As, if anything, makes the argument more difficult as one could argue nukes would be more destructive against a planetary base. But, yeah, I think the three biggest things that against just nuking them is the ramifications of the collateral damage, the big bad having a competently defended base, and no loot or XP from baddies killed with indiscriminate weapons.
The main thing keeping players from nuking the boss from orbit? That the rules basically forbid directly targeting character-level targets with ship-scale weapons. :pBut even that doesn't make any sense, if those nukes are like our nukes. You don't target character level targets with nukes, you target cities.
A) Most real world tactical nukes have yeilds mesured in tons or kilotons, so at best they'd not be much more powerful than the ones used in WWII, which aren't that impressive compared to what we have now.
2) And it's because you target cities you could not use them, not at least without majorly pissing off the city's governing body and their friends. Nuking the big bad's base and all of the associated collateral damage might make the PC's just as, if not more vilified than the big bad themselves.
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Take starcraft as an example. In the lore nukes of the "city-leveler" kind used to exist but were banned after the destruction of a major planet. Now the only kind of available nuke deals as much damage as an artillery barrage from a big (not the biggest) terran mech.
All of this discussion seems to be assuming you'd fire a nuke at the target. Why are we assuming you'd need to?
We have no hard rules on how accurate a Drift jump is, so it's unclear how precisely you can predict where you'll be exiting when you exit Drift space, but much more significantly, we haven't got rules governing (and hence, stopping) issues like Drifting into atmosphere. We have enough of a description of the Drift to give any GM an easy out in terms of why you can't Drift your fighter into the hangar bay of that enemy Dreadnought, but it's a lot tougher arguing you can't Drift directly onto a planet and shove a nuke out an airlock.
I'm convinced you can't do this, since the Corpse Fleet hasn't already won - with their immunity to arbitrarily hard radiation, this would be their primary solution to cleansing and conquering worlds full of the living, if it worked. But why can't you? Travel In-System is an explicitly easy Drift task that doesn't even need beacons to work, and while you ought to be largely unable to hit an arbitrarily accelerating target, something obeying a regular orbit and the size of a planet should be relatively trivial. What's the deal?
So far, the answer I've come up with that I'm happiest with is that Drift engines can't (or won't - remember, Triune is responsible for their operation) Drift into or out of any location too close to too much gravity. This means you can't commit suicide by Drifting directly into a black hole, which I am comfortable with, and that you can't build a ship on the surface and then have it get into orbit by Drifting, which I am also comfortable with. But this is a house rule, and I'd love to hear an official answer.
Do any of the characters have "work experience" with launching nukes? I'd make it an insanely high skill check (perhaps multiple checks) to guide the missile to target. Perhaps even make the rolls yourself (hidden) so they might even think they are doing well, but at the last minute they realize the missile is going horribly off-target and actually destroys an inhabited city!
Yikes!
Do any of the characters have "work experience" with launching nukes? I'd make it an insanely high skill check (perhaps multiple checks) to guide the missile to target. Perhaps even make the rolls yourself (hidden) so they might even think they are doing well, but at the last minute they realize the missile is going horribly off-target and actually destroys an inhabited city!
Yikes!
I mean if your characters can launch nukes and other starship weaponry just fine, then there really shouldn't be a skill check involved, outside of maybe just a gunnery check at most.
Anyway, the game isn't going to tell you if they're like real world nukes or not, because while that detail may not really add anything to the game to begin with, it's probably best to leave it up to the GM.
A city destroying nuke is pretty easy to model. Just simply apply the weapon damage to every structure in an arbitrary mile radius, while doing "hazard damage" to creatures with in the radius. And before someone says "a nuke can't knock down a concrete wall," a GM simply saying structures are vulnerable to the nukes damage, therefore doubling it, immediately takes care of that. Also, the book suggests that most concrete walls are at least 1 foot thick, which is only 180 HP, so even a tactical nuke takes care of that rather easily.
Real nukes take a whole control room of personnel to fire and control. They have years of highly specialized training, and they are following manuals and protocols the entire time.
Sure this is a sci-fi settings, so it can be dumbed down, but I was introducing this like of thought to help OP think up some deterrents for players wanting to abuse the "easy" solutions all of the time.
Easy solutions prevent games from taking place.
So basically make a bunch of house rules to make Starfinder nukes closer to your conception of real world nukes thus creating the problem in the OP.
The only house rule here is giving the weapon a radius, because it does not have one.
Treating them as hazards against people is stated in the starship rules in the "Shooting Starships" section, and doubling their damage against structures is a rule from the breaking objects section, which is no different from the GM letting fire deal double damage against paper objects instead of normal damage.
I guess, though it's not like there's any particular reason nukes are more effective against concrete than against anything else.
Okay, instead of concrete, how about just "building walls," then? Sound better? Really, though, this isn't some sort of dangerous rule that a GM has to be particularly nitpicky about.
And while there is that note about using them as hazards, what that means is up the GM. How do you set up the hazard rules for being near ground zero? Seems to me you'd have to pretty much make them up. If you're going for realism, it's pretty much "unavoidable, you die".
Going by the hazard rules in the vehicle section, the CR of the hazard should be near its item level. So tier 6 starship's weapon attack against ground targets should be near CR 6, more or less.
If you're ground zero? How close? If you are right in front of it, like on top of it, I would just use the full x10 damage, which is probably what that's for. If you are near it's detonation, just increase the CR, if you feel it's not high enough. Just leaving it as "you die" in a game where the players can survive nearly anything might rub some people the wrong way.
Yes it is rather handwavy, but that's all they gave us, with rules interspersed through out the book.
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So far, the answer I've come up with that I'm happiest with is that Drift engines can't (or won't - remember, Triune is responsible for their operation) Drift into or out of any location too close to too much gravity. This means you can't commit suicide by Drifting directly into a black hole, which I am comfortable with, and that you can't build a ship on the surface and then have it get into orbit by Drifting, which I am also comfortable with. But this is a house rule, and I'd love to hear an official answer.
I've decided myself to make a similar houserule. Entering the drift in my games requires you to be in a relatively flat area of space-time, so either out of a planet's gravity well or in a lagrange point. Basically, you have to take off from a planet and spend the "reach satallite" time to either leave the gravity well or find a lagrange point to go into drift. Exiting the drift is "random" with the same rules as plane shift, meaning you end up within 5d100 miles of your intended exit point. Since this could put you in atmo or inside the planet itself, most people just try to exit significantly far away from any known bodies.
I don't think you'll get an official answer (though I hope I'm wrong). I expect the vagueness of this (and many other things) was intentional to help GM's run the kinds of games they want to.
Half snark/Half Serious.
If PC's can get a hold of nukes, so can the bosses. And if the boss is supposed to be a threat to the PC Party, and have better resources, they should have better missile defense than the PCs.
Its the old thing of, "Look, anything you can do or think of, so can the bad guys. There's a reason I'm not having them nuke YOU while you sleep." or in this example, "There's a reason why the Boss doesn't just decide "hey, I should send a nuke through a portal and tele-f*ck that PC"
The notion that the PCs have come up with a omg total pwnz idea that no one else has ever considered, especially when its on the level of, "Why not do massive over-reaction level damage?" is kinda silly.
If the PCs want to play on that level of overwhelm, its only fair the badguys do the same. Alternately something that blatant means the actual CR isn't that high and they shouldn't get anything tangible out of it.
"Nuke Planet" doesn't mean you get millions of xp.