Hi everyone. Recently joined the forums and thought I'd get some opinions of the work I did last year on a EOTE to EVE ONLINE ship conversion formula set and also updated ship combat rules.
Now to preface these I would just like to say that EOTE is a wonderful storytelling system, I really enjoy it, but I feel its balance starts to fall apart with higher level characters with higher dice pools and especially in ship combat where things seem to turn into rocket tag quite quickly. A creative knowledgeable DM can do wonders to make ship combats feel fun, challenging, exciting, etc without it turning into rocket tag but raw... its rocket tag... go first with a Torpedo/missile or linked/ autofire weapon and kill them all on turn one before they go or they basically do the same to you. I also didn't like how speed / comparative speed didn't have much of an impact on combat so I developed an updated set of rules for that as well. In my experience silhouette 3 ships gets 1 shot'ed by basically anything all the time and every player in all 4 games I've been in or DMed for all consider it a death sentence to enter space combat in a star-fighter even if they have a fully modded one and they themselves have (as an example) 2 ranks in defensive driving and tricky target. On the other side of the spectrum big ships slugging it out with each other also doesn't work because the offense is generally much stronger than the defense and it is so very easy for most of the shots to hit at long ranges. Most big ships seem to be able to kill a copy of themselves in combat at long range in about 1 round of turbo laser fire. And finally as both an economist and longtime eve player the lack of balance between star-ships by cost was literally driving me nuts. There are many examples of "best" ships for each size and also for each cost bracket with others varying drastically by these two parameters.
So my goals with this work was to 1) balance out space combat so that "RAW" and not just DM caveat it worked better and specifically made smaller/faster ships harder to kill for larger slower ships 2) establish a "baseline stat set" for ships cost by effectiveness and size 3) balance out mods a little more while also offering more things to do in combat for the non pilot/gunners and mods to give those people more options for "EWAR" in combat.
AND THEN ... I got inspired to do a ship conversion between EVE and EOTE so I could run a game in the eve universe using EOTE rules (and the modified ship combat rules I worked on) and got wildly sidetracked away from the initial goals and they all remained kind of half done. I've run about 10 sessions of this EVE game so far with a "dark matter" type story of capsuleers who lost their memories in an accident and have to uncover their pasts (while dealing with missions they have already accepted/been paid for, old enemies, etc. )
Anyway here are links to the google docs where I have everything atm. I would love questions, comments, criticisms, critiques, and queries on all subjects related to this.
Distance/ Speed/ electronic warfare reqs/ critical hit tables
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZuNjf3iJApB87NgDJND68S9TpiIZl1230IDrTlQ3Gxc/edit?usp=sharing
Weapons/Electronic Warfare + Modules/ Ship Conversion Rules (and baseline)/ and Eve Ship Skill bonuses conversion
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1J0g0jBWlI5E5eT3ZPXQewtTfzrFvntm8SGYeVY5zkSQ/edit?usp=sharing