The Challenge

I've been reading the responses to my initial question--Paul's is great,
except my players aren't quite that stupid...well, most of the time--and
I thought I would share some of my own techniques.

The two real obstacles are, I think, fairness and elegance.  Anyone can
make an arbitrary decision that the NPC gets the first shot, and gets a
hit.  I don't think anyone here does that to their players (with the
rare exception of a player who is REALLY asking for it), so that's not
too much of a problem.

The peace-through-superior-firepower solution is one that I generally
have to rely on.  You have to be careful, though; unless you simply want
to make certain things totally off limits to a group of characters, you
can only make your NPCs a little more powerful than they are.  (Yes,
you have a five hundred ton corvette with a particle beam...it can blow
the socks off any unarmed merchants...uh oh, is that a sixty thousand ton
battleship on your screens?  Oh no, Mr. Bill....!)  And even here, you
have to be careful to keep the situation from simply being one of who
gets the first three really good rolls.  Sometimes, of course, it can
work, if the aim of the adventure is to take out a larger opponent's
forces via guerilla tactics, identifying weak points and hitting those
and staying away from the ones you can't beat--the decision being left
to your players.  In short, the problem here is that it is easy to
hit your players with something that they simply cannot stop (even if
you have Fleet Tactics +5 and a couple of dreadnoughts, the GM can always
send twice as many ships at you under a guy with +8) but giving them
something that they have a good chance of beating, although they will
have to sweat to do it.

I've sometimes found, by the way, that the most enjoyable adventures
are ones where people have to figure something out, as opposed to simply
blowing it up (of course, sometimes they have to do this, too).  I
once had my players on their corvette being followed by a probe that
stayed at the borders of their sensor range so they could not get very
good information on it.  It was simply keeping tabs on them.  Didn't
do anything else.  Had them spooked, though, until they found out what
it was.

The trouble is that is it hard to come up with good mysteries.  Commando
missions are easy because they're really all the same; the only thing that
changes is the precise mission objectives and the skill levels and weapons
of the NPCs shooting at them.

Ho hum.  Take care all.

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