Starship Bridge Battles

nomotog · Feb 19, 2015

Morrus said:
Boarding adds an excellent additional dimension, yep.

If you're all doing a little part of ship flying, and a large part of repelling boarders/hunting saboteurs then it can work. The ship flying is just a backdrop to the main action. But you have to come up with a lot of ideas as to what that main action can be while engaged in starship combat!

Wouldn't the main action be engaging with the other starship? I mean the boarders would be a part of the other ship. The starship might also be supporting their boarders with things like healing rays, and supporting fire. Your starship can also support you with things blast doors and shields.

(If you haven't looked at FTL, take a peek because it's the kind of game you see it and then go "finally I can't believe it took them this long to do it.")

Olgar Shiverstone · Feb 19, 2015

I'm not sure about an RPG, but I can see development of a cooperative-competitive card game where individual decks represent the various crew positions, and different cards provide different actions, abilities, or modifiers that affect how the ship as a whole performs against another ship or ships. You could fight another ship as a team, with each player using one deck, or even with multiple decks per player depending on how many players are available. Card combos from each of the position decks could result in new maneuvers.

For this to be managable I'd probably combine positions a bit:

Captain/Navigator/Communications
Weapons/Sensor
Engineering

Hmmm ... possibilities ... off to the development cave!

Wednesday Boy · Feb 19, 2015

My group definitely struggled with this when playing a Star Wars Saga campaign. Space combat was fun for the pilot and sort of for the gunners but boring for the rest of us. My character manned a couple of support positions (I think engineering and communications) and my turns boiled down to a single skill check.

We discussed the situation with the GM and he tried spicing things up by having other stuff happen on the ship while the combat occurred. The trouble was that every space combat then had to be plagued with something else (e.g., intruders on board, damage in the ship to fix, etc.), which made for a cumbersome narrative.

Maybe you could give the support roles a way to hinder the enemy. The enemies get a bonus while they are able to communicate with each other. The communications officer can jam their communications or hack into some remote functions of their ship. But it would need to have its own minigame so it would be more interesting than a series of skill checks. Maybe [MENTION=5868]Olgar Shiverstone[/MENTION] 's card game would well work for this.

Morrus said:
FASA gave that a good shot back in the 1980s with their Star Trek RPG, but I feel they fell short.

How did the FASA Star Trek fall short to you? I bought a copy of it a while ago because I heard good things about the space combat but it's wall of text poor readability discouraged me from reading just a bit of it.

Morrus · Feb 19, 2015

Wednesday Boy said:
How did the FASA Star Trek fall short to you? I bought a copy of it a while ago because I heard good things about the space combat but it's wall of text poor readability discouraged me from reading just a bit of it.

Pretty much in exactly the way you just described your own experiences.

Conversely, I *loved* the starship combat as a tactical skirmish game with a ship or ships each. It was just when several people were controlling one ship it became an exercise in utter tedium.

As you say, there's only so many times you can have a simultaneous "fix the engine room" mini-game running before it becomes very repetitive.

nomotog · Feb 19, 2015

What are skill characters doing in regular combat?

Gradine · Feb 19, 2015

There's quite a few caveats to this system. Most of them revolve around what type of game you want to implement this system in.

Is starship bridge combat the whole point of the game, or at least its central element? Then roles like "science officer" or "comes" are likely going to be NPCs. There's a reason I only included three officers; helm (subtle maneuvering), guns (aiming and firing) and engineering (engine speed and shield positioning). The trick is breaking these options up so they don't feel like one-third of a normal RPG character. A typical cleric will have, at best, what, four, maybe six legs max, and they typically don't function independently. How many thrusters can we stick on a ship to control it's subtle movements. Introduce a series of maneuvers (broadside, crazy Ivan, etc.) that will require careful coordination with guns and engineering. Likewise, how many arms is the typical archer going to have, versus the dozens of guns (some positional, some stationary; port, starboard, aft, etc.) you'll have discrete control over as a gunner. Especially since, at in the system I proposed, you can't aim the same round you fire, reinforcing the idea of aiming where your target is going to be. Maybe you have a captain who's the only one who can see the board but I wouldn't recommend that for a tabletop RPG.

The more tangential this particular element is to the overall game, the less necessary it is for every character to have an equal role in the system. If away missions and boardings are more frequent, the more reason there is to play a security officer or ship medic.

Morrus · Feb 19, 2015

Gradine said:
Is starship bridge combat the whole point of the game, or at least its central element? Then roles like "science officer" or "comes" are likely going to be NPCs. There's a reason I only included three officers; helm (subtle maneuvering), guns (aiming and firing) and engineering (engine speed and shield positioning). The trick is breaking these options up so they don't feel like one-third of a normal RPG character. A typical cleric will have, at best, what, four, maybe six legs max, and they typically don't function independently. How many thrusters can we stick on a ship to control it's subtle movements. Introduce a series of maneuvers (broadside, crazy Ivan, etc.) that will require careful coordination with guns and engineering. Likewise, how many arms is the typical archer going to have, versus the dozens of guns (some positional, some stationary; port, starboard, aft, etc.) you'll have discrete control over as a gunner. Especially since, at in the system I proposed, you can't aim the same round you fire, reinforcing the idea of aiming where your target is going to be. Maybe you have a captain who's the only one who can see the board but I wouldn't recommend that for a tabletop RPG.

Those aren't great anaologies. You're still only firing, or only moving. The fact that you're firing twice or three times doesn't make it any more interesting; at least not to me. And the guy whose job it is to change the speed? That's not fun! "Erm. I'll change the speed to 6. OK, let me know when you want me to change it to 7." I know, I exagerate, but I feel the very concept is fundamentally flawed and bolting on extra guns or extra dice rolls needed to change the speed doesn't make it any more fun for me.

I mean, each to their own. If you find that fun, that's cool. It's not for me, though.

Gradine · Feb 19, 2015

Morrus said:
Those aren't great anaologies. You're still only firing, or only moving. The fact that you're firing twice or three times doesn't make it any more interesting; at least not to me. And the guy whose job it is to change the speed? That's not fun! "Erm. I'll change the speed to 6. OK, let me know when you want me to change it to 7." I know, I exagerate, but I feel the very concept is fundamentally flawed and bolting on extra guns or extra dice rolls needed to change the speed doesn't make it any more fun for me.

I mean, each to their own. If you find that fun, that's cool. It's not for me, though.

Engineering does more than control speed. There's a resource-management aspect to that position (do I allocate resources to engines to boost speed, or do I spend this action bolstering the starboard shields?). I envision the roles as distinct, ala any fantasy RPG. Helm is the skirmisher, with the emphasis on maneuvering and positioning. Your typical archer doesn't move much to begin with, so your gunner generally has more to do. And engineering is the support role, allocating its unique resources to aid or protect the party. There is something lost, individually. But there's something else gained. I believe there's probably a niche for this type of communal gameplay. But I agree it's a very different paradigm from the typical tabletop RPG, and it might very well not be the right niche.

To be honest, I wouldn't build a game around this system myself. I'd go the second route, with this being a more tangential system that crops up more as larger set pieces, and introduce action (like the boarding party) for those characters not involved in the ship to ship battles.

Or go the Star Wars/BSG route and place greater emphasis on individual starfighter dogfighting, and leave the capital ships to the NPCs. Which works fine too. But it's not what the OP was looking for.

Edit: The system I'm proposing is ultimately quite crunchy and complex, because that's the kind of system I'd imagine looking for this type of experience would enjoy. With the complexity comes precision, which is why I imagine the system involving ultimately fewer dice rolls than the typical RPG combat. And it might very well be better suited as a board or card game than tabletop RPG.

Janx · Feb 19, 2015

Morrus said:
Well, yeah, but we're talking about tabletop RPGs, not video games or real life starship battles!

Well that's the design challenge then for tabletop RPGs.

Run, don't walk to Artemis's website and forum as we talk about the 6 roles that MarkB identified on a ship on that forum for that PC game. Artemis IS the computer game outcome of what the OP is asking for

There is insight to be had on what might work for a table-top game.

The key thing this is those 6 player roles Artemis has are because the goal was to give all 6 players something meaningful to do. A ship's doctor was skipped because it's not a full time job. The game itself focuses on Combat, because outside of Combat, there's little for the weapons officer to do for instance.

Now how to translate the idea of Artemis's 6 active players on a bridge to tabletop isn't easy. But one part is to change the view of what each role would be doing. The engineer isn't working a simple switch for shields on or off. He's working a number of resource allocations for power that dramatically alter performance of key systems during the fight AND managing the damage repair teams. This may mean shifting power from maneuvering to beams, right when the weapons officer is going to fire so they do more damage and Helm knowing that the ship is going to steer like a brick right then.

With the BSG mod for Artemis, the Comms officer is now the CAG and is managing all the vipers in flight (thus running all the tiny ship's dog fights)

The science officer is scanning enemy ships, looking for vulnerabilities and shield frequencies so he can relay them to the weapons officer so the beam weapon frequency can be adjusted to better penetrate shields. Part of Artemis's design is a certain clunkiness that requires players to communicate and coordinate in order to do their jobs.

The captain meanwhile is looking at the bigger picture of this fight, and whether he is going to need to jump to Deep Space 7 for a refuel or if he can intercept the other enemy fleet heading for Deep Space 4, or if he has time to go help that freighter in distress that Comms has directed to be along his path to Deep Space 7.