Starship Bridge Battles

Wednesday Boy said:

Riffing off of [MENTION=6747249]Anthony Lowe[/MENTION], maybe some sort of worker placement-like mini game would work with the crew splitting their effort to deal with whatever threat occurs each round. The GM would play situation cards that would have to be dealt with and the crew would have to deal with dodging attacks and damaged systems. The crew could have different special abilities and only affect certain ship systems. Or maybe each crew member would have a ship system that had unique "hit points" that needed to be protected or fixed to keep the system operational. It would tend towards a board game rather than an RPG but might be a way to make the crew game fun.

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If we think of Star Trek as the standard, there's always been plenty of "other" things going on for the crew to be doing during an attack, besides actually flying and firing the phases.

Outside of repelling a boarding party, there's crawling down jeffries tubes and rerouting primary cooling before an overheat.

there's evacuating a section before the bulkhead closes due to a breach (as well as the immediate reaction to a breach, and trying to find and seal a micro-fracture in the compartment one takes refuge in.

there's finding that kid who got left behind when the classroom evacuated to emergency shelter

there's triage and treating of injured people in sick bay, or worse, being stuck in 10 forward and having to work with what few supplies can be improvised

there's trying to decipher/decrypt a signal from the enemy vessel which will then give you their command codes to disable their weapons or shields (say with a laptop in real time via google and whatever online tools you find)

These could be treated as mini-games or concurrent encounters for some of the players while the helm and weapons officers fly the ship and shoot things.

Basically, stuff is happening inside the ship to the other people in the ship as a result of the ongoing battle.