My sci-fi rules for ship crew follows and has worked quite well at the table thus far. Any pay that would be due the crewman who dies is of course paid to their beneficiary (remember to fill out those papers!) and the party would usually offer them a bonus to assuage their guilt, something like double shares for that voyage might be appropriate.
Note that the base system assumes splitting all of the profits among the crew, which is what motivates normal people to leap into the jaws of death for the glory of adventurers. So, say, the party was to find 24,000 gp worth of treasure (and assuming no expenses like provisions, fuel, etc), using my system, and had a ship with the following crew:
1 Captain (player)
4 officers (players)
60 Regular Crew (NPCs)
This would come to a share total of 160 (5*8+2*60)
After the ship's cut of 4,800, either paid to the owner (or split among the owners, if the players own it!) or added to a fund for repairs and upgrades, and the captain's share of 2,400, there is a share value of 105 (16,800/160), so a crewman can expect a payday of 210gp, and one of the characters could expect 840gp. At 2gp/day this means a voyage might have taken 105 days, or three months, fairly accurate for historic sailing, but probably much longer than our astral privateers might expect.
You will first notice that this means that when a conventional party of five might expect a payout of 4,800 (24,000/5) they are now getting substantially less. This is what motivates the crew to face peril on the same par (or worse!) than what adventurers do. It also allows the game to hand out very large paydays of 40,000, 60,000 or more. This is especially important when it comes to taking prize ships. If a ship taken as a prize can sell for 40,000 or more, this can break a game very quickly... unless you have a lot of it getting paid out as shares.
For fantastic adventuring, I would consider magical items to be personal spoils, and not go into the general prize/profits pool, and make the assumption that the crew is routinely pocketing minor items in their travels as well (a cutlass with gems and silverwork in its hilt worth 100gp is neat treasure, and a fine trophy for a crewman to take while boarding, and might happen off-screen as it were). Returning sailors might have superior equipment after multiple voyages.
All of this might be more equity than you expect for simple crewman, but historically the naval trade was very dangerous, especially for privateers, and even pirates were paid very well for their participation and sharing of mutual risk. Most importantly, this lets us have the party capture multiple highly valuable prizes without warping the character economy too much, as historically a captain might take a half dozen prizes in his lifetime of decades at sea, and our party might be taking one every other session.
[sblock]Step 7: Assign Crew
A ship requires crew to operate in an optimal fashion. A ship’s crew man systems, performs maintenance, does the laundry, scrubs the deck, and a host of other tasks to varied and numerous to count. While a ship may operate with a skeleton crew of just a few, or even only one pilot, for short periods of time, anything approaching normal operations requires at least the listed minimum crew, or risk hardware malfunctions, exhaustion, and suboptimal performance.
Size Minimum Crew Optimum Crew
Fine 2 5
Tiny 5 20
Small 16 48
Medium 50 150
Large 150 400
Huge 300 1,000
Gargantuan 600 1,500
A crew is typically provided their upkeep, room and board, and paid a share of the vessel’s profits. The following is a simple and fairly common profit sharing agreement used heavily through human space. At the end of a Run, after profits have been calculated from expenses the ship’s owner receives a flat 20% cut off the top and the captain 10%. Of the remaining 70% of profits, crew members each receive a number of shares. The amount of shares granted per crewman is typically dependent on the quality of that same crew.
Talented spacers will find ships where they are paid what they are worth, and stingy captains will develop a bad reputation with potential crewmen. Officers (including the captain) receive 8 shares, as do elite specialists. Veteran Crewmen receive 6 shares, Experienced Crewmen receive 4 shares, Regular Crewmen receive 2 shares. Green crewmen still learning their professions receive a single share, and valuable experience. When paying the crew tally up the total number of shares to be paid out, and divide the remaining profit by the number of total shares to determine each share’s individual value, and pay each crewman accordingly. It is common to offer incentives to the crew for good behavior, like liberty time aboard stations and at ports.
A ship might have an officer for every hundred lower ranking crewmen, but this number is disproportionately higher on smaller ships where the entire crew might technically be officers, or even shared owner operators.
A cook’s mate (assistant to the ship’s cook, under the division of the steward officer) might be entitled to 2 shares, earning 200 credits for a long run. With a week in port and no responsibilities beyond making departure call, he might wisely deposit 100 credits with the local Bank of Sol, and work his way from bar to bar, gambling and drinking his way through the other 100, perhaps being wise enough to renew his spacer’s license for ten credits, and buy a nice new pair of boots and some recreational videos for another 5 credits. If he is in the good graces of the quartermaster, and not over mass, he might purchase a few bottles of a good local whiskey, for 5 credits a bottle, to trade at the next port, or to enjoy while off duty during the next voyage.
Duty Stations
A ship requires at least one crewman for each subsystem to be operational, plus at least one pilot and navigator. A crew with more hands than duty stations means that it can be considered combat ready more of the time. If a pirate attacked while the only gunner was in bed, it could very well be over by the time he wakes up and gets to his position. Additionally, overworked crew will perform more poorly. Long hours at the same station will eventually lead to fatigue, and mistakes can be made. Another thing to remember is that all other general ship maintenance duties are performed by crew not on watch, so in general the more hands a ship has, the smoother and better it will operate.
Whenever a ship must make a check, such as to close range or evade an enemy missile, it rolls a d20 just like a normal character would. However, it adds two numbers (generally) to that roll. The first is the bonus provided by the system that is related to the check. The second is the crew’s average proficiency with that system. Under normal circumstances, if at least a quarter of the crew of a system is of a given level experience, use their bonus for that system.
Each department can be staffed differently, such as only elite gunners in weapons, or nothing but green recruits down in the cargo bays.
Experience Bonus Expected Shares
Green -1 1
Regular 0 2
Experienced +1 4
Veteran +2 6
Elite +3 8[/sblock]
