Actions in starship combat for those with no useful skills

[Morrus]

So lots of games do the usual suite of starship combat actions for PCs collectively running a ship.

This question is slightly different. What self actions can you think of for characters who have no useful skills in starship combat? They have no engineering or medical or piloting or gunnery or computers or sensors etc. skills -- but you want the player to feel involved and not punished for excelling at a different pillar of the game. What if the character is only good at whacking things and knitting; or social stuff (some social buffing, I guess, but that gets dull quickly)?

Or do you just give them a useful crewman to play for the duration?

 

[Sunseeker]

I provide them with an airlock.

I'm hard pressed to think of a skill that is useless in space combat that would actually be a codified skill in a game. "Hitting things" in a sci-fi setting often translates into "shooting things" which are translatable into gunnery-like skills. But I suppose, if somehow they were only good at hitting things with a stick, they might be either able to fend off boarders, or a boarding party themselves.

I could see social skills being useful, they could attempt to call for help, persuade the enemy to leave or perhaps distract the enemy with long boring speeches or silly questions and commentary. I mean how focused can you be if someone was narrating the battle, or worse, wrongly narrating the battle, leading you to believe your bad-guy-minions were slacking or fleeing or turning on you.

But lets say that Bob is so niche that there's absolutely nothing he can do. Well, honestly, tough. Most sci-fi games give each class ample room to be good at "one thing" and still have some modicum of skill in other areas. If they chose to ignore all of those things, that's on them. I mean, is Bob even really interested in space combat? Maybe he's happy to sit that out.

 

[Celebrim]

You should design your game so that this doesn't happen.

One of the problems I typically have with science fiction games (and to a lesser extent modern games) is that this exact situation tends to come up.

But it shouldn't if the game is well designed.

Consider the novel Babel-17. In it, the skill of starship piloting exactly translates to.... being a skilled professional wrestler. In fact, pilots looking for work attract clients by showing off their skills in the wrestling ring. There is no reason that a science fiction game shouldn't use similar cross skills to prevent players finding themselves in a silo with nothing to do in the current mini-game.

So for example, there shouldn't be a skill of 'knitting stuff'. There should be a skill of crafting, so that anyone that is good at knitting sweaters is also good at repairing broken coolant lines, hydraulic lines and mending blown electrical circuits. If the character is skilled at 'social stuff', then they should also automatically have skill at 'command', and be able to do things like 'assist a teammate' or 'coordinate team' - basically, you are the 'bard'. That only gets boring if you have no real choices to make about what ability to use - do you give someone on the team an extra action, or a reroll to use, or do you give everyone across the board +1 bonus? It certainly no less boring than being the engineer that is fixing stuff each turn, unless you have to make choices each turn about what to fix - can't repair lost engine power and lost shields in the same turn, for example.

If you are so niche you can't participate in an important mini-game within the game, then you are too niche and something is wrong with the skill rules or the chargen or both. You shouldn't be able to make an NPC.

 

[Dualazi]

Give them a useful crewman or just have them spectate for the duration. I would hope that the game is designed in such a way that a character can contribute in multiple ways, but even in the most generous of such systems there are still usually ways for characters to become pretty specialized, and this is one of the logical consequences of that. If a player made a character that only focuses on melee combat in a sci-fi RPG, for example, then they deserve all the advantages and disadvantages that come with it.

I feel anecdotally that I've seen a lot of people on the internet and in person at least allude to resenting being stymied as a result of their build choices, which has always irked me. If you build a pyromancer in a fantasy RPG, you should do so knowing that fire immune monsters will be far more challenging for you, and yet I've still had players complain when this occurs. Sci-fi RPGs are a little more guilty of this by default due to the assumed nature of crewman necessitating specific roles, but if a GM warns a player about making niche choices and they do so anyway then the table should not bend over backwards to accommodate them in every encounter.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I see it as a largely self-correcting issue. Usually, the player will either find a way to contribute in combat, make themselves indispensable in other aspects of the game (so nobody resents his "slacking off", or ask to play something else.

 

[LordEntrails]

I think one mistake in game system design is that something like gunnery actually requires skill and training to use to some effect. That misconception comes from a 19th and 20th century attitude and expectations, and really shouldn't be considered accurate for a 21+ century setting.

Think of today's computers, ease of use is something central to application development. Apps (including targeting and firing of a weapons systems) should be easy to use. It is .... not forward thinking to think that a computer in a high-tech society, possible hundred of years in our future, would not be as capable for an amateur to use as a computer or app from today.

So, to me, piloting a ship, firing a weapons system, etc should be as easy as saying, "computer, set course to Centauri Prime, Station Alpha, minimum time. Engage." Or touching an enemy icon on a weapons display and saying "Fire".

Now, that doesn't mean someone who is an expert in piloting or gunnery couldn't do it better. They would know advanced options or routines that the opposing computer would be using and how to compensate for that, but such would not be required to atleast be moderately effective.

Look at Rogue One, any old person can jump into a gunners seat and shoot bad guys. Why not many of the other functions? Maybe not calculating a warp jump, but piloting sure. Managing automatic damage control? Absolutely. Replacing a warp core? Probably not even with a series of You Tube videos (or you can see how close we are today, look at time 0:40 and again around 1:00 to see how easy maintenance and repair will be 10 years from now, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7VyVOJBM4Q)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Thing is, those old combat skills are still relevant today. At the very least, they come into play when all the tech has issues. There's a reason why gunners are taught the old ways of calculating range, angle, drift, etc. that are programmed into targeting computers. There's a reason soldiers are taught knife fighting and other close quarters martial skills.

What happens when voice-operated nav systems don't respond to commands? Or the weapons targeting system goes wonkyjog? How do you compensate? Which buttons do you use to do a hard reset? Do you have TIME for a hard reset?

If you don't, which buttons let you do what you need to do manually? Which readouts matter?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Thing is, those old combat skills are still relevant today. At the very least, they come into play when all the tech has issues. There's a reason why gunners are taught the old ways of calculating range, angle, drift, etc. that are programmed into targeting computers. There's a reason soldiers are taught knife fighting and other close quarters martial skills.

What happens when voice-operated nav systems don't respond to commands? Or the weapons targeting system goes wonkyjog? How do you compensate? Which buttons do you use to do a hard reset? Do you have TIME for a hard reset?

If you don't, which buttons let you do what you need to do manually? Which readouts matter?

 

[Morrus]

Besides, just telling the AI to fight your tabletop RPG encounters for you doesn't sound much fun!


Sent from my iPhone using EN World

 

[Sunseeker]

Now, that doesn't mean someone who is an expert in piloting or gunnery couldn't do it better. They would know advanced options or routines that the opposing computer would be using and how to compensate for that, but such would not be required to atleast be moderately effective.

I think that's really what the point of the "skill" is. Saying that you can accomplish a task to a superior manner than the basic targeting algorithms.

I think to some degree we have to look at skills in a 21st century+ context. A universe where "aiming" is not a skill, because a computer can help you with that, it's knowing when to shoot (or when not to) in ways that nothing short of a full-blown AI could accomplish. Anyone can aim. Anyone can steer. But the skill doesn't represent being able to push the hyperdive clutch. It represents being able to push the hyperdrive clutch correctly. Maybe not faster than a computer, but better.