Sci-Fi, space battles and multiple PCs in a single ship

[Laurefindel]

My preferred solution, if I were designing a game that heavily featured starships, would be to have a separate 'layer' of starship-related talents and abilities on top of a character's personal traits, ensuring that they must pick some of each rather than choosing between them (...) And then ensure that multi-crewed starships were designed to take advantage of each of the crews' strengths in active fashion, not just in terms of "roll to assist the cool people.

Could you elaborate on that, please?

 

[5ekyu]

Well, i guess it depends on how many choices you need for every character plus do you consider character build relevant.

In the game i currently run, barring boarding, there are piloting tasks including movement choices, offensive maneuvers, defensive maneuvers etc. There are gunnery options including not just who to shoot but targetted shots etc. There are a variety of technical actions including boosting engine output, sensor jamming, sensor enhancement and a variety of damcon options including basic repairs and recovery from specific effects.
On top of all those, there are always the Help action to give others better odds.

Arguably the Help option is the one which RAW requires very little defined skill per se and most of the others tequire skill checks.

But, this all hinges on chargen and expectations. A grunt who avoids tsking relevant skills or abilities can still have painted themselves into a corner.

Its why my character sheet set includes a summary block for starship ops and i also have qurstions about off-duty and odd-jobs for my players at initial chargen.

"What do you bring to the table when..." very key series of questions for my players, cuz my games dont start sessions often "at the derelict's airlock."

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[MarkB]

Could you elaborate on that, please?

Sure. In terms of the different layers, I mean that, if you use a conventional "levelling" system for character advancement, then when you pick class features at level-up, you'll (almost) never be making a choice between choosing a starship-related skill or choosing a personal skill. Either there will be separate 'pools' of points to be put into each category, or some character levels will advance personal skills while others advance starship skills, or else class features will be designed to benefit both aspects of the game (so, for instance, the same class feature that makes it easier to spot enemies visually will also enhance your ability to use a starship's sensors).

The objective here is to avoid the "well, I built my character to be good at hand-to-hand [or diplomacy, or thievery, or psionics, etc.], so I'm useless at starship stuff" scenario. Whatever else you built your character for, you've also got the skills to help out aboard ship in a crisis - and if the players have been sensible, and their ship is reasonably versatile, they'll have a broad enough range of talents that everyone can do something useful without stepping on someone else's toes.

In terms of active roles, I mean that the characters who aren't manning the weapons or flight controls shouldn't be relegated to 'support' roles. To use a D&D party as an analogy, they shouldn't feel like the support-focused bard, doing nothing but improving other characters' rolls, or the band-aid cleric, fixing things when they go wrong (unless they enjoy those roles). Instead, the 'secondary' stations like co-pilot or sensors or comms should feel more like the primary spellcasters of the party, having access to an array of limited-use options that can really turn around a combat.

Someone manning the sensors could just be doing a 'target lock' to throw the gunners an attack bonus - or they could be performing scans of the wider battlefield, finding useful 'terrain' such as ionised gas clouds, spent torpedoes, or debris fields that can be employed to break up enemy formations or provide spectacular one-shot effects; or probing for weaknesses in opponents' defenses or sensors that open up options such as special evasive maneuvers or attack runs.

Likewise a comms officer could have their role expanded to include sophisticated electronic warfare, jamming, or management of drone fighters. And again, not done in terms of providing small, consistent bonuses - they should have a limited repertoire of much more powerful options that can be deployed at just the right moment, often in opposition to their counterparts on the enemy starship.

The key to making these secondary roles feel proactive and important is to get away from the "roll your check each round for a small mechanical bonus" mentality that a lot of systems have traditionally used. By giving them more powerful options, but making those options limited in how and when they can be used, even the occasional rounds when they literally are just reduced to 'support' tasks will feel less like dull routine and more like they're setting up for the opportune moment to unleash their full capabilities.

 

[Laurefindel]

Sure. In terms of the different layers, I mean that, if you use a conventional "levelling" system for character advancement, then when you pick class features at level-up, you'll (almost) never be making a choice between choosing a starship-related skill or choosing a personal skill.

ok, that makes sense. I completely agree with the rest of the post; each player must be given tools and opportunities to be playing against the enemy; not (only) assisting one or two gunners to play against the enemy.

 

[CapnZapp]

Do any of these have realistic spaceship movement?

I certainly hope not!

Please tell me immediately - any sf game with realistic physics is completely out of the question for me.

Stupid to have to calculate vector sums for a game but you never know.

Exactly.

Or rather, if a designer can't separate between realism and playability Im not interested...



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[Morrus]

I certainly hope not!

Please tell me immediately - any sf game with realistic physics is completely out of the question for me.

It seems unlikely. Orbital mechanics are *really* complicated. Rocket science ain’t for the faint-hearted.

 

[MarkB]

It seems unlikely. Orbital mechanics are *really* complicated. Rocket science ain’t for the faint-hearted.

I still remember the Traveller game I played at a convention where we were investigating an accident where an explosion on an asteroid in a planet's ring system had knocked loose a valuable piece of equipment. Half the party wanted to backtrack to the point in the asteroid's orbit where it had been when the explosion took place, on the assumption that when the equipment came loose it would naturally have drifted to a stop close to that location.

Then there was the one where our ship was damaged during jump and coming in hot towards a planet. The GM described a derelict ship nearby, in an orbit so stable that it could have been there for centuries. We could match velocities just long enough to dock and transfer over to the derelict, but we wouldn't be able to stay there any longer because our orbit was incredibly unstable and would inevitably send us spiraling into the atmosphere.

That was when I stopped hoping for a hard SF experience in con games.

 

[Morrus]

This is wikipedia's overview of what realistic space flight would be:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_mechanics

I suspect that anybody who asks for realistic space flight in their games does not mean it. Or they're some kind of super-genius artificial intelligence. One of the two. There's a reason that "rocket science" is used as a colloquial term for "genius". It certainly has no part in a tabletop RPG.

 

[CapnZapp]

Exactly.

"Do any of these have realistic spaceship movement?" I guess it's natural to ask for this, but if there ever was a holy graal of rpg design* this would be it.

Most of us don't know what we're asking for, and if we did know, we would no longer want it.

*) in the sense that a true graal is unattainable; that is, the quest for the Holy Grail seen as a quest for an unachievable mystical union with God

From the Wikipedia page:

"The consequences of the rules of orbital mechanics are sometimes counter-intuitive. For example, if two spacecraft are in the same circular orbit and wish to dock, unless they are very close, the trailing craft cannot simply fire its engines to go faster. This will change the shape of its orbit, causing it to gain altitude and actually slow down relative to the leading craft, missing the target."

That's worth saying twice: if you go faster, you will actually go slower. (Relative to another target in orbit)

Nobody wants that. Not even if they say they want it.

Reminds me of the movie Gravity, and the "scientific inaccuracies" reported for it. Oh how many very many people that only managed to reveal their lack of knowledge back then...

 

[aramis erak]

FFG Star Wars does pretty well.

Pilots have a bunch of action choices.
Copilots can do more than just the CP action, including (if the pilot only did zero or one pilot action) a pilot action
Gunners have two basic choices: Aim or Fire...
Pilots/Copilots, and Others can boost shields, jam comms, use sensors
Non-Pilot, non-gunner positions can do shields, repairs, provide bonuses by leadership actions, and a variety more.