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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Radiating Gnome" data-source="post: 2784409" data-attributes="member: 150">Well, that all depends upon what you want from the game.  That would work, and it makes sense within the given rules, but it would mean moving away from the computer use model where everyone can contribute in a very very generic way.  If you were running a starship-centric game, that would make sense, but it might not in all campaigns.  It's fun to think about this stuff at work when I should be writing a report for an executive board meeting tonight . . . so much more fun that writing my report . . . Flying castle may work better than character.  It would be interesting to create a system that is abstract enough to handle starships, but that could also handle vehicles in other settings -- sailing ships, for example.  For a seafaring campaign, the ship could have the same sort of personality as a starship, and it would be interesting to make sailing ships much more than just a frame from which your swinging ropes hang, or a place where it's not smart to wear your heavy armor.  I'm running my head around in circles.  I start out with thinking about a system that would allow PCs to plug themselves into specific roles on the "platform" (starship, dirigible, etc) and each one would have the potential to add or improve one or more aspects of the platform.  Better sensor checks, better attack rolls, better recovery from ingury, better rolls to avoid being hit, that sort of thing.  But as soon as I start thinking about these sorts of PC sockets, I start thinking about saturday morning robot cartoons (voltron?  I forget . . . ) and that turns me off.  As soon as you plug yourself into the socket -- as soon as you become Voltron's leg, for example, as a PC you might as well go in the other room and raid the fridge, there isn't much for you to do until the combat is over.  (And, in the case of Voltron, as I recall the parts were NEVER able to defeat the big bad, it was only ever by coming together as the big robot that  they had a chance of victory . . . ).  It seems like the campaign models that will make starship combat the most fun, if it's going to be a big part of the campaign, will be the models where the PCs each pilot their own ships.  Maybe they're all viper pilots on the Galactica.  But in any campaign where there's one ship, and only a few PCs are really active in starship combat, starship action will necessarily be a sidebar, and not the main action.  And, in that sort of campaign, PCs who DO pilot the ships will be crippled in any other part of the action if they've had to invest all of their skills, feats, and class abilities into being that pilot . . . so MOSt of the rest of the time they're weaker than the rest of the party.  The same problem exists in cyberpunk campaigns where Hackers/deckers/whatever need time to go off and do their VRnet thing.  In the end, if you're not running a narrow campaign, you end up running a fractured one that has many scenes where for a lot of the time you have PCs who are not active or whose effectiveness is severely curtailed because of the dramatic specialization of the characters.  I haven't spent any real time looking at any of the various Star trek systems that are out there, but it always struck me that, by and large, the star trek universe is one that exists without hotshot pilots.  I mean, there was some lip service paid to whatshisbucket on Voyager, who was supposed to be such a great pilot -- and then there was the awful moment when Riker got to use a joystick to fly the enterprise out of a nebula in one of the less satisfying movies . . . but other than those exceptions, flying shuttles and capital ships seems to mostly be a matter of pressing a few buttons and saying "evasive pattern delta". That shifts the focus away from individuals as agents in ship-to-ship encounters -- maybe the captain comes up with a clever tactic, but that's about it.  Would that sort of game be satisfying for players to actually play?  I think that players and GMs that are looking for a very starship-centric game, what they're looking for is a game that is as close to car wars in space as you can make it.  They want space and weight and cost and frames and a variety of gear, and to be able to design starships where they must balance speed and maneuverability against firepower and protection and they spend hours between sessions tweaking their ship designs.  But that sort of detail isn't at all appropriate for most games.  gotta run . . . more later . . . -rg</blockquote>

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