Talk to me about spaceships in RPGs.
What is important about them, and what do you care about in them?
Some ideas:
guns!
trade!
speed!
FTL Capability!
environmental!
passenger capacity!
freight capacity!
size!
food!
crew size!
What else? Which of these matter to you?
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Methods of gravity compensation
ReplyDeleteAcceleration vs deceleration
ReplyDeleteEntertainment on the ship.
ReplyDeleteWhere they can make landfall/dock — practically and politically.
ReplyDeleteOhhhh, yes.
ReplyDeleteTime between jumps. Length of a jump. Duration of a jump.
Keep 'em coming.
ReplyDeleteArmor and/or shields, as the obvious counter to enemy guns.
ReplyDeleteSensor arrays, and the sensitivity thereof. The more science-y the mission, the more this scales up in importance
Cloaking? Whether that's full-visual or just sensor deflection
Medbay
I'm playing in a Planescape game where we're crewing what amounts to an artifact starship, and our adventures so far revolve around repairing its various functions. We started with the med-bay, even before worrying about navigation. (Because it's Planescape, we can go some places without Nav or thrusters, but not all places.) Weapons and defenses are also on the agenda, eventually.
Resource reclamation. It always bugged me when resource tight colony ships execute prisoners with spacing. If they were so tight on resources then desensitized bureaucrats would want to milk ever last ounce of water, oxygen, and calorie out of the bodies.
ReplyDeleteHow do spaceships from unfamiliar planets interact? Communications? Docking? Even combat might be invalidated by incompatible perspectives.
ReplyDeleteHow do you design a spaceship to present your culture to the galaxy?
A deck plan, if the ship is small enough for it to matter. I want to know where the bridge is in relation to the staterooms in relation to the cargo in relation to the airlocks etc.
ReplyDeleteSince much of the action will take place inside the spaceship, I would want to know what it's like on the inside. Like, scenes on ST: TNG feel very different from ST:DS9, which feel very different from Battlestar Galactica, just because of setting motifs.
ReplyDeleteTwo most important things about a spaceship dramatically: It must have places where stowaways (or the crew, during a boarding) can hide, and it must be subject to breakdown.
ReplyDeleteGosh Ron Stanley, I aodre that list.
ReplyDeleteCrates. Breakable crates with useful contents, and no sense of property rights.
ReplyDeleteOh wait, wrong kind of RPG?
What does the spaceship tell me about the world?
ReplyDeleteIf spaceships have stats like coffee, cargo, and docking ports, how is the world different from one with stats like edibles, hidden compartments, and boarding party?
I have ideas, but what do you think?
Lifeboats / fighters / shuttles.
ReplyDeleteHow does it dock with other ships or stations?
Can it land on a planet itself or does it send a shuttle down?
Propulsion method? Is there a distinction between reaction mass and fuel? What's its capacity of those? (Maybe not a useful distinction in an RPG, but remass can be improvised while fuel probably can't.)
William Nichols I stole my list from the two best Star Wars movies and every Star Trek episode. Also Metamorphosis Alpha.
ReplyDeleteTony Lower-Basch hinted at this: What is the relationship between the players and the ship? Is it, Soon As I Get Planetside, I'm Off This Garbage Scow? Or This Old Ship And Me, We've Seen Too Much To Part Company Now?
ReplyDeleteIs the ship a character? Is it a PC? (If you're playing Mindjammer or a hack of Farscape, it probably is.)
I need to read Mindjammer. I bought it, and it is sitting here. The PDF doesn't want to load right, and I am hopeful I can load it up on my work computer.
ReplyDelete