On 28/06/2011 06:18, Onno Meyer wrote:
On the other hand, if the PCs are running around in small ships and some NPCs command much bigger and more powerful ships, that limits the scope of adventures -- our heroes might be able to find the enemy, but then they have to wait for the cavalry, or resort to trickery. How many times can there be a conveniently placed thermal exhaust port?
This is not, IMO, a problem with ship size so much as with the size of the political entities in the game. If big ships win battles, large nations will have fleets of big ships and the players in their little ship will have to hope their side's cavalry is just over the hill. however, if small ships win battles large nations will have swarms of them, and the PCs will still have to hope their cavalry is just over the hill.
To make the PCs and their ship important requires that their ship be expensive compared to the budget a nation spends on ships. This could be because of small and fairly poor nations (such as in a setting recovering from an interstellar dark age), or because their ship is fairly large and very expensive but requires a small crew. Another possibility is that it takes a very special and rare talent to be able to operate a spaceship - say a setting where most people have to travel in cold sleep because being concious while a ship is warping drives them insane (and ships use a 'stutterwarp' to move), so you can't just put tons of backup crew on a ship, even a large one, because you need them flying their own ship.
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