On 5/07/2011 16:58, Onno Meyer wrote:
Hello Rupert,
if swarms are the solution, the PCs can be part of the swarm, while
they would have to stand aside if battleships slug it out.
I don't see being the crew of one ship with a five man crew in a fleet
of hundreds or thousands as being more useful or interesting than being
in the same ship as support for a battleship. You're still just a
statistic, most likely.
To make the PCs and their ship important requires that their ship be
expensive compared to the budget a nation spends on ships.
Or it is one of many similar ships, which happens to be in the right
spot.
That brings up another possibility - slow travel times, so that 'the
cavalry', be it fleets of small ships or single battleships, is simply
not there when it matters and the PCs can't just go and get help because
by the time they do it will be too late. Just as the commander of a
gunboat in Africa or Asia two centuries ago had to come up with
solutions on the spot, despite being part of the Royal Navy with it's
multitudes of ships of the line (well, when they weren't all laid up in
Ordinary - bear with me), so would the PCs have to. As their opponents
would mostly be in the same situation, the battlefleets remain in the
background, sitting in their bases awaiting an actual war (because if
they aren't involved it's merely an 'incident').
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