On 9/8/2012 1:27 AM, Onno Meyer wrote:
Hello everybody,
I'd like to toss two thoughts into the ring ...
First, it seems to me that the big ships, with several thousand
tons and a crew size in the double digits, caused less interest
than the little ones up to a hundred tons, with crews the size
of a typical gaming group. Is that the right impression?
There are basically four viable sizes for ships in RPGs.
Option one is 'everybody gets a ship'. The virtue is that it's probably
the most interesting for ship to ship combat, as it means everyone
actually has something to do.
Option two is the ship that can be crewed entirely by the PCs.
Option three is the ship where the PCs are the command staff, their
actions pretty well determine the fate of the ship, and everyone else is
basically background color (the Star Trek model).
Option four is the ship-as-setting, where the ship basically functions
like a city that's a home base for the PCs.
Option one is mostly used for fighters and mecha, and tends towards
ships-as-characters, since otherwise you have a whole bunch of identical
units.
Option three doesn't work too well in GURPS, as it requires a fair
amount of suspension of disbelief (why is the command staff going off by
themselves when they have a hundred redshirts available?) and isn't
generally how the tech assumptions in GURPS work (you don't have lots of
crew unless you actually need lots of crew).
Option four generally only needs the stats of ships as a plot device.
As such, option 2 is the one where GURPS style ship stats are the most
useful.
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