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[Girlinhat]

So I'm thinking about making rules and running a game of my own design.  The basic premise is that 'you' are a ship's AI, and you have pretty rigid control over your ship.  You have a command crew, like a captain, an engineer, a scientist, etc, then you have officers, like a pilot or a weapon user, and then you have generic 'crew' like maintenance workers, ammo-loading grunts, repair mooks, and other menial tasks.  As you progress, instead of upgrading your stats yourself, you upgrade your commanders or your ship's size/equipment, and if you lose them then you're out for that investment (barring cloning or such, of course).

I thought about making it 'every player is a member of the crew' but realized how boring it would get.  One player would invariably be the weapon officer, and every game they wouldn't get to choose what to do but would just roll the dice to hit, over and over, without any real input.  Instead, each player would be an individual ship, and play it as normal D&D party where each player controls themselves.

One of the core aspects would be ship design, with store-bought ships and components that fit into slots on a tile-size basis, or getting a good enough engineer to modify existing designs or make their own new ideas.  This would be an almost dwarf-fortress style 'this tile is a floor' or 'these four tiles are a cannon'.  Because of this damage would also be localized, able to damage individual components, kill specific crew, or even sever parts off of a ship with enough firepower.

The core of the ship is the powerplant, FTL drive, and AI core (aka, you) and has substantially harder shielding, so most times it's not worthwhile to kill a ship's core during combat, but to do enough damage to disable it, and then later come back and finish it off.  Hopefully that would keep player deaths low, as it would take a whole party wipe to really lose anyone, though they could still suffer significant damage to crew and equipment that would punish failure.

Thinking about fleshing this out more and running it on roll20.  Any feedback?

[Xardalas]

I'd certainly be interested in it. Though I don't think my schedule would actually be compatible with anyone else's. Yay for night/evening shifts

[BigD145]

A slight tweak on Battlestations? http://www.battlestations.info/

[eerr]

All I can think of is how the AI in SS13 is a glorified door man.

Well that's not true, I think of that game about flying steam punk airships with a small crew.
Positioning is absolutely vital. How will you take care of that?

[Girlinhat]

All I can think of is how the AI in SS13 is a glorified door man.

Well that's not true, I think of that game about flying steam punk airships with a small crew.
Positioning is absolutely vital. How will you take care of that?

For the most part the ship internals will be static.  You've got 8 crew, 2 on the bridge, 4 in weapons rooms, 2 in engineering.  You know where those guys should be, there's no reason to track them going along their duties.  If you take a hit to your left side weapon pod, then you know you've got one crew at the gunner's seat and the other feeding shells into the receiver, so if the impact hit either of those two positions, then you worry.  If it didn't directly hit a crew member (or have explosive payload that could hit a crew) then you just make checks for atmosphere or like, if the shot would have knocked the ship like a hammer.  The specific positioning of crew only matters when the crew matters.

Most of combat will take place on the 'space map' where you position your ship around on the grid like any other combat tabletop.

Most ships, especially starting ships, are likely going to be very small, too, so most shots will either kill a crew or not, so there shouldn't be much shuffling around on the 'ship map'.  Things like boarding and combat will take place with generic units pulled from the crew, without giving details on each crew member's specific abilities.  Only the 'hero officers' would have changing stats.  Of course it's all averaged, so if you start training your crew they do better, and if you provide good equipment they fight better, but each crew will fight the same as every other crew with the same training and equipment.

The BIG thing I want to achieve with this, is having ship-to-ship combat be the focus, over large fields and thick fleets, with the ability to hurt ships on individual components.

[Hanzoku]

Sounds like a really awesome idea. I don't line up for roll20 times due to a busy life schedule, but if you end up doing a play by post at some point, I'd totally be up for that.

[BluarianKnight]

Color me intrigued!
I'd be up for it.

[Viken]

I'd also be interested~  And unlike others I don't really have a set schedule, so deciding on a time a few days before will give me plenty of warning to be there.

That said, the crew should have a purpose.  The Troy Rising series by John Ringo has a saying: Having humans do what humans can do relieves the load off the AI's.  This is apt, cause even an AI cannot control every single detail.  Having a weapon that the AI is forced to run due to having a weapons officer be stuck in the sickbay should degrade its performance.

Other such issues can also crop up.  Also, a starship wouldn't just have a crew of 8.  Once a ship reaches a certain size, it can take dozens or even hundreds of crewmen to keep the ship in working order.  Or you could go a la Warhammer 40K route in which these massive ships are literal flying cities with up to millions of people living and working in them.  Heh.  That'd be interesting~

[BluarianKnight]

It'd be more intriguing to build up to those giant metropolises of amazingness from small, tiny vessels.
If this were to be around spaceships, I expect customization.

[IWishIWereSarah]

little question :
Would you design the system or handle more "on the fly" ?

I'm asking because I don't think I could participate, but would really be interested about the system, I think.

[Tiruin]

I'd love to see this in action, although I both do not know anything about tabletop gaming or the inner mechanisms about them; I do love reading about them though! Still an awesome idea, there.

[Girlinhat]

The AI can control most aspects of the ship, pretty much anything wired into the central core.  But it does so only at base stats.  Most equipment will function with the bonus to crew grade, so a mediocre crew might give you a +2 dice roll, for instance.  Having an officer assigned to a specific gun might give them an extra leadership boost, so you might end up with +4.  Crew is important and plays a great role, you want to protect and use them, but they're also expensive to maintain and feed, so a very small ship might put a few things into crude automation simply to keep things cheaper.

Crew levels though are generally small, mostly for simplicity.  The setting is 'high science' so like Star Trek where a small exploration ship might have 3 crew, wouldn't be unusual.  Space has become pretty thickly colonized and any given ship can travel to another planet without stressing it much.  Because you're usually so close to a spaceport, the crew doesn't have to be big enough to maintain the ship, you can just go to a dock when something breaks, and you probably do so frequently enough that breakdowns aren't common.  Some super-capital ships surely measure in thousands of crew, but 'common' ships are a bit larger than a suburban house, and about 6 crew.

NINJA: I'm gonna write all the rules down, it may even translate into a decent enough computer game, but as with all tabletops the GM's word does make special exceptions to make things more fun

And yes, ship customization is intended to be one of the key features.  A good engineer, either trained, hired, or... inspired by outside influence, can plan out how to build a ship bigger or more complicated, so you can add tiles or change the superstructure of the ship, or just start building a new one.  Smaller changes, like fitting a different weapon into a hardpoint, can be done by generic crew relatively easily.

So there's nothing really stopping you from building an enormous dreadnought cityship, but it'll take a BIT of effort to get there.

[Anvilfolk]

Been toying with this idea for really long too, but I never got anything to come out of it. I hope you do though! PTW

Also, possibly relevant, since it appears to be an OKish implementation of some of those ideas: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/104575/steam-torpedo-first-contact

[Girlinhat]

Small update to my ideas.  I've been thinking about how to build ships bigger, because it's going to be a big deal.  The pure size of your ship, and the tonnage, will play important roles on how you progress, and I expect each and every one of you to go as big as possible.

So here's the working idea I've got.  You have a 'superstructure' that forms the spine of the ship.  Every tile of superstructure can support a certain tonnage amount, and can support tiles away from it to a certain distance, based on your engineering level how far out you can build, and if you can squeeze a few extra tons in.  Superstructure is incredibly durable, but also difficult to build, and especially trying to build more of it is tricky.  It's the main limit to progress and your engineering level will directly impact how much superstructure you can build, and thus how big your ship is.

You can attach tiles directly to superstructure, as many things will, but you can also build 'struts' to support wings or bumps.  Since you're limited on how far away from superstructure you can build, ships end up looking like cigars.  Adding struts lets you have parts poke out, effectively functioning as a smaller version of superstructure, but much weaker.  Since you probably want to mount weapons facing forward you'd need struts to support the wing structure where you mount your weapons.

And then there's regular old tiles, where you do everything.  Depending on your engineering, you can build tiles further away from support, so a very well-designed scout ship might support a lot more on a smaller size.  This can help you build small but advanced ships, or you could build big and bruising.

How you work with the ship's structure will depend on engineering level and material.  A great engineer working with steel might be able to build a decent frigate, but if you gave the engineer a navy shipyard and access to adamantium superstructure, you might easily build a battleship.  This way game progression can be controlled both by skill of engineer and by how much material that engineer has access to.

Of course, it also doesn't have to be your engineer.  You could hire someone on contract, get another player to design it for you, get on the galaxy-net and find open-source ship designs, find old diagrams in abandoned bases, reverse engineer ships you've found, or maybe even stumble across some derelict, ancient AI that gives you designs to intricate ships.  The biggest limiting factor is either getting the skill or finding someone with the skill, the time needed to make the design, and then the actual construction - either from buying materials or by going mining.

[Viken]

Girlinhat, you should also think about those who want to free-roam.  Without having a large faction, or say pirates who don't want to risk going to a large shipyard, how would they get by?  The ability to scavenge other ships, and also self-created resources and structures are important as well.

Say a small Space Pirate clan is run out of a star system.  They flee to another system, and find a decent asteroid with resources they can use.  Even without precision mining equipment, things like laser turrents or batteries can be used to crap the asteroid open and allow them to get to the resources within.  Personally I love the idea of being able to develop a support fleet with in-ship processing and manufacturing capabilities.  This would greatly cut down on the need to resupply when in lawless areas.  Being able to manufacture ammo, replacement parts, and even certain structural elements and armor plating would be good~

Going further, a space ship is not a truly self-sufficient structure.  Even in StarTrek, some resources still have to be procured in order to continue on for extended periods of time.  Ram-Scoops are great for that, but ultimately only in small quantities.