Carduus
2011-06-22, 12:53 PM
Hey there, I'm Wik, and I run a real-time sci-fi text-based roleplaying game. We're finishing up the final touches on a custom cinematic space system, with characters able to own (and customize) their own ships with a variety of roles, fly from place to place, and explore for new planets and resources. This was created in response to player reaction to a very realistic and video game-like space system that we had, which, while cool for those who liked fast-paced video games, was an extremely poor fit for a game focused on roleplay, for four reasons.
1. You can’t effectively type out what your character is doing when you know that you have to hit the retro thrusters in about thirty seconds from now, lest you pass the planet and have to spend another ten minutes turning around to make another pass.
2. It was an open system, allowing GMs to upgrade something that was originally like the Millennium Falcon, to be as powerful as a star destroyer. This created huge disparities amongst player ships and led to a lot of bad blood, as some people (rightly) felt that difficulty levels of bad guys were being tailored to ship’s crews that had a GM’s favor, and thus the non-favored ships couldn’t participate due to lack of stats.
3. Battle effectiveness was often based on the player’s hand-eye coordination, and had no basis in the character’s abilities.
4. System levels were based on real-world physics stats, and each system had like ten stats, which was extremely unintuitive for people who weren’t advanced math nerds.
Hence, CSpace was born: with a room-based space grid, easy, intuitive, one-command travel from Planet A to Planet B (so you can rp on the way without stress, or go get a sandwich during the ten minute ride), the ability to pit one character’s stats against another, and above all, a closed, somewhat simple point-buy system for the creation of ships. We’re coming to the point where we’re going to have to crystallize the point values of various ship systems, such that everybody feels like they’re awesome at their own thing, but don’t feel like the system is unbalanced or biased for a player or build.
Now, I can’t expect you guys to say that a small ship with 2 points in shields, 4 in engines, and 2 in sensors is even to….whatever. You don’t have enough information, and you’d have to play my game to get an understanding of what’s useful in our setting and what isn’t. What I’m looking for is for suggestions for spaceship systems (like sensors, cloaking device, automated repair suite, etc) that can be used to fulfill as many cinematic spaceship tropes as possible within a closed point-buy system. The end product should be a really accessible, easy-to-understand list of systems that players can choose from in various levels that allow them to be awesome in one of as many different ways as possible.
Here’s a baseline of your starting assumptions:
1. Systems range from 1 point to 10 points, and each size of ship has its own number of points to spend, with small ships having a small number, and large ships having a large number.
2. Base stats are as follows: Engine(in-system speed), Thrusters (maneuverability), FTL(ftl speed), Sensors (ability to see into other sectors for ships, planets, etc, and pierce nebulae and other sensor-jamming stuff), Shields (damage reduction) Hull (hp), Weapons.
Here’s an example of what I’m looking for:
Interdictor - A static system that pulls everyone in the area out of FTL, and disallows them from reentering it.
A low level Interdictor could be used by planetary flight controls to prevent ships from going into FTL within a certain radius of the planet, or could be used by pirates along shiplanes to pull in small ships to pillage. A high level Interdictor could be used like in the Star Wars movies, as a form of battlefield control.
In that example, I managed to fit three tropes/uses into the addition of just one system. If you can think of ten tropes out of two systems, all the power to you.
Have at it!
1. You can’t effectively type out what your character is doing when you know that you have to hit the retro thrusters in about thirty seconds from now, lest you pass the planet and have to spend another ten minutes turning around to make another pass.
2. It was an open system, allowing GMs to upgrade something that was originally like the Millennium Falcon, to be as powerful as a star destroyer. This created huge disparities amongst player ships and led to a lot of bad blood, as some people (rightly) felt that difficulty levels of bad guys were being tailored to ship’s crews that had a GM’s favor, and thus the non-favored ships couldn’t participate due to lack of stats.
3. Battle effectiveness was often based on the player’s hand-eye coordination, and had no basis in the character’s abilities.
4. System levels were based on real-world physics stats, and each system had like ten stats, which was extremely unintuitive for people who weren’t advanced math nerds.
Hence, CSpace was born: with a room-based space grid, easy, intuitive, one-command travel from Planet A to Planet B (so you can rp on the way without stress, or go get a sandwich during the ten minute ride), the ability to pit one character’s stats against another, and above all, a closed, somewhat simple point-buy system for the creation of ships. We’re coming to the point where we’re going to have to crystallize the point values of various ship systems, such that everybody feels like they’re awesome at their own thing, but don’t feel like the system is unbalanced or biased for a player or build.
Now, I can’t expect you guys to say that a small ship with 2 points in shields, 4 in engines, and 2 in sensors is even to….whatever. You don’t have enough information, and you’d have to play my game to get an understanding of what’s useful in our setting and what isn’t. What I’m looking for is for suggestions for spaceship systems (like sensors, cloaking device, automated repair suite, etc) that can be used to fulfill as many cinematic spaceship tropes as possible within a closed point-buy system. The end product should be a really accessible, easy-to-understand list of systems that players can choose from in various levels that allow them to be awesome in one of as many different ways as possible.
Here’s a baseline of your starting assumptions:
1. Systems range from 1 point to 10 points, and each size of ship has its own number of points to spend, with small ships having a small number, and large ships having a large number.
2. Base stats are as follows: Engine(in-system speed), Thrusters (maneuverability), FTL(ftl speed), Sensors (ability to see into other sectors for ships, planets, etc, and pierce nebulae and other sensor-jamming stuff), Shields (damage reduction) Hull (hp), Weapons.
Here’s an example of what I’m looking for:
Interdictor - A static system that pulls everyone in the area out of FTL, and disallows them from reentering it.
A low level Interdictor could be used by planetary flight controls to prevent ships from going into FTL within a certain radius of the planet, or could be used by pirates along shiplanes to pull in small ships to pillage. A high level Interdictor could be used like in the Star Wars movies, as a form of battlefield control.
In that example, I managed to fit three tropes/uses into the addition of just one system. If you can think of ten tropes out of two systems, all the power to you.
Have at it!