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Other Games / Interest in a homebrew starship-based tabletop?
« on: October 16, 2016, 04:30:59 pm »
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?
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?