Cool space battles, part 1: FTL jump

[dogeared]

I've been thinking about how lame space battles can be in an RPG, where it's fun if you're the pilot or the gunner, and kind of boring for everyone else.

So I'm working on a list of things everyone can do on their turn. I'll post some of those ideas soon, but right now I'm thinking about the suspense of "hurry! jump us out of here!" and how to do it.

In the context of a battle, plotting a jump seems to me like the equivalent of fighting an additional enemy. Imagine that the course has the game version of AC and hit points, and you need to make your roll and do damage to it in order to jump.

With the dice pool mechanic I'm using currently, you'd roll d6s and count 4-6 as hits, like in BW. Say there's a track of boxes (say 5), and a DN based on where you want to jump to, whether the pilot is flying crazy, if the ship is damaged, etc. If your roll exceeds the target, you can spend the excess to mark boxes off that track.

Like say the DN (or Ob in BW) is 3. You roll and get 4 hits. You can mark off one box. Mark off all the boxes, you jump safe. Sure.

But what about "We can't wait, we need to jump now!" situations? I'm thinking that if you have to just say screw it and hit the button with what you have, the DN is 1+ any boxes you haven't checked off yet. You've checked 2 out of 5 boxes, your jump DN is 1+(5-2).

Thoughts?

I'll post more of my ideas for the other crew in a bit.

[Chris Chinn]

I guess the useful thing to ask is: what kind of choices do you set players up with?

For the Navigator doing the jump, really the only choice you're presenting is "Work longer and hope we don't get dead vs. Jump early and hope we don't get (in trouble, lost, stranded, etc.)"

So, here's some other ways to think about it.

Diaspora does this thing where there's a lot of things to do, and everytime a crew member has to take a second or third action, they get increasing levels of penalties - so a portion of the decision making is who does what and choosing to do A vs. B, or attempting A AND B, and what comes of that.

Alternatively, maybe ships link computers and you can basically assign more CPU power to navigation at the cost of less evasion or gunnery. ("Look, I can either calculate our escape trajectory OR deal with the missles coming right now.")

Questions for later:
How many roles do you see happening in play? What choices should players have to make? How much teamwork is necessary?

Chris

[dogeared]

Where do you get the idea that plotting a course is the only thing a character can do in the game?

[Chris Chinn]

I'm not thinking in the game, but in the space battle at that moment.

If you're already working on it with multiple choices, awesome!

Also - is the difficulty of the jump based on something like distance or current star maps? There's probably some interesting choices in that as well:

"We could go to Iridani 5, which will be easier to lose them, but Cano 4 is closer and quicker...."

Chris