Something Star Hero needs, but hasn't-PT2

[Spence]

DrTemp brought up something I thought I'd comment on. I would have mentioned this on the original thread, but they are all throwing formulas at each other and I didn't want to get hit

Anyway, here goes. While I don't think StarHero itself needs a "plug and play" starship contruction system. I feel the lack of one in AlienWars and Terran Empire is decidedly weak. Yes they have several charts containing "drives" and such, but no coherant discussion of "space" or "volume" needed. I also think that the lack of any deckplans of common ships is one of the things driving the proverbial nail in the coffin. A starship battle game doesn't need deck plans but RPG's need them in a very bad way. If a group of PC's are just traveling then having maps and deck plans are not that critical and can be adlib'd as required. But if the PC's are playing "crew" they need to really know where everything is.

For example:

The scene - the PC's are on a merchantman that has been overtaken by pirates. They were outgunned and not able to outfight or outrun the enemy ship. So the plan is to let them dock and turn the tables by taking out the pirates during the boarding action.

With no deck plan.

PC#1: We'll set up ambush points in the ship. When they come aboard we'll let them move into the ship proper and then hit them. GM are there good ambush area's?

GM: Lets see (rolls dice) yep.

PC#2: Good we do that. Let us know when we are fighting.

With a deck plan.

PC#1: We'll set up ambush points in the ship. When they come aboard we'll let them move into the ship proper and then hit them. The main airlock is here (points on plan). Upon entering they can go straight or imediately to their left.

PC#2: We need to draw them left. That leads to crew quarters and commons. If they go straight they hit main life support, the computer core and medical. I really wish these merchant ships were laid out with a little more thought about defense.

PC#3: Do you think we could get them to use the ventral maintenance access somehow?

PC#1: I wish, but pirate doesn't mean stupid.


With a deck plan the players have the "common knowledge" they would have. If they are crew they know the ship, like you know your house. Remember in StarWars when they hid under the deck plates in the smuggling storage to avoid the Deathstars troopers? That would never have happened in a normal game because no one would have come up with it on the fly unless they had seen it before. But a group of PC's who have plans of their ship, and who engage in smuggling would probably have hidden compartments drawn in where ever they could get away with it. That level of detail simply does not exist without deckplans. and without some kind of starter examples the large majority of people simply don't know where to start in transferring a ships "stats" to a paper "map".

I know that there are just too many different ways with hero that a starship can be done to be able to make deck plans of them all. But a few deckplans of the "standard" small ships. Say a small scout and a small merchantman. say the IES Gagarin (TE pg176 ) for one and a merchant. Especially a merchant. I know of many more games that revolve around adventurers that own/use a converted merchant vessal than any games where the PC's are military. I am really confused by the predomenance in TE of massive warships while the small ships that can be crewed by a player group are virtually nonexistant and trying to find the mainstay, merchantmen, is almost nonexistant.

I would love to see a supplement along the line of "Merchanter" or "FreeTrader". with a few basic deckplans and suggestions of how to go from "stats" to "deckplans".

just a thought.

[Aroooo]

I've kept quite through these threads, because I think the subject has been talked to death. I will say that I do agree that TE could have put a little more emphasis on the player character 'ship classes,' but I'll live with the lack. There are so many web resources for ship deck plans that in the long run I don't think the lack matters. And from the 'story' viewpoint Spence uses in his example, those available plans should be more than suffficent for a GM to tell a good story.

Aroooo

[Curufea]

It depends how you play.
Some GMs don't like location based gaming, and some do.
Great examples of scifi that doesn't worry about locations include Blake's 7, Dr Who and Farscape. Whereas it is important to Star Trek and Babylon 5.

You get the same thing in fantasy as well - you have games that are character based, and you have some that are wandering through a dungeon (and many other sorts of course).

There is also the philsophy of not rigidly defining things - one reason I hate the D&D system.
However, stylistic examples could be given - the authors shouldn't presume that their readers have access, or knowledge of, what these things normally look like (ie deck plans). But not the entire fleet.

[Spence]

I've kept quite through these threads, because I think the subject has been talked to death. I will say that I do agree that TE could have put a little more emphasis on the player character 'ship classes,' but I'll live with the lack. There are so many web resources for ship deck plans that in the long run I don't think the lack matters. And from the 'story' viewpoint Spence uses in his example, those available plans should be more than suffficent for a GM to tell a good story.

Aroooo

You are absolutely correct. I'm not meaning anything bad against Hero or the products. I just feel that it isn't that much to ask for a few deckplans of the specific ships in AW or TE. In Battleground Champions the mall and construction site were awsome maps. In Viper they only had 4 maps, 3 of the Aerie and 1 of the Ninr Dragon Palace. They serve as fantastic examples of how to layout a "secret base" with only two pages worth of space in the book. The maps have uncountable value for the newer GM in planning and mapping of a secret base. While I acknowledge I can go to GURPS or many other scifi games for deck plans, I would love to be able to say, "Pick up a coopy of Battleground Terran Empire, it has a fantastic deckplan of an Imperial outpost, a Garagin Scoutship and a Free Trader. Use them for comparison as you draw the deckplans of that Frigate."

I understand that H may not want to put out a book of deckplans that could not possibly cover a fraction of the possibilities, but I also don't think it is too far out of line to ask for one or two one page deckplans from the established campaign settings. After all I'm just asking. The only scifi RPG I know that didn't suffer when it didn't have deck plans was/is the StarTrek games. And that was because there are loads of ST deckplans already published.

Just another slow moving thought

[DrTemp]

There are so many web resources for ship deck plans that in the long run I don't think the lack matters.

True, but 1) Terran Empire an Alien Wars would really profit from a deck plan book as proposed (setting-feeling-wise) 2) there's probably "a lot" (as far as SF RPG's are concerned...) of money-earning potential in such a product, because while one can use foreign setting deck plans with AW and TE, the other way round this is also true.

Plus, the ships from Jovian Chronicles are virtually the only ones with deck plans and spin gravtiy AFAIK... and there are not that many deck plans of them

UES Centauri and UES Jupiter deck plans, now!

[Rapier]

I've really come over to the other side of the fence. I did a wander through Terran Empire over the holiday. While I am still very much convinced that spacecraft design has no place in Star Hero.

However, without having read through it [Star Hero] I do think it should have included some discussion about how to design a starship building system (much like FH spent some space on how to design a magic system).

I also think that Terran Empire should have spent some space on, if not starship design systems, at least given full examples (pic & stats) for a number of the ships. That way you would at least have some kind of measuring stick to hold your own designs to.

I think there is a real lack, so far, in viable starship designs and design methods in the Star Hero line.

[Spence]

It depends how you play.
Some GMs don't like location based gaming, and some do.
Great examples of scifi that doesn't worry about locations include Blake's 7, Dr Who and Farscape. Whereas it is important to Star Trek and Babylon 5.

You get the same thing in fantasy as well - you have games that are character based, and you have some that are wandering through a dungeon (and many other sorts of course).

There is also the philsophy of not rigidly defining things - one reason I hate the D&D system.
However, stylistic examples could be given - the authors shouldn't presume that their readers have access, or knowledge of, what these things normally look like (ie deck plans). But not the entire fleet.

Exactly. But we do differ slightly in one of our definitions. To me a character based game is one where you have the most need of a layout or floorplan. If the game is character based and the PC's are a ships crew, they have a critical need of the deck plan of their own ship. After all no self respecting ships engineer can exist without knowing what kind of engines and more imoprtantly where the engines are located. That doesn't "rigidly define" the game, just one piece. Having knowledge of your own house does not mean you know what the arrangement of someones apartment in the other town is either. And I'm not implying that is what you meant. Now it the party is a group that routinely travels from world to world via passenger liner or tramp merchant, then having a number of deckplans isn't required (though they would be helpful) and a complete GM adlib of the locations works. Some of the best games I have played were like that. In a fantasy game a roving band doesn't always need maps, but if the PC is the commander of a border fort they are a must. If you don't even know where the jakes are it's kinda hard to plan anything. SH type games usualy involve traveling between starsystems and the PC's usually control/own their ship. Having a good deckplan can be important. If I was planning to GM a game based in the TE, having a few DP's to use as a rough yardstick would be really nice. Not absolutely critical, but very very helpful.

Anyway I am way overstressing my soapbox.

[Bucky]

Well, what is stopping us from making our own deckplans? Granted, Star Hero does not have a means of producing them, but that is no reason we can't "homebrew" a system and make our own. Heck, maybe the company might want to publish them.

Just because the Hero system does not have them, does not mean we have to sit around and wait on them to produce. I am sure they have alligators of their own to contend with.

[Aroooo]

Well, what is stopping us from making our own deckplans? Granted, Star Hero does not have a means of producing them, but that is no reason we can't "homebrew" a system and make our own. Heck, maybe the company might want to publish them.

Just because the Hero system does not have them, does not mean we have to sit around and wait on them to produce. I am sure they have alligators of their own to contend with.

I could certainly do a few. All I would need would be a sketch of the ship and its dimensions. (I did one for B5 BTW.)

Aroooo

[Curufea]

I couldn't agee more. Creativity should ALWAYS be encouraged.

I'll have to look at the rules now Haven't done Star Hero in over 8 months...

Some sort of ratio for active points and size will need to be worked out to give rough estimates on size of parts. There would be general rules - planet landing capable ships shouldn't be too fragile (but needn't be aerodynamic). Each race should have a style of ship (Xenovores for example favour vertical wing biological shapes).

Engine size compared to fuel tank size should be based on tech level and type of engine.

Warships would have nonessential parts on the outside of the ship (such as crew quarters, cargo, and empty fuel tanks). Important parts would be in the centre (bridge, reactors, computers).

I'll have to check some of my other scifi RPGs and see if they have construction rules suitable for deckplans.

[DrTemp]

Well, what is stopping us from making our own deckplans?

Probably the same thing that is stopping us from writing our own RPG system, our own RPG setting, our own ...

[Brother Jim]

if you want ship deck plans there are several out there. i believe that SJG still makes the Traveller deck plans and there are deck plans for the Fading Suns rpg as well. the SJG ones are double-sided with squares on one side and hexes on the other

[DrTemp]

if you want ship deck plans there are several out there.

Next thing you tell me is that there are other SF settings out there that I could buy.

[Spence]

Well, what is stopping us from making our own deckplans? Granted, Star Hero does not have a means of producing them, but that is no reason we can't "homebrew" a system and make our own. Heck, maybe the company might want to publish them.

Just because the Hero system does not have them, does not mean we have to sit around and wait on them to produce. I am sure they have alligators of their own to contend with.

You are correct and we already do. I'm tinkering with Profantasy's Cosmographer right now because I want my deckplans to not just be functional but look nice. But I think everyone is missing my point which is not exactly DrTemp's. I don't want or need a complete "how to build starships" book. I don't want or need a big book of deckplans. What I do want is one or two representative deckplans for the existing and established campaigns. That way when I build my own they can "fit in" with the world sense. When I ran LUGtrek I made several deckplans for different ships and they all had a nice Trek feel, because I had a few examples to refer to.

[Bucky]

While DrTemp is trying to be facetious in his last couple of posts he does bring up a very valid point: We should not need to buy other company's products in order to play our Hero games, no matter what the genre.

My point is that "should" has nothing to do with it. You don't have deck plans. You want deckplans. Your choice is to either complain, or make your own. Making your own just seems more effective to me than complaining and waiting for the company to do it for you. More likely to get you deck plans in a shorter amount of time.

Besides which as much as we may like science fiction, in gaming it seems to be a minority player. There are other, more profitable anvenues out there for the company than our little corner. The sad fact is, we're a minority.

Companies are in the business of making money. What we would do for free, they gotta pay folks for, and they have to pay them whether the product sells sufficiently or not.

So, curse the darkness or strike a match. Your choice.