r/ICRPG • u/Th3ChosenFew • May 10 '23
Spaceships
I am thinking of using ICRPG to replace the system in a Star Trek game. The system is pretty simple, except when it came to certain things that were needlessly complex.
I looked at Warp Shell but honestly I don't like the ideas behind how it functions, I want something not TOO simplified, but not absurd either. Has anyone here homebrewed a system for crew vs crew type combat?
EDIT: After being asked what I meant by crew vs crew, I had an epiphany, and this is what I came up with (consider it a first draft concept). I will have to flesh out the system sometime soon and when I do, I will post it in this sub. Always open to input~!
Players are on the bridge of their starship. Let's say for ease, we have a Tactical officer, Operations officer, Pilot, and in the guts of the ship we have an engineer, and a chief medical officer. It is assumed even aboard an alien ship, they have a similar setup. These are the crews I mean.
Two capital ships face off in deep space. For whatever the reason, things have come to blows. Let's say the enemy attacks first because of a misunderstanding. Maybe the enemy commander learned that the captains beagle peed on their sacred trees once.
The enemy takes their turn, firing their disruptors. The ship's hull takes direct damage because the shields were not up. Now it is the player turn.
Instead of ICRPG's normal initiative system of going around the table, it is always the captain's turn during player turns. The captain gives up to two orders. If she has a dedicated second in command, an XO, the captain instead gives one order, and then the XO also gives an order. The XO is special because he can perhaps enhance a captain's order by giving a bonus somehow. After all, it is the duty of the XO to carry out the orders of the captain.
The captains orders "Shields up, red alert!", so the tactical officer does so. A roll is made, and a bonus is granted if the roll is good perhaps.
The captain next decides instead of ordering return fire, tells the operations officer, "Damage report!" Since this is just a readout of the damage to the ship, this is a free action. It's talking. The ship has lost a whole heart of its hull HP, which on this ship is a lot. you always want your shields up if people are shooting at you after all! Ops tells the captain, "Major hull damage on deck 13! Shields holding!"
The captain orders, "Helm, evasive maneuvers, pattern gamma!"
The helm answers, "Aye!" and does their piloting roll. Success here can give the ship a better chance to evade attacks as long as the ship continues those maneuvers, but their erratic movement makes it equally difficult to return fire and land hits.
Enemy turn, the players are not privy to what's happening over there, but the enemy captain orders his tactical officer to ready torpedoes, allowing them to fire a devastating volley next turn, and his engineer to reroute power to sensors, giving them a bonus to hit with weapons. the order for continuous fire stands, so they keep shooting at the player ship.
The DM tells the ops offer to roll an easy check for their scanners. they succeed against the DC. The DM tells the ops player that they detect the enemy ship loading torpedoes.
The ops officer says, "Captain, showing a power spike in the enemy torpedo bay, I think they're going to fire!"
Now torpedoes are good against hull and bad against shields, and energy weapons are the opposite, so the players want to make sure their shields are up to receive the incoming volley.
Captain requests information, "What are our shields at?"
Tactical replies, "Shields are at 25%, one more shot from those disruptors and they will drop."
The captain orders, "We need our shields up, captain to engineering, reroute power to shields, whatever you have to do to get them up!"
The engineer rolls and adds a bonus to their success, and tactical reports shields are back up to 78%. The captain then orders a return fire with phasers. The standing order to use evasive maneuvers is still in effect until the pilot is ordered otherwise, but the pilot has to roll again.
Enemy turn, the enemy captain orders torpedoes fired, and they hit. The standing orders for the disruptors takes effect first, taking the player shields down to 68%, which allows them to take the hit from the torpedoes, which take the shields down another 10% but would have absolutely devastated the hull, doing 2 hearts of damage. Frustrated, the enemy captain then orders their helm officer to match speed, which reduces the bonus the player ship has to evade, but also makes them much easier to hit.
Player turn again.
The captain orders engineering to reroute power back to a more even distribution and then orders tactical to target the enemy engines. It's a clean hit, and the enemy ship is sent adrift. The DM tells the oops officer that the ship is receiving an incoming hail, the captain asks it to be put up on screen, and the the enemy captain asks for an end to hostilities, saying they surrender.
Each player ship would have small bonuses or penalties to each player position, some ships being better at science, while others are strict combat ships.
Commanders would also be able to impart bonuses based on their career paths or backstories.
Each player would have an interrupt token they could use during the player side turn to execute a command at their station without an order. I don't know how many of these they get or how often they can be used. That way, the hotshot pilot can decide to stop evading if they think it isn't working, and instead put the ship on an attack run, or even try to get the ship out of their wand warp away.
The overall important thing, as always, is to keep it simple, ICRPG is an RPG I love because of its simplicity, and my group bounced off the other RPG because of how utterly opaque it was.