Federation Commander

So, as I was talking about over here:

http://www.starfleetgames.com/federatio ... 1186#61186

We were trying to make a large scale FedCom game, it was foolish to try without getting a good solid grasp on the rules, so we have some time before we try to get this under control.

So, here's the question I have:

We play GURPS Prime Directive, and we play Federation Commander, One thing we were noticing was that in the GURPS game a ship was quirky, unique (By necessity), we had a character that was a crack shot when in-game, but in the FedCom game, she was just another weapons officer on an NCA in a fleet of NCA's. She gave the ship no distinguishing features. In fact, there was no real reason to worry about the Enterprise in Fed Com even though we know there was a certain Captain on board who could get that ship out of ANY trouble... The ships were identical and the people were identical. Some people like this in a game (Part of the strategy), and I'm not knocking those folks at all. We are a messy gaming group, and we know it. Part of the fun for us is in the surprise.

So we sort of applied a modified version of the GURPS "Advantages/Disadvantages" function to the ships. Some ships were just better at seeing through cloak than others, Some ships had a slight advantage at HET than others, some had one less hull box, some had a phaser that rolled randomly and sometimes overloaded, doing extra damage (But then breaking). We also added "Truncated characters" to the ship that had a natural advantage like having an incredible engineer that fixed things in record time (Half repair costs), but also gained skills as the game went on (so the gruff, old engineer that had been there through quite a few battles was also pretty darned quick). Sometimes those characters were killed when the Bridge took a hit (Or Impulse deck for the engineer, Hull for the Marines, etc- roll a 1D6 and on a 6 they were killed, on a 4-5 they were wounded but will return, etc) and we had to replace them with green characters, who might have a great random talent in doing something, but no real skills.

The idea was that as our game went along, certain ships would gain a "reputation", like you heard from WWII: "Oh no! It's the Chicago! She has a HELLOFA sharpshooter at her helm!" (Which means her gunner has a plus to hit or something). Or "That's the Montana, she doesn't look like much, but I saw her duke it out with a Dreadnaught and they called it a draw." (Because she has extra hull points or some kind of weird "Luck roll" which deferred half the damage). Or a ship may come back to fight with another ship for a long time, and the two ships may be "sharpening their talons" over and over against each other. But the ships are gaining "Lore"

Is there something like this in place already? Like something Federation and Empire does? If there isn't something like this, would people be interested in a mod like this?

As I said in the other thread, we are calling a moratorium on modding for a year, but the two of us that WANT this to happen are going to be taking notes while we play (And discussing and building the mod). But it's silly to do this if something like this is ALREADY in place. And if it isn't, we'll keep you posted on what we are doing and how it's going so you can use it as well if you'd like.

Sounds like the old legendary officers thing from SFB.

Star Fleet Battles allows for Legendary Officers and Outstanding and Poor crews. However, they are highly optional rules that seem to rarely be used. With one exception, none of these will be ported over to Federation Commander in the foreseeable future. (The one exception is that the Poor Crew rules were used as the basis for the Federation Commander Degraded Crew rules. That rule was needed to account for Klingon penal ships and other exceptional situations where a crew was operating far below optimum.)

You could work through options like those.

On the other hand, you are trying to apply different rules to different games. While the old TOS series seems to make people want to adventure on ships the size of the Enterprise, RPGs are really designed for people to adventure on much, much smaller ships. An adventurer's model shouldn't be Kirk and Kolloth, but rather Cyrano Jones and Harry Mudd. The latter two are the real "adventurers" in an RPG sense, not the first two.

When two skiffs are fighting it out (or two freighters or two free traders), individuals make a huge difference to the outcome. When two heavy cruisers (with 400+ crew each) are fighting it out, the contribution of any individual becomes massively muted.

Hmmm.... so maybe I was looking more for "Space Opera: The 5th Fleet" or something like that... When you read about the antics of a squadron (like the Black Sheep) or even a carrier group, there are all of these weird little quirks that pop up (The plane whose propeller craps out just before a fight and is grounded along with it's pilot, the ship who is extremely lucky and keeps hitting the enemy up until that ONE battle when her luck runs out, etc). I know I'm smashing two unrelated systems together, and don't get me wrong, I have NO intention of rolling up every character in the fleet in GURPS (Um... I'll see you guys next decade... don't wait up... o.O). I'm just pondering something like this.

If you're talking about using house rules, one simple thing to do would be to come up with a set of modifiers that would be the opposite of the Degraded Crew rules (and call it Excellent Crew, or something). Keeping it as simple as possible would be consistent with the spirit of FedCom.

One of the earliest scenarios in Communique featured both a chief engineer and the first officer trying to get the ship repaired during combat and they each special qualities to lend to different things. That is as close to legendary crew capabilities as I've seen in FC.

But perhaps there were some other things in those cards that existed for players who won approved local tournaments. I don't know if those are still going on, but the concept could be interesting. Maybe Borders of Madness material?

Thanks for the help, guys! so... I am trying to find the rules for legendary officers and I can't. I have a SFB rule book, but it just says look in a future expansion. Can anyone tell me what rulebook legendary officers are in ?

Advanced missions, or the master rule book.

Legendary Officers and Crew Quality rules are both in Advanced Missions. (Just the rulebook is available for order as a spare part.)

(If you ever want to go fishing for rules yourself, this page: http://www.starfleetgames.com/playerresources.shtml has table of contents documents; but it would help if you knew the rule numbers (G.22 and G.21 respectively), and you might not guess the officers and crew are Ship's Systems.)

Awesome! Thanks guys! I actually caught on to the Legendary officers while reading the SFB rulebook and thought this might be the right path. It took me a lot longer to realize that I needed to scan for (G.22) to find all the instances of Legendary Officers in the book...

I'll see if I can't get a copy of Advanced Missions and I'll keep you posted on what happens here. Thanks guys!