Quote from: RPGPundit;1118868While a ship-board campaign can be a special kind of campaign, it also means the PCs will be very dependent on a ship, theoretically also a crew, and circumstances.  Handling storms, and long voyages with little to do along the way, has a way of disempowering the players in relative comparison to a land-based adventure where the PCs can basically decide to go in any direction and without being so directly dependent on the whims of nature or other people.

While spaceship-based games don't tend to worry about the weather, the rest of what you wrote applies. The dependency on the ship can cause major problems if the players and GM don't agree on the degree of plot armor for the ship. I ran a Star Wars game where the players stole ships, crashed ships, had ships shot out from under them, and stole more ships. One player wanted to have his plot-armored Milennium Falcon stand-in and didn't like how easily ships would come and go (the go usually came because the PCs would either take it into heavy combat or would attract so much heat that ditching it for something less notorious was a smart idea). OTOH, I had a friend running a Star Wars game and the way things went, it was painfully obvious that we were supposed to treat our starting ship like another PC and never even think of replacing it (but don't worry, no matter how banged-up it got, it was always repairable).

Interesting thing I've found about adventures on ships is that it gives pcs and players freedom i.e.

"Wherever we want to go, we go. That's what a ship is, you know. It's not just a keel and hull and a deck and sails. That's what a ship needs. But what a ship is... is freedom."

This means that players can go all Jack Sparrow and say "Give me that horizon" and sail away from the carefully designed adventure in to the wild oceans of the sandbox. I am always pleased when players jump off of the trail of breadcrumbs and decide to do their own thing, but other GMs may not be.

My characters had a flying ship for years, and it was not a problem to DM the campaign. Some areal battles were just unreal.

WEG Star Wars had the "Smuggler" template that started with a spaceship and a huge debt with a mafia boss. I guess every party had one.

I thought the thread was in reference to sailing ships. I've run a lot of sci-fi games based on spaceships. There's a different type of liberty of movement there.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1119985I thought the thread was in reference to sailing ships. I've run a lot of sci-fi games based on spaceships. There's a different type of liberty of movement there.

It really works out about the same (except most PC spacecraft have crew sizes of < 10 so there is usually little need for too many NPC crew--WH40K's Rogue Trader being a big exception).

Quote from: RPGPundit;1119985I thought the thread was in reference to sailing ships. I've run a lot of sci-fi games based on spaceships. There's a different type of liberty of movement there.

I had thought mostly about small sailing ships but there is not reason that they are the only option.
Different considerations with varying sizes but that just gives more possibilities.

Did a 2e starwars campaign centered on a strike cruiser, npc captain to prevent fist fights at the table, each player had 3 characters; a ground assault character (stormtrooper, imperial army trooper with light vehicle or naval trooper security detail type) a starfighter pilot character and a gunnery or bridge-pit crew character. It did pretty well until captain was killed by a rebel straffing run on the bridge and a player got promoted to captain then there was the typical strife of no one wanting to follow orders from another player, it slowed the game down somewhat with bickering but never went off the rails until half the group no longer wanted to follow orders from imperial naval command and decided to defect. The other half were loyal sons of the empire so mutiny was the order of the day; pvp ensued, the ship was scuttled, there were many escape pods, and after that the group divided into a pair of players who were up for anything, a pair who wanted to do rebel only, and that one guy who has to be contrarian about everything. Had to switch to D6 fantasy for while to defuse the bickering, then real life caught up and scattered everyone to the winds before we could try it again. Now, was it the ship? I dunno, I lean more toward player immaturity here, which is sad because everyone were adults. The only thing that ever caused this much strife at my table before was an argument over who would hypothetically win, tarrasque or age category 12 red dragon, which nearly came to blows. Adults can be such children. Ship or last slice of pizza, some people become monsters if dice are involved.