I'm still working on my golden age sci-Fi game and I'd like to gt one ideas for starship combat.

I'll be using GURPS but im not terribly excited about the space combat and I'm comfortable bolting on other systems as I need to.

Here's what I want:

PCs each control a ship system so that everyone has something to do (one pilot, gunner, etc...)

Some sort of resource management system. I like the idea that a big part of what the crew does is prioritze ships systems ("divert power to the shields!" "all power to life support!" "re-route emergency power to forward lasers!" etc...)

So what I'm looking for is either 1) a system like this I can steal or 2) ideas for how to jury-rig something like this together for GURPS.

thanks.

MongTraveller has positions for different crew (characters):
-pilot (manoeuvring to line up shots or dodge fire);
-captain (use Leadership to increase initiative);
-sensor operator (get a weapons lock or jam same);
-turret gunner (shoot a turret gun, of course);
-bay gunner (same with a bay weapon); and
-damage control (do battlefield repairs to shake off hits).
If you add in the expanded rules from High Guard, then you use initiative to perform various manoeuvres, which is a sort of resource management.

Starblazer Adventures has different ship skills for characters to use, one each (similar to Traveller).  Not so much resource management, though.

The old Last Unicorn Star Trek games had different roles (Sensors, Command, Engineering, Helm, etc.), also it's rather fiddly for my tastes.  It had a lot of resource allocation, though.  There's a (very) expanded starship construction and combat ruleset here.

I'm crazy, but I really dug the ship combat of Skies of Arcadia. Basically it was an allotment of command points (CP) and a turn consisted of a block of phases where the ships/monsters made a pass at each other. You inputted your actions as a block of commands that take both CP and Phases, such as: evasive maneuvers, heavy cannon fire, tacking to conserve CP, etc. Any bad judgment on your part then involved responding next turn, but you had to prioritize where the responses could fit in during the phases. Some of the really fun stuff was initiating an action that had multiple phase delay, or had multiple phase effects, or two crew members assist in an action, etc.

Sounds complicated in words, but in practice it was pretty cool. Just need to make a grid of turn phases + crew member actions. Essentially it worked like declaring actions before your initiative roll and things going off according to speed, except here you ignore speed and place things according to the sequence you want them to go off. With GM and PCs secretly plotting their turns I think it'd be fun during reveal, like a Crimson Skies dogfight.

Feel free to hammer this in if you like, its the bare bones of my own system but enough to get you going, just let us know how it went afterwards. The only thing you need to watch out for is swarms where every ship on either side attacks one single other ship, but a max number of attacks per round will deal with that, assuming you're using rounds.

It works great for ships of all eras, submarine, steampunk blimps, space, even ground vehicles, and is readily portable to almost anything.

The old FASA Star Trek Starship Combat Simulator was really good at this. It wasn't as complex and fiddly as Star Fleet Battles, but had similar energy allocation requirements and jobs for every crewman so it had the same flavor.

Might I advise something radical?

Design a very simple system for quickly resolving space encounter through a few rolls modified by character factors and spend a well-written page explaining how space battles in an RPG are actually rather dull and worth blazing past, because that has been my experience.

If I ever get around to designing my own space RPG I'll make cheap one-man ships with powerful A.I.s the norm so that every player can have a full range of decisions in a battle.

Quote from: jeff37923;565947The old FASA Star Trek Starship Combat Simulator was really good at this. It wasn't as complex and fiddly as Star Fleet Battles, but had similar energy allocation requirements and jobs for every crewman so it had the same flavor.

Agree with this. it was a great system and you could allocate stuff to each PC to take care of.

Oh of course whenever you take a hit you all have to hold the table and shake arround in your chairs.

Quote from: Vegetable Protein;565980Might I advise something radical?

Design a very simple system for quickly resolving space encounter through a few rolls modified by character factors and spend a well-written page explaining how space battles in an RPG are actually rather dull and worth blazing past, because that has been my experience.

If I ever get around to designing my own space RPG I'll make cheap one-man ships with powerful A.I.s the norm so that every player can have a full range of decisions in a battle.

If you like AI ships having space combat read Excession. One ship destroys a fleet in the 0.15 seconds it drops out of Hyperspace for.

Quote from: jibbajibba;565987If you like AI ships having space combat read Excession. One ship destroys a fleet in the 0.15 seconds it drops out of Hyperspace for.

Ah yes, Excession, the book I hate to love and love to hate. Rarely have I encountered so many interesting ideas so well expressed paired up with so many despicable characters and lame payoffs.