Quote from: Spike;627453I seem to find myself in a quandary, in that none of these games, and others I'll discuss here, satisfies my itch for good old Sci-fi adventure with starships.

I'm in the same quandary, as there has never been a good published system for starship combat that both worked and allowed good ship design in at least a semi-engineer style.

I can create acceptable Ships in HERO, but the method for doing so is pure meta-game as I mix and match the powers and effects to achieve a predefined outcome. Even here however there are some things it just does poorly.

My first game design was simulation of TOS Star Trek, very different from anything anyone else has done. But it didn't include ship design.

Good, balanced, and 'realistic' Starship design is on my list of impossible RPG dreams, along with interesting single opponent melee combat.

I remember ship design and combat in Space Opera -- from capital ships down to fighters -- being pretty slick. I guess it might be too modular for you, but you'd have to find out for yourself. I don't remember enough to say how it relates to your other concerns.

Of course, it was totally Doc Smith: zooming inertialess, starkly annihilating rays, tractor beams and defensive fields, and so on.

Consider the PDFs at RPGNow: http://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?cPath=100

Even if the starships don't send you, you're likely to find your money's worth of goodies in the basic set.

Speaking of Space Opera, what about D6 Space?  (Formerly Star Wars.)  It had design quirks, handled scale well, and was reasonably fun to play.  Not to mention it has gone OGL, so one could 'embrace and extend' if you so desired.

Quote from: JeremyR;627472There really needs to be a Car Wars in space.

In that it was pretty easy to make your cars and they more or less made sense.

And since the system had RVs and later semis, it should scale up at last to the small freighter level, if not huge ships.

great perspective on it--"soft" sf (yes, i know hard/soft is a loaded bit) should have something along those lines.  millennium falcon vs. star destroyers, for example.  two different scales, etc.  never felt trav did that right, then again we winged ship combat a fair bit. . . .

(sorry if this was addressed, but i find spike's posts to be tl/dr territory, sorry man )

Quote from: mcbobbo;627643Speaking of Space Opera, what about D6 Space?  (Formerly Star Wars.)  It had design quirks, handled scale well, and was reasonably fun to play.  Not to mention it has gone OGL, so one could 'embrace and extend' if you so desired.

didn't it have ship and capital ship scales?  that's the angle to take.

Quote from: Phillip;627623I remember ship design and combat in Space Opera -- from capital ships down to fighters -- being pretty slick. I guess it might be too modular for you, but you'd have to find out for yourself. I don't remember enough to say how it relates to your other concerns.

finally got a copy of this, just need the time to grok it, which i don't have much of as i get older.  same "aging gamer" story i guess.  fond memories of incorporating SO stuff into my megatraveller campaign back in college (88-91).  hadn't owned it at the time, but found it easy to integrate SO with traveller.  

Quote from: Blackhand;627574I recommend the Renegade Legion line.  It's out of print, dunno if that's an issue with you.  There's lots of great stuff, and the games are designed to interconnect.  Use Legionnaire, with Leviathan and Interceptor.

another i wish i had back in the day.  have those now (plus "prefect" the strategic game, iirc) but just need the time to read & integrate everything, alas. . . .

Great analysis of starship building in this thread!

One system that went unmentioned was R. Talsorian Game's Mekton/Metkon Zeta. While designed originally for mecha, it worked equally well for building starfighters and capital ships. The trade-offs of scale used in Mekton meant that small, nimble fighters and huge battlestars both could have their place.

My issue with sci-fi games is that the starship rules are usually way more complicated than what I'm interested in.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;627989My issue with sci-fi games is that the starship rules are usually way more complicated than what I'm interested in.

Yeah, I'm not sure how those extra levels of detail would ever come up in game enough to bother me with their errors. None of the scifi games I've played in have focused much on the spaceships themselves... any more than the trains/cars/buses we used to travel around in.
Even when space battles happened it seemed more about character skills than ship design.

That said, I did like the ships in Ringworld. Empty transparent shells with various openings that could be customized with various interior/exterior bits... painted or left clear. Gravity on the walls and ceilings if you wanted (there were floorplans for at least one of those multi-planed gravity ships).

Which brings me back to Spacemaster Privateers.  Yes, I know, I'm a terrible bore.

See, in SPAM, the big engineering style ship design rules produce a pretty simple in play ship.

You've got weapons with a type, Mark number, and possibly a bonus.  You've got a Defensive bonus and a HUD / Targetting bonus, Hit Points, Armor Type and stuff like cost, crew, cargo capacity, and maximum speeds / acceleration.

But that's about it.  Combat's attack roll + skill + HUD - Defensive Bonus - Range Modifier, check a chart, roll a critical.  Yes the criticals give combat that "sometimes a stub fighter can take out the death star" effect.

Anyhow, there's something special about firing Mark 50 torpedoes, dunno why.  If it said tiny, small, medium, large, and huge it'd do the same job but MK 50 just feels more substantial.

Man, this reminded me of the first huge mega-thread I ever did many years ago, on WotC boards for RCR d20 Star Wars:
Novastar's Naval Review

...I really should see if I can clean that up, and make a workable product out of it! :eek:

Rather than quote and post a dozen times, I'll try again to consolidate:

Pundit: I like the Traveller combat rules, being, like the rest of the system, functional and easy, and I think the design system isn't any deeper than it needs to be.  I just found it has flaws that make it harder for me to accept than need be.

David: Don't have the vehicles book, but as I noted, I do like the Silent Death ship creation, though I do miss the non-combat elements of design for obvious reasons.

Amacris: I used to have Mekton-Z, pretty much all of the R.Talsorian games actually (including Teenagers from Outer Space!), but that was many years ago, and I don't trust my memory to make any judgements on the design system (which I did use for robots..). I could, on a semi-related note, cover the vehicle system from Heavy Gear, etc, which could also cover space craft, but didn't.

mcbobbo&phillip: I never was fond enough of the WEG starwars to try the D6 system, so I can't really say how their spaceships would fare against my terribly rigid standards, sorry.

Blackhand: I actually have the PDF files for Renegade Legion. I'm not terribly fond of reading PDFs, but I did somewhat regret missing this game during its heyday (though I do recall seeing the books for sale, they always had a problem of not giving me a good 'entry point'. With the PDFs I still had to work through four of them to find my 'starting point', as I recall...)

gliechman:  True enough. I could have mentioned Heroes, which is not terribly dissimilar from a lot of games I didn't mention, and some I did (Serenity, say?).  I don't actually mind such rules, they are fully functional and useful, but they don't scratch that itch.

So anyhow, there's a whole balance of focus issue when it comes to space ships in rpgs.  On the one end you've got stuff like GURPS Space 1e that abstracted and dare I say wimped out on starship combat.  A couple quick rolls and back to the PCs.  On the other you've got GURPS Vehicles 2e with detailed rules for seat belt systems.

Personally Spacemaster and the GURPS Space Opera Combat system hit the sweet spot.  There's lots for the PCs to do but the ships aren't harder to design than the characters.

I do have a fondness for Brilliant Lances for Traveller the New Era.  Take four decimal place precision and vectors Star Fleet Battles.  But Brilliant Lances is just a rational outgrowth of the TNE system.

I don't like it when ships and vehicles are treated the same as characters or built on points.  Sure, all the numbers are made up anyhow.  Sure, spaces are the same as points.  Well except if you're using the space based system of measurement I wrote up for one of my games in which case a space is 250 square feet.  But personally I expect cube square for armor and structure and power to mass for movement at the bare minimum.

Quote from: David Johansen;628345Personally Spacemaster and the GURPS Space Opera Combat system hit the sweet spot.

There was a GURPS Space Opera book? Somehow I missed that... or do you mean GURPS Lensman or Tales of the Solar Patrol?

Quote from: Simlasa;628352There was a GURPS Space Opera book? Somehow I missed that... or do you mean GURPS Lensman or Tales of the Solar Patrol?

GURPS Space is very good too, just to flesh things out.

There was a GURPS Space Opera Combat System that first appeared in GURPS Lensman and then in Compendium II for third edition.  It's a fun little system that has a nice tactical feel without actually needing a map or miniatures.