Collaberative RPG Vehicles?

1/2
12 seems quite small to me. Even a 75 ton caravel requires at least 20. Fluyts were made to have small crews, but I haven't any good number on them. Taking notes from portuguese navy:

>Captain gave orders; usually a noble or adventurer with no ocean experience and sometimes not even comand exp.. Some crews might pool up money to have one of theirs as captain. He could apoint an under-captain.

>scribe was the trusted servant of the crown, he had the key to the money and cargo. Not even the captain could check the cargo without the scribe. Pirates tried to capture him alive.

>Pilot is also the navigator. Some had personal diaries which were as valuable as wizard's grimories when it came to dealing with the sea and knowing routes. He had an apprentice.

>The master or crewmaster was the one translating the pilot's orders on crew orders. Pilot said he was going to left, master told the crew to get the ropes and sails like so to allow for that. He could be a substitute pilot if needed.

>The boatswain was an assistant and enforcer of the master. They usually split the work between them, each one ordering half the deck/sails/rigging. He also took care of the anchors and unloading of cargo. He had his own assistant, boatswain's mate.

>two estrinqueiros, skilled sailors in charge of the windlass that operated the round sails (one for the main mast, another for the fore mast).

>The bailiff, a judicial officer, was in charge of dispensing punishment and supervising on-board dangers (fires, gunpowder stores, weapon caches).

2/2
>The chaplain was in charge of saving souls, the barber surgeon in charge of saving lives. Fantasy clerics could combine both.

>The purser was in charge of food stores and rations. Unlike ships of other nations, Portuguese vessels did not usually have a cook aboard, sailors were expected to cook their own meals themselves at the ship's ovens.

>Perhaps the most valued of the specialized positions was the repair crew. This was usually composed of two carpenters and two caulkers that fixed anything that was broken, plus the cooper, who ensured the cargo and water stores remained preserved.

>A nau might also have divers, crew specially trained to go down the outside of the ship to check and help repair hull damage below the water level.

>Every nau also had, at the very least, a small specialized artillery crew of around ten gunners, under the command of a constable. As naval artillery was the single most important advantage the Portuguese had over rival powers in the Indian Ocean, gunners were highly trained and enjoyed a bit of an elite status on the ship.

>The bulk of the crew, seamen and shipboys, could be treated as a faceless mob whose morale is still important, can be lost due to disasters and combat but replenished in harbors.

This simulator allows one to get the hang of sailing:
thepirateking.com/ships/sail_simulator.htm

Ive tried a few different methods. I usually have on player in charge of maneuvering, another in charge of navigation, one for first-officer/quartermaster, and a 4th if necessary to be some 4th thing. Cook. Lookout. Petty Officer in charge of training and drilling deckhands. It all depends on what the system will allow.

If that's the case, why not do the exact opposite of real life, and have the first bit be democratic. I know that isn't perfect, and is likely to result in someone becoming de facto mover, but in theory it could allow for more planning from everyone.

Then everyone could strategize, followed by once again everyone not fucking up.

Well Shadowrun is an extreme example. If the GM isn't careful, the decker runs out into cyberspace, the mage astrally projects, and the street Sammy gets into fights in meatspace, with the whole group scattered to hell and gone running multiple parallel solo campaigns. Games like D&D give everyone a reason to worry and make decisions about positioning and tactics, but obviously that's off the table for multicrew.

So yeah, I'm a hard core GURPS fan, but frankly Spaceships is as guilty of this as any other system with multicrew. And no, I've no idea how to fix this. A spaceship is a unit of action. So put multiple players on it, and ultimately they're sharing or delegating one agent's worth of decisions into several crew slots. What's worse, fleet and fighter games exist where you want a single ship to stand for one player.

And so the solution is usually that one guy gets to move, and the others are "roll to not fuck up".

I've yet to see a game that gets this right. In vidya, Star Citizen seems to be trying to attack the problem head on. So I'm watching them closely because their ideas could bear on pen and paper RPGs as well.

The thing is, what can be as tactically rich as movement and positioning? And how do you create four to six such roles?

It's a fucking hard problem. I hope GURPS gets the answer first, but RT is so far the champ and any system that solves it has done the world a big favor.

Yeah at least that keeps the players together. I don't think it's a solution, but it's very possibly an improvement.

...

The Mythras Supplement, Ships and Shield Walls has an awesome system for both combat and piloting a ship as a group, and combat while on a ship.

I'm running a pirate game soon. Most of the stuff is going to be handled with individual skills related to tasks, with appropriate modifiers if characters are doing the work normally dinner by a whole team of men.

I'm planning on supplying NPCs to cover any gaps.

In Rifts, there are multiple multicrew vehicles and robots.
Had a 3 person robot in my game before:
- One pilot/primary weapons gunner
Self explanatory
- One secondary Weapons gunner/ CommO
Controlled turrets, missiles, etc as well as monitored communications with the rest of their allies (a merc force)
- One Auxiliary systems expert/ sensory systems operator
Fed IFF data to both gunners, provided shooting bonuses, relayed marked target info for fire support, tracked combat and navigation data for miles around.

Together they were a mobile command center/ communications center/ Artillery element

Pic semi related; Power Armor pilot outside her suit

So the main character, and his 2 vestigial dice rollers.

OP here, here are some details of the ship-
>Single-masted river/coastal cog
>Length 65', beam 20'
>Crew of 17 (including PCs)
>Hauls 90 tons total, including all supplies and the crew themselves

For simplicity's sake I rolled several of the crew into single people, so onboard we have
>Captain
>First mate
>Navigator
>Second mate
>Bosun
>Third mate
>Doctor (actually an alchemist with no medical training)
>Rigger x2
>Helmsman x2
>Shantyman
>Carpenter
>Generic seamen x4

The ship has no weapons so no gunners either. It's not super hardcore realistic, but the players themselves have never even been on a boat, let alone sailed one, so it'll hopefully be fine.

Pic related is the reference image I cooked up for them to picture it

we played it in earthdawn.

but legend points add a real need for crew to setup jobs other than pilot

>I usually have on player in charge of maneuvering, another in charge of navigation, one for first-officer/quartermaster, and a 4th if necessary to be some 4th thing. Cook. Lookout. Petty Officer in charge of training and drilling deckhands. It all depends on what the system will allow.
Okay, that's a good division of labor, but *how does it work*? Do the players have to take specific tests? Or merely being on board is enough for the ship to function, mechanically?

>I've yet to see a game that gets this right.
Have you looked at tank combat RPGs? I don't know of many but I'm picturing a tank where one player moves the tank, one player fires the weapons, one player makes decisions, and one player repairs/reloads. Would something like Twilight 2000 have that?

I'm not following this conversation too well. "Make it democratic" how? I don't understand, are you two talking about each player having a designated role, but the ship itself only acts mechanically when the players OOC decide together?

Just found it on Scribd, I'll take a look. Can you expand on what you like about it? Have you gotten to play in it?

Only experience I have is 7th Sea 2e and that rounds out at ll of 1 or 2 (can't remember which) sessions where one PC was the ship captain, handling the direction of the general crew, while I and another PC ran about the ship making ourselves useful which for me meant manning a cannon while the other PC readied his long rifle.

It all worked well enough given each PC focusing on a different aspect of the vessel's operations.

I feel that there is a middle ground to hit that lies between "everyone does their own thing" and "everyone does the same thing/nothing" that we hit due to fulfilling whatever role is needed in the moment and switching to our preferred roles once such a thing was possible. For example once our ship was against the enemy ship my character went from manning a cannon to leaping onto the other ship to engage in melee which was much more his style.

So in this case, in order to sail, are you having the pilot roll to sail, the carpenter roll to repair, the navigator roll to plot a course, etc? Are you making them check at set intervals, or only when emergencies come up?

How did your game go? Did the non-pilot players have fun or did they feel as does?

Buy wooden and plastic number rods and trays to make puzzles for tactical hull repair and bracing. They start with full length lumber and some discount scraps and have to fill the random hole and brace it. Can make it 2D or 3D. Can call for a skill role to simplify the problem and use up wood.

So Puzzle Pirates?

No, I haven't. How tactically rich are the other jobs on the tank?

Yeah that's what I think he's suggesting. It keeps the players together, even though the character roles remain isolated from one another.

I had the same problem talks about. One of my ideas was to use modified X-Wing board game movement templates which the Pilot role would control and the Captain would issue commands that could affect Gunner and Pilot but from there I kinda lost steam on mechanic building. Plus I had no one to test it with.

A cog, huh? That works. In my experience PCs scoff at "puny" ships, I didn't assume that as an option.

>For simplicity's sake I rolled several of the crew into single people, so onboard we have...
That works fine, the list I put together implies long trips on unknown lands. I believe you could even do without a specific navigator, third mate and second rigger if you wish.

>It's not super hardcore realistic
I'm sorry if my list made you think of that. I'm not actually that keen on realism. I have used a catamaran super-galley rowed by giants for the players to hang at. Besides stopping everywhere, the thousand-plus crew worked as source of hooks, NPCs and a minor market for "this-fell-from-the-wagon" goods. In battles, the players worked as marines, repeling boarders and boarding themselves. Although they didn't actually command the ship.

And if you want, here's my album of ships, mostly real ones:
imgur.com/a/yZDSn

There are cogs and similarly sized ships in there.

BTw, a cog's average speed is about 5 knots, the top would be 10.

I bet many other games do this as well, but Strike! uses a thing called team conflict. It abstracts it away, but that makes it easy to tweak and attach fluff to.

Basically, the entire ship and whatever challenge it is facing are entities unto themselves with a defense and offense value. For ship to ship combat this is obvious, but it works for, say, ship to storm (the "defense" of the storm is how hard it is to get out of it/outlast it, the "offense" is how dangerous it is).

The characters all decide what they want to do, which modifies the vessel's stats and sometimes have extra effects. Unless you have a skill to justify what you are doing, you can only use basic actions, but you have advanced actions like the "scout" which let's you peek what the opposition is rolling next turn so you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

Then, you roll contests between your attacks and defenses and depending on the results (whose attack won/lost) things advance.

This means everyone is acting at the same time, everyone's actions are meaningful, and you aren't locked into doing the same thing over and over (and indeed, need to adapt depending on how the rolls go).

I think there is only so much you can do with mechanics, a lot of it comes down to narrative. Give the players realms of command, split the encounter into multiple related narratives. While one is steering the ship, the other is rallying marines to repel a boarding, and another is trying to save a sailor's leg. They all have to cooperate in sailing, but each is allowed their focus.

>imgur.com/a/yZDSn

Right into my Resources folder you go

Yeah, that's how GURPS does it. The Captain hands out bonuses and such to other players. The problem is that usually it's pretty obvious who should get which bonus, so it's rolling to not fuck up again.

This is a hard problem in game design. I'm not surprised that nobody's solved it yet.

You need a system that can account for four situations. First, one or more single man fighters. Second, fighters with a second character aboard. Third, a ship with a small crew where the PC does stuff himself. Finally, a Rogue Trader style ship where the PCs are the bridge crew and they're managing a large anonymous crew of NPCs.

You need each role to be important and tactically rich, and yet be able to handwave it all away when the role is filled by an NPC. And you need to account for the fact that different player characters will be built differently and that you don't want ship rules to overconstrain players' choices.

I am DEFINITELY giving this a try. Thanks!

I have an idea

Have each player take a role on the ship. Gunsman, navigator, helmsman, captain, engineering, comms. Etc.

Give players 5 minutes to decide course of action, let them think together.
Maybe turning ship starboard would help gunner do an impossible shot. Maybe it would fuck the navigating due to winds, or rocks underwater.

As Dm in meanwhile plan actions of every other ship.

Execute all movements at once. Minis would help a lot.

Have a marker describing a wind direction on board - it will affect speed of boats - it's direction would be updated each turn.

Have a maximum angle and range for guns. Assume that shot can take place at anytime in the turn.

Captain's role is to solve conflicts. Mind you - low morale between players can lead to others ignoring his role.

It could be done better if players could communicate their ideas to only the captain.

Now a navigators idea and roll affects helmsman ability to turn, while helmsman turn affects Gunner.

All the while engineering/magical shields can protect only one side (front-left, front right, aft-left or aft-right.. Or front, left, right, aft - 8 sides should be enough)

Players need to actively discuss roles, execute them(roll) with extra rp element of relaying orders to the crew, if they have any.

It actually went well. No one had full ownership of the Mech's functions so they had to work together to be functional. At the end of the session, there was a huge sense of accomplishment and camaraderie.
It was like winning one of those races where one's legs are tied to another's.

So if you don't control the legs, you don't get to have fun?

No prob!

I think Mouse Guard and Burning Wheel (maybe Torchbearer, I heard that one's also part of that family) use these kind of rules.
Attached a very dense player reference sheet, has the info about team conflicts in the right column.

It feels like this could work with a good GM and players, but if you tried to use this as your default system that it would end up as suggests. Even a bad system can be played well if you have good enough people. A good system can't rescue a shitty group, but it can do a lot to help an average group have fun or help to avoid problems in a sub-par but not dysfunctional group.

Only making them roll when it's outside the norm. Like trying to pilot in combat, or repair the hill during a storm, or at other points where the plot demands it.

The only real exception it's going to be navigation.

Well then you're back to the problem where the pilot gets all the tactical decision-making and fun. Everyone else either rolls to not fuck up or just hangs out and does the obvious. Unless you have some tactical complexity in the other roles, it'll be one player having most of the fun.

Having lots of roles that are important in different situations is how you get the Shadowrun problem:

>Well Shadowrun is an extreme example. If the GM isn't careful, the decker runs out into cyberspace, the mage astrally projects, and the street Sammy gets into fights in meatspace, with the whole group scattered to hell and gone running multiple parallel solo campaigns.

I'm not saying it's a bad plan, just that you need to have a plan to keep everyone involved and interested and having fun all the time.

Here's the relevant part from the rulebook.

Also, link to pdf: sendspace.com/file/txtl08

Legit, thanks man

Based user, thanks man

Oh if you can tell me how
>One Auxiliary systems expert/ sensory systems operator
Fed IFF data to both gunners, provided shooting bonuses, relayed marked target info for fire support, tracked combat and navigation data for miles around.
Is fun and compelling despite literally involve doing what is asked of you by other players, and looking at the game map. By all means.

Or even
>One secondary Weapons gunner/ CommO
Controlled turrets, missiles, etc as well as monitored communications with the rest of their allies (a merc force)
Oh boy I get to shoot at the things player 1 is already trying to kill because he let me press the missile button, that absolutely needs a second player to handle. Lot of responsibility behind that button. Now you just look at me, I get to press that button and be fluff responsible for talking to the people everyone can hear because we're all playing together, or if we aren't my role boils down to playing telephone with the main character.

FUN

They suffer from the exact same problem. No one has solved it yet. Trying to play as a tank or aircraft crew in Only War doesn't work well. This one works as a party game because it requires physical action, but it's not an RPG.

This is super interesting, thank you for pointing that out. It hasn't given me any ideas but I think it's in the process of doing so

I do worry that a lot of these "solutions" are just adding complication for complication's sake though

Are there any videos of this being played? Or accounts? I'm having a hard time grasping the gameplay

Auxiliary controls the flow of the battle. With the systems at hand, he has navigational data and a better strategic layout of the battle than the pilot who is doing his best to dodge incoming fire and keep anti robot weapons from getting a lock on the machine.

Secondary gunner is targeting the small guys, the troops, thus providing an advantage to the ground game of their allies; which gives them a better chance of winning the fight. The communications aspect directs the forward force under their command.

You're assuming that the pilot makes every decision and has all the tools of the bot at his disposal. It's literally a team effort or else the bot would be effectively blind and/or dumb. A whole lot of good a walking 40' mech is when it keeps running into ambushes.

No one of those roles can function without at least one of the others. I don't need to sell you on what's fun, my group has a blast with the in depth and tactical nature of squad/team play.

Perhaps if you learned to work as a unit, your group wouldn't resent your overarching need for attention and power gaming. May all your rolls for a month be shitty, like your attitude.

How many crewmen are too many crewmen?