Games with starfighter combat are similarly fraught with insta-death WW2 movie style danger, unless, of course, there is some sort of built-in player protection with the rules. I don't like player protection in my rules, as I am a fan of the old-school "keep characters simple and disposable" mentality. Player protection opens the door to complicated character creation and is ultimately a tool of retaining players via a social contract built into the rules.
If it takes four hours to create a character I am not having them die in the first five minutes!Why would players play that type of game? I wouldn't. I would play the game that takes 5 minutes to design a character and 5 minutes to lose them. I don't have that much time anymore, and frankly all of the games that supported complex designs and player protection have been put away. My life is simple, and my games need to reflect that or I end up looking at them and never enjoying them. They become "things I wish I had the time to play" and they make me feel sad. So away they go.
Ship Combat as Rules Complexity
It is funny because I started this article thinking about sci-fi RPG ship combat and it ended up really being about how easy it is to lose characters. The two concepts are tightly tied together because if you cannot lose characters easy your ship combat systems must reflect that and have player-protection rules written into them as well. Complexity is added to the system, and the amount of special cases and rules you need to process increase.In computer terms, your application becomes bloated and full of special cases. Your CPU, memory, and disk space usage get higher and higher the more you write these special case rules, and the whole system gets and feels heavy and slow.
And if players are protected, ships must be as well. I am not spending four hours designing a starship to have it blown up in the first five minutes! Bloat increases and the time it takes to process and play the game increases.
Part of what made us give up on Pathfinder is that you could not keep the entire game in your head anymore. Even remembering "what book do I go to for that?" became a nightmare and we found ourselves shelving books on different shelves based on what type of rules the book had. We never really got into Starfinder as a result, which is a shame because it looked fun, but our overload with Pathfinder contributed (unfairly I would say) to our exhaustion with the system or anything like it.
Knight Hawks
The old Star Frontiers supplement Knight Hawks felt like a good balance of ship combat, complexity, and character interaction. It felt strange for us at the time to "wargame it out" while the PCs were there, as we preferred more of a storytelling game. Also, our ideas of starships were a bit more advanced than the lower-tech designs seen in Star Frontiers (because they never had ships in the main rules and we assumed Star Wars and Space Opera were more our thing for how ships worked).
There wasn't a lot of player protection either in Knight Hawks, other than bailing out and running to the escape pods. If your ship was space toast, that was it. I had as player who refused to put escape pods in his ship, and that upped the ante. His reasoning was, "if the ship goes, I go" and it was a sort of a silly thing kids do, but it raised the stakes.
I know, the ship should have failed its first inspection as a deathtrap and worker safety hazard, but we never knew better. And I am not sure anyone would want to work on that thing looking back, but he was "the best starship captain in the galaxy" and took on that sort of "Han Solo never used escape pods" sort of machismo.
These days, give me an escape pod please.
Traveller
I see escape pods mentioned in the new Traveller rules (under encounters), but not in the ship designs or rules in what I can quickly find. They are one of those "assumed items" I suppose but I would like that spelled out somewhere (I may have missed it), and I would like those clearly laid out on the ship maps (since that really matters during boarding actions or other emergencies).
I need to play some more of this game, especially ship combat, and get a feel for how this goes. You can sit and theory craft about "how you think things are" but until you play your opinions are just theories and feelings. Knight Hawks and even Space Opera we played a lot of, and we had a good feel for how those games worked. More on this soon.
Star Wars
There are a lot of different Star Wars games, and our experiences with the Fantasy Flight version did not include many starship battles. Now that I think about it, not having any starship battles in a Star Wars RPG just feels...wrong. The modules we played did not have many or you could skip them, which we did. From what we saw, they were more abstracted and narrative affairs, and the ships felt more like abstract characters that fought each other using player skills instead of traditional vehicles where it is more of a "to the metal" experience of damage location charts and complicated movement and positioning systems.
If I pull my old Star Wars books out I may play this, but it is a more complicated game and my interest in things Star Wars is pretty low right now. The story of that universe feels nearly done for some reason to me. I am ready to move on and see new things.
Overall
Overall I need more experience in Traveller at this point, and I want to see how that system has been updated. I like the lower-tech ship battles and more gritty feel, and that is what captures my imagination these days. I am not feeling much interest in flashy space battles and I am a bit worn-out on modern CGI and VFX. I am craving the real these days, and something cold and mathematical like the old Harpoon rules from GDW. A system where you could go into a battle knowing you are going to lose it, and only your wits and possibly sheer luck can save you. These days, that is what excites me about ship combat.
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