Into The Oort: Ships 2

In Into The Oort, ships have three stats, just like player characters. They also reflect, sort-of, the features or attributes of the player stats (which at the moment have the same name as stats in Into The Odd, Strength, Dexterity, Willpower). The three stats in Oort for ships are currently:

• HULL: the physical structure of the ship; the exterior, the interior, how spaceworthy it is, and so on. It is no indicator of size particularly, or speed - it is more about resilience.
• DRIVE: a measure of how fast a ship is and also how well it handles. It is used almost-directly to calculate transit times across large distances (a hex can be crossed in 20-DRIVE days by a ship), and over short distances it is needed to make difficult manoeuvres.
• SCAN: the sensors of the ship - whether those are heat-based, x-ray, optical wavelengths or radio transmissions. It is also a measure of how good those systems are for understanding what signals have been picked up.

Unlike characters, rolls are made under the ship stats for active choices rather than saves. For example:

• Roll under the SCAN stat when you are trying to look for something.
• Roll under the DRIVE score when there is a difficult comet debris trail to navigate.
• Roll less than your HULL when you're trying to maintain the ship in a difficult situation.

Does that make sense? I hope so. I don't have much more to say about ships today, I suppose I just wanted to clarify or share a few more details beyond what I mentioned in the last post.

I'm creating tables that generate the appearance of ships, but my impetus for doing so is for NPC ships to be generated quickly. Players could use some them though, but appearance could also be left to player-choice - so long as they can choose fast. As with Into The Odd, I aim for players to get playing ASAP. At the time of writing I'm constructing a table to give some details of the features of the ship - does it have something special like missiles, a cloaking device or a leaking engine coil? Or is it perhaps owned by someone else or a notorious past?

Into The Oort: Ships

Chargen in Into The Odd is one of the fastest things I've seen for a game. 3d6, 3d6, 3d6 and a d6 and then mechanically it's done. Sure, you might want to make up some details of what your person looks like or talk about how they know the other players' characters, but after a brief flurry of rolling you're done.

I want the same thing for chargen in Into The Oort, but also for shipgen as well; a starting group of players has their own ship, which has three stats that are related to different mechanical aspects of the ship. Roll 3d6 for HULL, 3d6 for DRIVE and 3d6 for SCAN, along with a d6 for shield points. Shields are always on, as a kind of energy shield to deflect dust and particles. In a pinch they absorb and redistribute weapons fire; once they're overloaded damage is taken by ship systems, but it only takes a short break from combat before the shields are back online.

Some combination of highest/lowest stat and the d6 for shield points will index a table that gives some details on what else the ship has - type of weapons, armour, special systems, and so on. I'm looking at ways to make other aspects of shipgen as simple. I think that there are possibly three other aspects which could be done quickly, and I've tried something for them recently at my second playtest game.

I had a short table of six entries for each of three aspects: TYPE, CREW, CARGO. Players roll three d6 as a group, and then use each result to pick out what they want. 6s are generally better than 1s. So at the playtest I think they got 6, 6 and 1. They assigned the 6s to TYPE and CARGO and the 1 to CREW. For the purposes of the playtest this meant that they had a decommissioned warship, two valuable cargoes but a small cargo hold, and they only had a skeleton crew of two others.

I liked this, but it also seemed slightly at odds with the other mechanical setup. That may or may not be a bad thing. I liked the aspects of choice rather than totally random gen. The discussion at the table - "We want an ex-warship, but do we need a good crew? Would it better to have no cargo?" - was great, and didn't take long. I can see that it might take a different group more time deciding what ship they want. I'm not 100% sure about it yet, so it might change.

What do you think? Any questions? Maybe in the next post I'll say something about how the different main ship stats work, mechanically, in the game.

Ships in the Oort Cloud, part 1

A night idea. I suppose in reality this is a couple of ideas that have been floating around for a while. On a recent train journey I started thinking about travel time between places in the Oort Cloud. I did some calculations on a series of Post It notes; I assumed that there was no instant travel, that unaltered humans wouldn't want to be subject to more than 1g of acceleration or deceleration. I also assumed that the drive in the ships wouldn't be explained using massive liquid fuel tanks (i.e., it will be totally hand-wavey in game; although some concept of range would be good).

These were in my head, have been for a few days. But at 2am when the baby woke up, the main thing that popped in was dice.

I like Zak S's Popomatic concept: so to come up with a random ship (not necessarily a ship owned/used by a group of PCs) why not roll a d4, d6, d8, d10 and d12 together, with the five numbers signifying different attributes or aspects of the ship.

There are a couple of things which dice could randomly select: weapons, armour, range, style of ship, cargo/berth capacity, maximum acceleration/deceleration. Off the top of my head this morning, I'm thinking:
d4: acceleration/deceleration (1g, 1.5g, 2g, 2.5g)
d6: berths and cargo
d8: armour
d10: weapons
d12: range

I'll have to expand on some of these ideas in the coming days. This is a departure from the way ships are handled in Machinations of the Space Princess, where the concepts/mechanics are much more closely aligned with the stats of PCs. That game as written is more sci-fantasy than I'm thinking for the campaign in the Oort Cloud. So: while I'll continue to do little "night idea" posts, it seems like last night's idea has nudged me in the direction of resolving this little gap that I currently have in my setting schema.

I'll see what the next night idea is, but the next part in this Popomatic Ships series will be saying more about acceleration - which will also, I guess, say more about where I'm coming from in the harder sci-fi setting. More later/tomorrow!