Getting back into ICRPG! Working on a new space ship hack!

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warpshell
hack
#1

Evening, morning and salutations wherever you be! First off, sorry for the wonky title! I’m excited and already bad at introductions! I’ll blame the ale I had for dessert.

Anywho! I’ve been getting back to ICRPG and tabletop in general. During the holidays I have been playing a good bit of EVE Online and got a bunch if inspiration for bringing spaceship piloting and combat to the table for even more space adventures!

I know the Warp Shell itself is a sentient ship that’s way different from your traditional cosmic vessel, but when discussing with my players about a scifi campaign they asking a lot of stuff about piloting the ship, playing out dog fights ect.

As a challenge to myself, I decided to try and hack a system for piloting, fitting and maintaining a ship.

I’m still fleshing it out, but I have a few things I was thinking of executing:

  • The ship should have a character sheet. Yep! Whether each knucklehead flies their own frigate or they man the bridge of a battleship, I want a separate sheet to show them their ships stats, equipment and cargohold.

  • Ships stats should be simple. Like the character, creating a ship should be easy. They’ll have hearts, armor and shields. Equipment slots will be based on the class/size of the vessel and behave like the character’s.

  • Movement will come in two flavors: your typical speed in combat using near/far measurements and warp speed or simply how many system jumps a ship can make before needing to be refueled/rest.

  • Combat should play like the players’ does. Although moving a ship will be a bit trickier. I’m looking to other games like X-Wing for ideas on this.

Has anyone else tried anything similar? Have some ideas or feedback? I’d love to hear it. Gods know my ideas can be… well. Two heads are better than one, you know.

This isn’t something we’d use every game, but I thought it’d be cool to try and add in sometime.

I’m compiling a Google doc that I’ll share later!

#2

Have you seen the Mecha sheet? And I presume you will use the Chunk system for the ships? That would be my way to go.
As for ship combat, I would use the fighter rules as written in Death on Krell (Core 2.0) for smaller ships.
Big ass ships fight at REALLY long range (lasers are fast as fuck) and could fire several sectors away. Ships usually avoid other ships by jamming and decoy (also movement, both big and small). Big ships can be light-seconds away from each other firing lasers that hit empty space because the target ship just moved, or was never there to begin with.
I would look at the Fighters for smaller ships, add more HP per chunk the bigger they get but not a great deal of chunks.
As for Stats, just use the normal character sheet! The pilot is the one firing right? The ships is just the shell.
As for Equipment per Chunk there are endless possibilities (would look to EVE for inspiration for sure. I ran mega-freighters back in the day).

This is my thinking “on a stright arm” as we say in Sweden

#3

I just looked over the Chunk system and that’s pretty much what I was thinking as far as equipping ships with cool stuff. What I had so far was equipment for ships, modules/chunks, come in three flavors:

  • High Slot Modules - Primary weapons, tools, cloaks, ect.
  • Medium Slot Modules - Armor repairs, shield boosters, jammers and other secondary modules. Boosters and stuff will probably go here too.
  • Low Slot Modules - Passive, bonus-giving things that bolster defenses or attack bonuses for the ship.

Small ships like frigates can only fit a few things where a battleship can strap on all sorts of goodies. Example: a frigate will have 2 High Slots, 2 Medium, and 1 Low.

Combat will play basically like when characters are on foot. They’ll use the ship’s character sheet and combat will play as normal. I don’t want to complicate it too much, at least at first so we’ll be sticking to small ships in exciting, fast dog fights before we throw down a battleship that can blast things from an insane distance lol.

#4

Rough draft of what I’ve gotten so far. This is just a condensed version of what I scribbled down in my journal today.

We’re doing some playtesting tomorrow at our Session 0!