Quote:
Originally Posted by Atgxtg
That's the best idea I've read all week. It's so simple, it makes me wonder why no one brought it up before.  |
I've noodled away at something on that basis, actually based of the stuff in the RQIII GM's book, which also formed the basis of the stuff in
Sailor on the Seas of Fate and IIRC I believe Jason has also done the same briefly at some point.
The problem comes when you try and apply the rules to multiple settings. How do you generalise from those rules in such away that they are useful for most SF settings? Even ignoring setting with no ships, or where ships are irrelevant in immediate play (there's no starship combat in
Dune for example...), how do you generalise a set a rules to cover
Babylon 5,
Star Wars,
Farscape and Alastair Reynold's
The Prefect?
The answer is you don't, because you can't. Any combination of Starship design and combat system has to make assumptions about ship and weapon performance, irrespective of the techno-babble used to justify how the ships behave. Small ships in the B5 need to use Jump gates to enter and exit Jump space; in the Revelation Space setting no human faction in the main timeline has FTL (well, Skade's Conjoiners try to experiment with it with disastrous results).
I think a far better approach to trying to come up with generic systems that are inevitably NOT generic is to design some example systems: spell out some criteria (both from a setting point of view and from a a game play point of view) and then provided a BRP compatible system that meets those criteria: that's always been BRP's strength in the past, that it has concrete solutions that are easily adapted or rebuilt for different situations...
Cheers,
Nick Middleton