One Player, one starship

[Brian K]

After reading the Destiny trilogy, I was thinking about how to work up an epic game, that spans a few quadrants, and the thought hit me.

What if every player controls an individual starship or station? Has anyone done anything like this? There are stats for starship renown, etc... would it be difficult to build the crew to support each PC captain?

Has anyone tried this idea?

Thanks

[K.G. Carlson]

Not yet, and I don't plan to do a whole campaign this way but I do want to have some fleet battles.

Because the starship combat is so streamlined in Coda, I figure even a quickie battle group can be thrown together. For the 3 primary combat stats give each player a +10, +8, +6 to assign to their liking, adjust for the starship manuever modifiers and let fly! I figure all the secondary stuff like sensor skills and whatnot can be at +5 skill rating for ships without statted up crews.

[Captain Otto]

IMHO i think this could be quite an experience and somewhat of a burden of the narrator - if you are going to crew more than one ship with NPC'S you need at least all departmendheads fleshed out.
Getting these together without to many stereotypes is probably the most complicated task.
Alternatively you could distribute the NPC's among the Players, so they have there hands full as well, and have something to interact with the peculiar Captain of a given ship. If you have Five Players, a player might be the CO of vessel A, the XO on vessel B (otherwise an NPC) , the Chief Engineer on vessel C (also an NPC), the Flight Control officer on Vessel D and finally the Tactical Officer on Vessel E.

If all are Focused and are prepared to jump to the scenes this could be quite an experience. On the other hand -as a worse case scenario- it could turn out to be an nightmare of epic proportions. Anyway there is a hell of administrative work ahead.

[Cut]

We once did a freestyle game set in the TNG/DS9 era, without rules, with three, later with two players. There our characters developed into higher positions, sometimes commanding entire ships all by themselves, working in concert in an epic campaign. Main villian were the parasites from 'Contagion', years and years before the DS9 relaunch used them finally again.

As I said elsewhere on these boards, those gameing sessions were the most rewarding Trek, maybe the most rewarding RPG experience of my life.

I still miss those days.

[Evan van Eyk]

I don't think this will work out well. I remember a campaign, where I had a single Captain as a player. It was an interesting show, (Ranger, ENT-style), but as a narrator it was difficult to create a unique crew and play them as a support for the Captain.
In case of a whole fleet, I doubt it is managable. If it is just three ships, you'd need 20 unique characters that have to be played individually, to make it a real experience. After all the player needs to get the feeling to really lead a crew and not just stereotypes.
However that is just me, it might work, especially with very experienced players, who could take some of your workload and e.g. design the crew themselves, etc.

Maybe you should consider - depending on the setting - to make everyone high-ranking but on one ship/ station. One could be the Admiral, one the CO and/or XO, someone else might be a Captain in charge of groundforces/ planes or other special tasks more appropriate to your campaign, e.g. special science task force, dimplomatic corpse, etc.

anyway just my humble opinion.