Use conflict chart (and its inherent abstractness) for the conflict. The Captains of the ship would use Militarist for Starship Combat, and all the players would use appropriate skills for rolls and team work challenges.
What I dont’ like about this approach: There is no real way to damage the starship, as it is equipment.
What I like: it makes the characters the focus, not the ships.
OPTION TWO
Full on Starship Burner: Create a series of questions that construct the starship almost like a character re-skinning all the stats/abilities thusly:
Purpose = Nature Supplies= Resources
Control Systems = will Sensors = Circles
Hull= Health
Systems=Skills
Features=Traits
Problems: Sensors and Systems? one of the obvious systems would be sensors, and in a conflict might pose a … conflict
The captain and crew would be less of a focus, but the ship would be a character and the Team aspect even more enforced.
Obviously this would require more work as there would have to be various Conditions. As well as what if a ship doesn’t have a certain system, as well as a new chart to indicate which systems to use for which types of conflicts.
I’d go with your first option, and note that damaging the other side’s ship can easily be the stakes you set out for the conflict: “Take out their warp drive so they can’t leave the system” or “take out their shields so we can have a little gunboat diplomacy”. Stuff like that.
Do you really need axes, bows and slings (etc) in the weapons list? I’d revisit and rescale that entire list. If you want those weapons to remain available, I’d lump them all under a “primitive weapon” category and give them a lump advantage to one thing. Maybe even, “Primitive, +1D to one action once per conflict.”
Who can forget the classic episode “Friday’s Child” from ST:TOS where Kirk and Spock go to war with bow and arrow against a conniving Klingon and the followers of the wife of a Teer? Pure nerd awesome!
But yes, like Luke says, I’d consider rescaling the list.
I think my problem with weapons and gear in general (esp. Starships) is I don’t know how to dole out the bonuses. I am used to a d20 mindset which is very “balanced” in its approach, and I don’t know that that applies here.
Yet another idea if you want to go super-minimalist:
Treat ships as creatures with the Nature trait, so doing battle with a ship is like going to war against a moose or whatever. Nature = the impressiveness of the ship. So like the Borg cube would be Nature (Borg) 8.
Lay out a handful of Natures to broadly describe each class of ship. Or maybe do it by affiliation:
Nature (Starfleet) might be maneuvering, warfare, resilience
Nature (Klingon) might be warfare, sneakiness, speed
Nature (Borg) might be resilience, grappling…indirect stuff. I don’t remember the cube being all pew-pew in the movie, but it was a long time ago.
Then, and this is the neat part, I’d allow the PCs to tap into their ship’s Nature per the regular Nature rules: they wouldn’t advance their characters but could use the ship’s die pool for doing shippy things (maneuvering, fighting, defending). Their ship’s Nature might even increase/decrease: higher means better crew training but if you hit 8, pow, ship’s been destroyed in some spectacular fashion (think of the various Federation ships that have suicided).
I think that may work for the Borg or a few other things in Trek-verse (Crystalline Entities or whatever), but you don’t normally have the equivalent of a mouse fighting a moose in the game. Not that I would put it past Kirk to try to shoot a Klingon Warbird down with his hand-held phaser.
Paul- that is very close to what I was originally thinking. But like I said in my initial starship post: I thought I needed a more robust system for the starships, but after one of the posters mentioned being able to use the Maneuver script to disarm I was back to very close to your idea.
