Re: (FT) Crew Quality

On Tue, 22 May 2001, "David Rodemaker" wrote:

> 
> Has anyone (or are there any plans for) used crew quality modifiers in
FT?
> Either the Good/bad/average style of SFB or breaking it up into the
same
> classes as DS/SG?

I've thought about it. The problem is that the weapon systems are pretty
different. You'd have to come up with modifiers for the different
systems based on quality, and that would get fairly convoluted. For
instance subtracting 1 or adding 1 to the die roll for pulse torpedoes
is far different from doing the same thing with beams.

The easiest ways to handle crew quality is as follows:

1) Initiative rolls. Give, say, three qualities: Excellent, Average,
Poor. All Excellent ships fire first. If both sides have excellent
ships, roll a die to see who wins the "excellent" initiative. The winner
picks one "excellent" ship and fires it. Then alternate between players
until all the "excellent" ships have fired. Then, fire all the good
ships. Finally, fire all the poor ships.

You can play around with this a little. The player with the fewest
"excellent" ships, for instance, gets to fire first with the "good"
ships, and the player who fired the fewest "excellent" and "good" ships,
in total, get to fire the first "poor" ship.

2) Crew repair rolls. Same quality, but give excellent crews +1 to
repair systems. Give poor crews no modifier, but if they roll the 6 to
repair a system, make them roll another die. Perhaps a 4, 5, or 6 on the
second die repairs the system. Two poor crews working on the same system
makes them equal to a normal damage repair crew.

You could try mixing and matching both ideas. I have no idea how you'd
price this in point values.

For Legendary Captains, I don't use such a rule. For one thing, it's up
to the player to move his ships. It's hard to imagine a "legendary
captain" making bonehead ship movements. Imagine Kirk or Sheridan
letting the enemy get into their rear arcs...

But, if you wanted to do this sort of thing, I'd probably keep it at the
"fleet commander" level. Put the Legendary Captain in a specific ship.
Let the fleet add 1 to the initiative die roll for the legendary
captain. If you want more than one L.C. in each fleet, add 1 per L.C.
You may, if you want, hide the Legendary Captains by writing down the
ship they occupy.

Note, you could do this same thing with fleet quality. The fleet with
the better quality gets a bonus roll to the initiative (this saves
having to calculate quality per ship). You could let a fleet with the
most Legendary Captains automatically win initiative. 

Just some suggestions.

Allan Goodall - agoodall@canada.com
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