So how many of you have tested the Captain yet? How much emphasise did you put on the crew and their well-beeing?
It might just be my Apocalypse World Brain speaking but i would give names to all of them and make them have demands left and right. A Captain needs to show his authority i guess.
Just treating them as mindless massess is so much of a missed opportunity.
I’ve also seen the middle ground – I had one player who had the majority of her captain’s crew as faceless mooks (who often die in droves during catastrophes), but her first mate was named and very much important and given Hireling stats. Later, this same captain Recruited a couple elite lieutenants for her crew, so she now has 4 named and important crew members (also the other PCs but psssh), while everyone else is still faceless and unimportant.
So, there is a good bit of leeway there, and it’s really up to how important the player and GM want them to be.
The captain in the game I’m running is complicated by the fact that one of the PCs is his ship/engine and the crew are all robots that kinda sorta answer to her. I had to foist some minions on them in order to take the middle path Jacob Randolph mentions.
On the one hand there’s a convenient reason all the others are faceless mooks(they’re literally faceless), but on the other, my pool of recurring NPCs is very small.