Praise the Captain!
Yesterday i got the chance to play a Captain for a session and i highly highly enjoyed it. While the “everyone just rolls +control” thing looks really boring on paper it actually creates a lot of cool moments and choices. When my captain was doing things himself, with help from the crew i would get to roll +3. But i couldn’t be everywhere. Still i can roll for the other crewmembers and basically make the ship my second character. I just would need to roll +1 (+2 if assign crew to the task). In that sense the trained crew enhancement i picked up kind of function like the “All powers to the shields!” thing in Star Trek. Giving you a little ressource to play around with. We didn’t get the chance to have other player characters do much on the ship but the struggle between using the ship and rolling lower or using your high stats seems interesting. Also there is a lot of fictional advancement you can pick up for the ship, giving you a quest an an incentive to trade and make money.
While i find a lot of the advanced moves to be a bit unexiting at reading them, this class felt like i didn’t push for advanced moves to be awesome. I had a freaking airship with Glaivethrowers.
So i was a happy Captain.
As expected i also had a lot of fictional effectivity because the game revolved around the Airship. The crewmembers played an important part (but also because i pushed for it) like i feel they should. You basically have a moving home base for the group and people there should be an important part of the game and characters that the other players care for.
The only really bad thing for me was that none of the backgrounds looked interesting to me. I wrote a new one (Scrapper) but it didn’t fit with the character i wanted to play. I am still trying to figure out what would best match them.
I also put a lot of work and effort into making it work for me and really understanding all my options. I am not 100% sure that a new player, coming fresh to the game and or class would see all these intricate things. If the GM knows about it great, they can explain it and show them how things work. But you can’t rely on that.
This is not a critizm here, more of a question on how accessible the whole class is.
Cool class.
Check it out everyone.
sub!
I have a player using the Captain playbook and he loves it.
can you talk more about how the mechanics work for you?
Like you stated, the Captain uses his crew and ship to really enhance the class. When he has to leave the ship typically we take a few crew members (aka Red Shirts… funny story there) with him to help aid his character off of the ship. We really haven’t done a lot of ship to ship combat as of yet though its coming,. Mike Lindsey could tell you more on his perceptions on how the class plays from a players perspective.
Every move you select as Captain deserves a second look: all of them are quite powerful, and reinforce that your character is competent even when the dice don’t land your way.
I will try to provide more examples when I have the book in front of me, but I’ve definitely enjoyed this playbook a lot…and I’m just now 2nd level.