Tag: T. Franzke

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. 

Originally shared by T. Franzke

Inverse World and fictional advancement

So many ways for the Inverse World captain to enhance the ship are purely coming from the fiction. Therefore they are hidden from you, when you first look at the class. Sure you could get a more powerful “engine” to increase your control stat. But who thinks of this? There is no “upgrade the airship” system and we as roleplayers are trained to look for these things. If advancement is mainly mechanical then fictional options get ignored (because i a lot of systems those don’t even work). Therefore some players see it as cheating if you bypass the “1 move per Level” thing and get extra moves or stuff from the fiction. 

Did you know that you could put extra armor plates on your airship in order to get Armor for your Airship? The only hint that this could work is the one advancement options that makes your airship immune to armor ignoring attacks. This option literally makes no sense unless you invest in game time and ressources to getting armor! 

So the captain has actually a lot of inbuilt motivation to use the trade move etc. to get coin. 

There is a lot of hidden chances there. I am not sure how you could address this on the character sheet though. How to point people at these chances?