Here to discuss permanent crew losses on a ship during a battle and game mechanics for such. I know there are rules for abstracting crew casualties and medical staff patching up wounded and NPCs or characters taking an injury for structural breaches, however there are not rules for handling crew attrition ( death ) and how the ship’s capabilities are diminished. Home brew rules discussion here in this topic…
just treat it as disadvantage traits
They stack.
Each trait is +1 difficulty on repair/maintenance tasks, but also +1 time unit each, and -1 crew support
Each day of under crewed is +1 CR on one system, to a maximum of traits per system, as maintenance suffers…
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Those are good ideas. What’s needed is a method of determining IF a critical crew loss impacts a system ( where your modifiers come into play) I’m thinking each breach on a system has a chance of causing a permanent crew loss (KIA) with the number of existing breaches on a system creating a wider range of a chance of permanent crew loss on a D20. Rolled if the GM adds a complication via threat pool.
I’d say just use cumulative breaches as a guide.
Thinking about it:
A Stress Track, length = Ship Size -1.
Each breach taken to ship systems does 1 stress
If a second breach is available, spend 1M to assign it to crew losses, doing 1 plus an effect die. Effect is killed outright.
Weapons with Antipersonnel effects do 1 crew per Effect.
Crew cannot be targeted.
When the track runs out, take a stage of crew loss, and reset the track
What crew loss affects:
Any roll made by ship’s NPCs.
Any roll to repair or maintain any system.
The Complication rating increase results in a breach as a complication… the system is coming apart.
Those are more good concepts. I’ll have to think about them some more and play test them.
I also think that structure breaches should have a greater chance of causing crew loss.
Can it be simplified?
Use damage complication dice results. Effects are work on the track. Breach causes significant casualty and the complication threshold for repairs increases by one per breach. When a Complication scored, repair difficulty +1.
Plus, Captain has to perform a funeral.
Garrett
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Another idea: Have an additional momentum/threat spend: 2 (either Repeatable or not Repeatable). Spend two momentum ( or two threat if GM ) per successful starship combat attack if there is a breach to structure. Roll a challenge die and if EFFECT is rolled, then roll a D20 and that is the number of crew permanently lost. GM decides exact penalties that are applied to the affected ship based on percentage of crew complement permanently lost.
Another impact of crew loss: Increasing the complication range for a ship that has suffered crew loss could be done by increasing the complication range by one ( for all character and ship tasks ) for each structural breach.
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The Defiant could lose almost half its crew in one hit, though.
Just suggestions and optional of course.
I don’t think this is something that requires special rules. There have to be a lot of crew casualties to impact a ship’s performance. And we have seen in various episodes that you can run a ship for a short time even with a skeleton crew. So I’m not sure where the performance degradation would even be applicable.
I guess this could be a special mechanic if you are playing a ship far away from any support or starbase, like Voyager lost in the Delta quadrant.
Personally, I treat those special mechanics as Traits. In my campaign, the player ship could not refill their torpedoes and they had only a few torpedoes to begin with, so the ship had the Trait “Low Torpedo Ammunition”. This basically meant that if they attack with torpedoes and a Complication is rolled, I could say that they have now exhausted all their torpedoes.
Traits are very flexible and in my opinion are the best way to handle such special mechanics without making the rules overly complicated.
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After giving it more thought ( and reading the other options presented here), I think that using negative traits to handle crew loss would be best to keep the rules from deviating into more complexity. The special rules for removing a determined amount of the crew permanently could be used for plot elements where there is a story reason to do so.
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Interesting. How would the negative trait look? Trait: Reduced Crew in Engineering. It seems to demand a complication range increase or those in engineering rolling the d20 twice and taking the higher number. Plus, as a big fan of dramatic roleplaying and fleshing out the crew, I’d like to see the Captain have to perform the funeral duties. It makes all the faceless people on board real.
Garrett
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Plus it adds an emotional element if some of the “supporting crew” become casualties; supporting crew whom the player characters have come to rely on for support and have developed an affinity for same.
It could just as easily simply make things harder (+1 difficulty)… which is a standard for a trait.
Interesting. How would the negative trait look? Trait: Reduced Crew in Engineering. It seems to demand a complication range increase or those in engineering rolling the d20 twice and taking the higher number. Plus, as a big fan of dramatic roleplaying and fleshing out the crew, I’d like to see the Captain have to perform the funeral duties. It makes all the faceless people on board real.
Garrett
Such Traits would increase Difficulty or even lower Difficulty of enemy Tasks against your ship, e.g. you don’t have time to re-align the warp field so enemies can spot you more easily.
They could also make Tasks impossible like certain science task because you had to shut down the department and reassign scientists to engineering.
Increasing the Complication range is also a nice fit, because the ship is not maintained very well.
those in engineering rolling the d20 twice and taking the higher number
I would not use custom mechanics. If you want to make a Task more difficult or more dangerous, increase Difficulty and/or Complication range.
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Not to do down the ingenious ideas here, there’s also an argument that the combat effects of breaches also include those of crew losses. The system is pretty flexible and abstract in that way!
The trait-based approach is an excellent way of reflecting longer-term crew casualties. Tne nature of traits is that they take effect in whatever way seems most appropriate whenever they seem to apply. They’re very flexible.
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I, too, like the Trait-based approach. The rules are already there, and the go away when they go away!
You might be able to replace two or three individuals at a station, but you would have to go to a major colony or home world for substantial crew replacements. Could be an adventure in itself!
Yes. Those permanent crew losses are going to cause negative traits until they can be replaced.
The Impact effect from a Structure breach includes some provision for crew injuries. This focuses mainly on damage to individual PCs rather than the broader abstract crew, but it’s not difficult to slip a house rule in there for slightly more involved crew damage, in the form of traits.
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Part of me thinks that, realistically, Dr Dastrums computer that can run a ship on its own is something that would have been developed long before we even make it into space with warp drive, since its something we basically have today. So why have crew? Providing useful redundant jobs and some tasks that can’t be done by a computer. So depending on the setting you have, losing crew might not do much to performance other than perhaps affecting repairs, but damage to the computer system could knock the entire ship out depending on any redundancies that may or may not be in place, hmmm.