Hi all! This is my first post on the forum, hopefully this isn’t a controversial post or anything.
I plan on running a, Enterprise-era campaign (C. 2157) following a convoy returning to the Delphic Expanse to “rescue” the lost “colony” from the episode “North Star,” but that’s a post for another time.
Since the official starship options available for this era are a little limited, I want to thoroughly understand them. However, I am completely mystified by the design decisions that went into the NX & Daedalus classes for the game. I’ve laid out what I’ve noticed below:
Due to refits, the Daedalus and NX are effectively on equal footing when it comes to total System strength. They’re also equal in Departments, as are most ship frames.
The Daedalus, however, for some reason gets to have five Talents instead of the three you would expect for a Scale 3 ship frame. The NX is not this lucky.
Both ship frames are, for some reason forced to take the “Polarized Hull Plating” and “Grappler Cables” Talents rather than having them simply design switches freely replacing shields and tractor beams. Having these available as talents for later vessels is really cool! However, I don’t understand why they are talents here.
Because of those talents, the NX has no frame-specific talents to reflect its unique capabilities, and has just one free slot for player choice.
My questions are, why were these choices made? And, perhaps more importantly, what do folks here think should replace these mandatory talents to reflect the uniqueness of both spaceframes?
Thank you for speaking with the designer. The Daedalus talents scenario makes more sense now, I just wish the NX got a little special love too, since I’m a huge Enterprise fan (comparatively small fan club, I know).
I suppose it’s a little tricky to differentiate ships of that era because the total points available for Systems is so low that boosting any one to stand out would push another low enough to cause problems for the crew.
The System points are only so low because the NX class has to be compared to the ships of the TNG era like the Galaxy class.
But if you only planning to play in the Enterprise era, I don’t see anything wrong with increasing all attributes by 3. This would make the NX class’s attributes equivalent to a ship of the 2330s (according to my sheet).
I probably should have clarified that I understand why the numbers are so low, it makes perfect sense. And I bookmarked, somewhere, the breakdown of system point total by decade that I think you yourself created! That will be an incredibly handy tool, I’m sure! It’s just a shame that it constrains the differentiation a little.
I’ll present the stat increase option to my players and see what they think. I don’t mind having weaker ships as it just emphasizes the skill of the characters even more.
