TraderJB said:
Hellebore said:
Anyway, back to the thread. Does anyone have any other suggestions for modifying crew casualty rates vs the size of the crew?
It seems to me, if you want to have the least cascading effects through the system, then it would be better to increase the starting population on cruisers to 150, 200 or more.
Under your current 3,2,1 system, you'd have to think hard about what you want to do with the Crew Reclamation facility so that it doesn't become a standard feature on every raider.
Plus, Rouge Trader being about Badassery, all changes should lean towards more badass not less badass.
Ooh, that's pretty good, although it would require the population be more abstract as it no longer represents a percentage. If you wanted to represent the crew ratios vs each ship you could have the larger ship crews proportionately larger depending on what crew size you use as the base 100. ie if 26,000 crew on th sword =100 then the lunar with 95,000 is about 3.5x the size so the lunar would have a crew complement of 350...
However, this and the current system runs into problems with hull damage vs crew damage. A Sword has 100 pts of crew but only 35 pts of damage, so when you've destroyed a sword via its hull (ie actually smashed the ship up) it's only lost 35% of its crew, whilst a cruiser with 70 hull points will have lost 70% of its crew when its hull reaches 0. That is assuming crits don't increase crew death rates. This was one of the things that bugged me about the system as a whole, the widely varying crew values on different sized ships as they take damage. Some of the crits cause extra crew loss and one halves the remaining crew complement, but crits aren't a certainty and they don't really complement the other rules, rather try to hide the fact that smaller ships have more surviving crew when they are crippled than larger ones by giving a chance of decreasing values.
This is why I was thinking if crew count is tied to hull damage you'd get a better progression. If we go with the suggestion above, then a sword will still have ~35% of its crew dead when it's at 0 but a cruiser will have 350-70=280 about 20% of its crew dead when it runs out of hull points.
So, how much of your crew will be dead when your ship is at 0 hull integrity? In my mind it would be sensible for the crew values to be extremely low, say 20% left ALIVE rather than only 20% dead.
Hellebore