I will be starting a campaign soon where the group starts with a ship. I was wondering if it would be a good idea to have any mysteries about the ship, ie dormant upgrades or other abilities that the players may or may not find. Any thoughts and or suggestion appreciated.

A ship with a few "quirks" can quickly become a character in its own right. I'd go for it.

Well, Knights of the Old Republic had an interesting sidequest where the ship you stole had a concealed and sealed storage compartment, and you had to find it, open it, then deliver the cargo to the person it had been meant for originally.

There was a very good supplement for the West End Games Star Wars for this. It was called Stock Ships I think, just full of ships with their own history and surprises for the crew.

Great idea but few upgrades are easy to overlook unless they are deliberately hidden and a lot of upgrades are hard to hide at all.

These upgrades could very well have been deliberately hidden, especially if they were illegal. Control systems reached through a certain sequence of key presses on the Holo Dejarik board, a certain food requested from the food processor, a specific set of Astrogation coordinates set. I have no problem at all with the idea of hidden programs or upgrades; and as far as I am concerned, with very few exceptions, I have no problem with hidden upgrades if it serves the plot. Lets face it, the Millennium Falcon was the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy but to look at it both inside and out it was a rusty old YT1300. The only things that were obvious were the Quad cannons and the Sensor dish, and I am not sure that the sensor dish was that big of a deal.

Also, Talon Karrde and his ship, the Wild Karrde . Three retractable turbolasers, and an engine way better that what it's supposed to have, but looks like just an innocent, everyday Action IV Bulk Transport . Zahn notes, in the annotated Heir to the Empire , that he gets asked sometimes what kind of Earth car Talon Karrde would drive. He thinks something along the lines of a nice, nondescript minivan. . . with a V12 racing engine under the hood.

On 2/10/2018 at 5:02 PM, EliasWindrider said:

Great idea but few upgrades are easy to overlook unless they are deliberately hidden and a lot of upgrades are hard to hide at all.

That depends on what sort of accord the player and the GM can strike.

After all, on the surface nobody would expect a run-down looking ship like the Millennium Falcon to have a cutting-edge hyperdrive, high output engines, a retractable low-grade blaster cannon, and military-grade shield deflectors. Granted, the Falcon also had a lot of quirks, but then (at least in Legends) preventive maintenance was never really Han's thing.

Find out how your players view ships. If they see them as transient gear (as most ships in the prequels were) that changes out every few episodes, then don't bother doing anything special with it. Not every group wants the baggage of having their own MF.

15 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

That depends on what sort of accord the player and the GM can strike.

After all, on the surface nobody would expect a run-down looking ship like the Millennium Falcon to have a cutting-edge hyperdrive, high output engines, a retractable low-grade blaster cannon, and military-grade shield deflectors. Granted, the Falcon also had a lot of quirks, but then (at least in Legends) preventive maintenance was never really Han's thing.

Hiding something from an external walk by is one thing, hiding something from someone (i.e. the pcs) who are repairing the ship is another thing all together. Han wasn't the first person to own the falcon but he presumably knew exactly what his ship was capable of. The first time the pcs do maintenance on the sublights or hyperdrive, I'd expect them to notice if it wasn't stock hardware, if they hadn't already noticed that the ship was faster than it was supposed to be. If someone adds a high output ion turbine, I'd expect that to be fairly obvious to someone with 2 int and 2 mechanics from a slightly more than cursory inspection of the engine room.

Physical upgrades are quite hard to conceal. Also keep in mind another thing - most upgrades take Hard Points. So you may come with a situation (depending on the ship choice) in which the PC's have used their Hard Points to upgrade different things and suddenly - Hey you have a Targeting Array which takes another Hard Point which you don't have. So I think you may stick to things which do not require Hard Points as those may not be obvious enough to people from outside the ship but are really hard to conceal from people who live on it. With the exception of smuggling compartment perhaps.

My experience with ships is that they tend to not be the focus other than transportation and maybe one encounter every 5 sessions. I would just let them pick any ship they can reasonably man.

1 hour ago, Tassedar said:

My experience with ships is that they tend to not be the focus other than transportation and maybe one encounter every 5 sessions. I would just let them pick any ship they can reasonably man.

Yeah, but it could make for some great plot hooks down the road.

OT: As for some ideas, and the viability of it, there's lots of ways you could justify it, the easiest being that they are getting this ship 2nd/3rd/4th/5th hand, and the people who had it before them, tweaked things, but didn't bother to tell anyone. If you've ever watched the show Farscape, the ship they had, Moya (or Moia, I forget), was a living ship, and a LOT of episode plots revolved around something unexpected happening with her. Granted she was a biological ship, but the premise is still sound. For example, she was previously in the hands of that shows equivalent of the Empire, and they did experiments on her. We don't find this out until much later in the show, when the crew accidentally remove a limiter that was put on Moia, and the resulting effect was she ends up pregnant. Needless to say, nobody on the ship was expecting this, so they had to try and now deal with this surprise from their ship.

You could easily do similar things with the ship. Have it be something they come across by chance, like how Finn and Rey get the Falcon by the fact that it's the only non-exploded ship at that moment. That way, there can be all kinds of weird stuff that they have no idea about. I played in a pbp game for a bit, and our ship was "loaned" to our pilot by a criminal cartel, as part of his obligation debt, and they put a lot of added....features, that we didn't like at all.

So there's definitely precedent for doing it, but unless the party has a big focus on starflight related stuff, I'd try and limit the surprises to things that will point them to plot hooks elsewhere, and not stuff that directly relates to the ship as much.

On 2/12/2018 at 9:25 AM, KungFuFerret said:

Yeah, but it could make for some great plot hooks down the road.

OT: As for some ideas, and the viability of it, there's lots of ways you could justify it, the easiest being that they are getting this ship 2nd/3rd/4th/5th hand, and the people who had it before them, tweaked things, but didn't bother to tell anyone. If you've ever watched the show Farscape, the ship they had, Moya (or Moia, I forget), was a living ship, and a LOT of episode plots revolved around something unexpected happening with her. Granted she was a biological ship, but the premise is still sound. For example, she was previously in the hands of that shows equivalent of the Empire, and they did experiments on her. We don't find this out until much later in the show, when the crew accidentally remove a limiter that was put on Moia, and the resulting effect was she ends up pregnant. Needless to say, nobody on the ship was expecting this, so they had to try and now deal with this surprise from their ship.

First rule of rp is fun use rolls but if I need to walk up some stairs an athletics check can go twist off.

Same for ships give the players reasonable fun but always reach for more.... Like missiles.