I see under Crew Improvements that you can increase crew morale through things like giving them nice uniforms, but how do I increase my crew rating from a default (30) to (40) at ship creation? How do I do it once the ship is made and gameplay begins?

You can spend 5 ship points to start at 40, and 15 (!) to start at 50. There is a piece of archaeotech - cogitator interlink which gives you +5 crew rating. There is a ship role (master bosun?) from Into the Storm which gives you +5 rating.

Post creation, there is a ship upgrade in into the storm - Crew Improvement, which at best quality gives you +5 crew rating.

There may be other ways.

I think some of it is just GM fiat, or if the PC invest off-time into training the crew. I.e the Rogue Trader, Arch Militant and Void Master devise a plan to train and drill the crew to be more battle ready and efficient.

Also, I'd say winning ship to ship battles with low crew losses is also a good "indicator" of the crew getting more experienced.

You could also make for a likely port and treat it as an Acquisition (either drafting more specialists to fill out and stiffen your existing crew, or paying for experts to come and train your crew up further, or discharge and pay off your original crew and hiring a new crew. A better crew).

Others have already said how it works at creation.

Afterwards I'd probably base it on the best quality crew improvements, making the skill bonus it provides stackable and allow buying it several times for a ship to slowly increase crew ratings in incerements of five. The morale bonus would only work once, or maybe only add a single point of morale after buying it the first time. There would be a minimum of time (either ooc or ic) that has to pass between each crew improvement, which increases in line with their rating (the higher the rating, the longer the next improvement takes). Specific actions ingame and roleplaying out some elements might make the roll easier or decrease the time needed for the next raise.

We use this system in the online game i'm running:

Acquisition of CREW

The crew you need to operate a standard Imperium of Man spaceship is vast. Add to this a diversity of needed skills and talents required. The difficulty of this task depends on 3 factors:

• Quality
• Ship Class Larger ship = more crew per Population point
• Location of Recruiting Effort

Note that acquiring crew beyond a ship's max population is not normally allowed.

Also, CREW are acquired in blocks of 5 population points.

To acquire crew, use the 3 tables and combine the effects.

Quality

• Incompetent +30
• Competent +10
• Crack -30
• Veteran -40
• Elite -50

Ship Class

Crew Population (for 5 points of Crew Population)

• Merchant, Raider, Frigate -5
• Light Cruiser, Cruiser -10
• Battle Cruiser, Grand Cruiser -15
• Battleship -20

Location of Recruiting Effort

• Population
• <100,000 -30
• <500,000 -10
• <1,000,000 -5
• 2,000,000 +5
• 5,000,000+ +10
• 50,000,000+ +15
• 100,000,000+ +20
• 1 Billion+ +30
• 10 Billion+ +50

World Type Modifier

• Hive World +10
• Agri-World +0
• Forge World +10
• Mining World -30
• Developing World -30
• Feudal World +20 (Incompetent Crew ONLY)
• Feral World +30 (Incompetent Crew ONLY)
• Shrine World -30
• Cemetery World -30
• Pleasure World -30
• Quarantined World -30
• War World +0
• Dead World (Impossible)
• Death World -30
• Frontier World -30
• Forbidden World -30
• Xenos World (Impossible)
• Artificial Construct +5

Time

• 1d10+5 days Plus 2 days per 5 points beyond the first and
• -1 day per success, max -5 days for 5 total successes

Splendid Results

For every success on the Acquisition Test you gain an extra crew point. These bonus points are lost if the extra points would bring the ship population over 100.

Disappointing Results

For every FAILURE on the Acquisition Test you lose one crew point PER BLOCK of 5 crew being acquired in the test. These lost points ONLY affect the blocks of crew you are trying to recruit, not those already aboard your ship. It is possible to FAIL an acquisition test for crew and STILL get some crew points out of the effort even though it still takes the same amount of time to resolve the acquisition.

Failure -1 per 5
Failure by 1 Degree -2 per 5
Failure by 2 Degrees -3 per 5
Failure by 3 Degrees -4 per 5
Failure by 4 Degrees (ZERO crew acquired)
Example:
Lord Captain Abeena fails her acquisition test by 3 points. Of the 10 points of crew she was attempting to acquire only 8 were acquired. If she had failed the test by 20 only 6 points in total would have been acquired.

Example of CREW ACQUISITION:

The Lord Captain of Silverfish wants to acquire crew at Port Gades to re-crew his wounded vessel's population when they arrive. His PF is 34.

He wants 5 points (-10 for Cruiser Class) of Competent (+10 Quality) Crew at Port Gades (+5 for 2+ Million Population and +5 for Artificial Construct).

He needs to roll a 44 or less. He rolls a 34 and for time to recruit a 11 (1d10+5: 7+5 = 12 days -1 for 1 success). The Lord Captain had Splendid Results and gained 6 Crew points in the acquisition (succeeded by 1 degree of success).

bobh,

How does that system work with upgrading your crew? Do you need to replace your lower rating crew in its entirety to gain the benefit?

If you replace some of your crew of a feudal or feral world does that immediately drop your crew rating down to incompetent, or do you have some pro-rated system you use?

what my last Gm did for crew rating is that the rogue trader can increase the rating by 1 for every 100 xp spent, you can do that. or reward it for a really impressive combat or series of actions out side of combat. Though becuase the ship's crew gains no xp which i find kind of odd given that in reality the crew would gain experiance over time and become better at there duties unless you have some bad luck and suffer heavy losses

What if you let the crew act as separate "characters" with their own skill improvements. So you could buy "Expert Torpedo Loaders to get a +10 bonus to reloading torpedoes for instance or a skill for giving +5 when going full ahead. Somewhat the same way crew improvements worked in BFG. I would keep the bonuses low so as not to make crew rating more important than the ship itself. Still I think the crew should be just as important as the ship and player characters.

It always annoyed me that you rolled the player characters full skill + ship components. The crew should be just as important as PCs in shipboard actions. The problem is the system is balanced for PCs + ship components. If you tacked up an additional modifier it would be too easy to succeed and if you gave lots of negative modifiers it would grow too complicated.

Haven't got time to stat up such a system with advance schemes and the like myself but il throw the idea out here so if anyone is interested feel free to give it a try.

bobh said:

Consider this yoinked.

Moribund said:

I keep track of how many points of crew a ship has and their quality - each point is roughly 1,000 crew. That way if a ship (cruiser) with 100,000 crew (100 points) is competent, to get it to crack (i think thats next level up) you need 51 points of crew to raise the competence level to crack. Casualties come equally from each group of points (comp vs incomp for example), choosing worst first if only one point is scored in an entire battle. If more than one point is take in a battle i just alternate. Then recalculate crew quality after the battle.

Okay, that works but seems like it requires a lot of bookkeeping.

How's this for an alternative, doing a weighted average of the crew ratings:

(Old Crew Rating * Old Crew Population + Purchased Crew Rating * Purchased Crew Population) / New Crew Population

So if you have 70 Crew Population of Competent Crew (30), and you buy 30 population of Crack Crew (40), your new crew rating is (30*70+40*30)/100 = 33

Round the new crew rating to the nearest whole number.

Maybe there should be a morale penalty for firing more than a quarter of your crew at a time.

Moribund said:

Its just a tally sheet and I keep track of it all on hidden pages on the forum I run the game on.

Oh and the Rogue Trader upgraded his crew on a transport, kept them in the holds and is using them as colonists on the next planet they visit (they plan to conquer it). Fire who? Use em.

Just how high have people been impvoring their crew ratings anyway?

There's a few factors to remember. If you press gang or just constantly recruit new crew, you won't have any veteran crew left and you're ships rating thus couldn't possibly go up, no matter how skilled the replacement workers were. Ship operation isn't about recruiting people with high attributes (as seems to be hinted at by the suggestion that the crew should gain XP to raise their stats), instead it is learnt through rote. A gun crew may not fully understand how the mechanisms they operate truly work, and the gunnery officer will only have a basic understanding, but they know exactly which chains to pull, where the shells go etc. This doesn't require understanding, merely compliance with orders. You'll find a fairly large portion of a crew will be illiterate commoners.

The system in RAW for starting with a crew of up to 50 rating is sufficient i find, especially when you consider how high you can stack the bonuses that a character can grant through extended actions. You can often get your crews chance of success on certain actions into the high 70 or 80%. I think if any system should be implemented for increasing crew quality it should be though NOT replacing crew members. If you start off with 100 population points on a frigate with 25,000 crew, that's about 250 crew per point. So if you lose between 3 and 5 points of population during a starship encounter, that's between 750 and 1250 crew dead. That's going to have an impact on how well a work crew operates, either from an entire work detail being wiped out when their section is hit or, if the damage is spread out, a handful of casualties from every work crew. Either way that is not conducive to a team operating efficiently and improving their 'rating'.

I think a better system would be to say that for every point of profit factor gained during and endevour in which the crew DIDN'T lose more points of population than the profit factor gained, that the crews rating increases by a single point.
So for example if an endevour awards 3 profit upon completion, and your crew only lost 2 points of population, they would raise their effective rating by 3 points. Had they lost 3 or more points of population, they would not have had any chance to improve their operations and thus remain stagnant.

Conversely, i'd also argue that if you constantly replenish your crew after horrific casualties that their rating should actually drop. An elite ex-navy raider with a crew of 15,000 (150 crew per point of population) that is regularly losing 5 or more points per encounter (750 crew) would slowly lose efficiency as veteran crew died off to be replaced by green recruits. So maybe saying that in any endevour where the crew lost more points than double the profit gained, that they lose 1 point of rating per point of population lost beyond double-profit gained. So in the above example where 3 profit was gained, if the crew population had decreased by 7 points, their rating would go down by 1 point [7 - (3 profit x 2 = 6) = 1].

Crew DIES. A LOT. Get skragged by a few lucky shots and your Dauntless will need twenty points after a battle. It sucks but it has to be looked at. And my system DOES account for crew loss, replacements being lesser or greater quality, et cetera. Also, you can use the system I use for prize crews to determine what the rating of the resulting crew will be.