Before I ramble on about the next chapter in the design work of my starship game, I want to tell a little side story. This one is about the things which I kept wanting to add to the game and which kept dragging my design down.
The first thing I wanted to add was a rule for how many spaces of equipment a ship could hold. I was really attached to this idea. The concept I kept pursuing was each ship had a certain number of spaces and you sketched the vessel out on graph paper with one square indicating one space. Each piece of equipment took a certain number of spaces and you had to draw it in on the diagram.
The reason for this was our fiction in the game. When we played, people were always tinkering with their starships and having to find space to install a power coupler, or having to move/reconfigure a capacitor. In terms of roleplaying, it was a fun bit of fluff. In terms of actually playing, it was more complicated than it was worth for such a lighthearted game.
I struggled with the concept forever, though. For some reason I was fanatically attached to the idea of drawing a ship outline on graph paper and filling it in with Tetris shapes. I think it was from playing Mekton and Battletech, both of which were concerned with the exact number of spaces you had to build your own mech.
The other thing which stymied my attempts at the game was the concept of size. I wanted players to be able to have ships ranging from tiny fighters all the way to super star destroyers, and still be able to play on a semi-equal footing. The rules for this ranged from mere to hit modifiers to the number of hexes each size ship would occupy.
The final big roadblock was a rule about target speed affecting to hit rolls, which was popular type of rule at the time in themed wargames. I wanted the relative facing and speed of the target and attacker to impact the to hit roll. I constantly tinkered with options like modifiers and different damage charts depending on orientation. None of them did anything other than slow games down.
Eventually, I put these three demons behind me in my quest to design my game. They are far from banished, though. I still experiment with them all from time to time, especially the size category idea. Something in me still wants to see each one of those ideas realized, as if my game isn't complete without them.
