Yeah, a dramatic scene would handle this very well. Ideas a churning!

Quick and Dirty Salvage Rules

In one of my recent games the players came across a huge ship that had been destroyed by planetary defense guns. The ship’s orbit was decaying and for this particular story it was important for them to try and find the logs of the ship to find out what had happened.

The crew first scanned the wreckage to figure out what was most likely the bridge, then used their tractor beam to stabilize it as much as possible. Then a team took a shuttle over to the hulk and boarded it.

I kept the exploration abstract. They had 3 hours to get the logs and get off the ship before it would begin to tumble and they would burn up in the atmo with the wreckage. They didn’t know exactly how long it would take to find the bridge.

I broke up the search into 15 min blocks. It would take them 1 hour to find the bridge. They could spend each 15 min to look for the bridge or other useful items. Not both. So time spent gathering loot would hinder their chances of getting to the bridge. The ship was formerly that of a scavenger race that loved their weapons. So the temptation for the crew to get more weapons or parts for their ship competed with their mission of getting the logs.

Here is the simple tables I whipped up for this session.

REMEMBER all in ZERO G (-2 to all actions)

Each 15 min GM rolls 2d6 – on an 8 or higher roll 1d6
1-2 deck plate concussion d3 damage to all on ship
3-4 plasma conduit blows (varies, might be damage or block progress)
5 part of ship near group breaks apart separating everyone
6 surviving enemy toughs in armored space suits
 
Each 15 min spent searching make one Mind + Career roll. Let players designate who rolls.
If successful find roll 1d6:
On a 1-5
1 archaic kinetic pistol
2 archaic kinetic rifle
3 DEW beam carbine
4 frag grenade
5 graviton grenade
6 Implosion Grenade, D6 but all sucked to center point.

On a 6
Salvage that can be used for repairs takes 1D in 15min blocks to remove and get back to the Grypon.
1 turret (guns)
2 sensors (NavCom)
3 thrusters
4 shields
5 ECM
6 TACOM

Salvage Rules: each time one of the above items is found they act as a boon die to repair rolls for that system on the starship. Example: twice ECM equipment is found. The next two repair rolls for ECM repair get a boon die.
 

Last edited by jasales (3/16/2015 5:03 am)

These are great. The only thing I would change is the ability for teamwork. Rather than just designating a player to roll the search I would allow other players to roll with a success granting a +1 mod for the actual search roll. A Mighty Success could grant a +2 and a Legendary Success could grant a +3.

On top of this you could allow a similar situation for finding the Bridge. The characters could split up in to teams and coordiante their search - rather than saying that it takes one hour (or four 15 min blocks of searching) you could say that the team needs a combined tally of X amount of successes (with a potential difficulty of +/-X to each search roll). Again, successes are measured by the Task Check - a successful die roll gives one success, a Mighty Success could count as two successes and a Legendary Success could give three successes to the total. The players could assign a specific team to make the search roll but the other teams could help modify the difficulty of that roll as described above.

You could also say that a critical failure means they have to start again.

It still requires the players to make difficult decisions but it does actually allow for the possibilty of a skilled team finding the bridge quicker than a less skilled salvage team.

Last edited by The GIT! (3/16/2015 8:14 am)

jasales wrote:

@The GIT! - all excellent enhancements! I love it!

Thanks - I made some minor tweaks to my post to help clarify a couple of points. I think your idea for the salvage operation is awesome; the scenario has some potential for some really tense and dramatic moments.
 

Hi, everybody:

I'm currently writing a small Companion volume for BoV, just for fun. I'm working on new careers, new space travel systems, more weapons (thanks a lot, jasales!), etc.

One of the things I want to do is to offer more information about each career (both current and new ones):
1) a descriptions of the Attributes that career should stand out
2) which skills describe that career
3) include examples of well-known characters (from sci-fi movies, series, literature, games...) with that career

By doing this, I have realized that Agent/Spy and Corporate Executive/Political Operative are quite similar, in fact, they are too similar, since I have had problems for distinguishing which of both careers a character belongs to. So:

1) may you give me (or suggest) more information about the description of those careers?
2) if I am not the only one with that problem, maybe it would not be a bad idea to suggest nerosfiddle to check it in his rules

Bye!