Help me love Spaceships

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by The Rampant Gamer

So, I need to get over my dislike of long turn lengths. Help me to appreciate how you keep any level of tension in a fight where you tell your players "You have ten minutes - what do you do in that time? Oh, and you can fire a whole lot of times during that timeframe, but you won't want to, because it's really quite futile and you'll run out of ammo entirely too quickly..."

Well for a start, that's not how you say it. You say, "We'll be in engagement range in 8 minutes." The reason why the turns are ten minutes apart, is because you are so far apart and moving so fast that that you have to wait to see the "whites of their eyes". And the way you can make 5 to 10 minutes tense is by dealing a little interpersonal drama into it. Ever watch Balance of Terror? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH7unYCdv6w 52 minute show representing hours of time in the story. During that 52 minutes, each ship opens fire twice. So what did they do for the rest of the time? They argued about whether this would trigger an all out war and whether they could even hope to win against the new weapons. They accused each other of being spies. They mourned their dead. They did damage control. They dealt with a little matter of a toxic coolant leak.