Abstracting vehicle combat.

[starslayer]

I am currently putting together a 'hellboy meets pirates of the Caribbean' style game, and one of the factors that I was thinking about was;

'I really don't want to bog this game down with detailed stats for the ships'.

Quite frankly I want the actions of the PCs to directly determine if they win/loose and how badly they get bruised up when engaging in vehicular combat (rather than the statistics of the vehicle itself).

This is very common in fiction; it does not matter if the enterprise is utterly outclassed by its foe, the quick thinking of the crew allows them to defeat the evil aliens; further there is somewhat horrifying concept that all 'ship damage' should be transferred to crew injury and death while leaving the ship at full health, assuming that someone can whip up enough fervor and have the charismatic leadership required to get the crew past their demoralizing loss somehow they can pull the thing together and re-enter the fray.

The following are my experimental rules for this- it is NOT intended to be anything even approaching realistic, but is meant to allow the sort of setting where a skilled pilot in a tie-fighter CAN in fact take out a capital ship.

I am very open to suggestions on how to refine this and improve it, also feel free to point out any faults in my concept.

The basic idea behind it is that the ships will have VERY minimal stats, and the 'action' stats are merely bonuses/penalty to skill- it will come down to 'commanders' at 'stations' making leadership and control rolls to make things happen.

If people are interested I can post a few worked examples of what I think a ship should look like under this system; right now everything is 'age of sail' flavored, but it's a pretty simple name swap to make it for almost any other setting.

Ship to ship combat.
Rather than bog the system down with completely separate vehicle stats ship to ship combat will be largely abstracted, focusing on the actions and leadership of key crew members.
Ships have simple stats:

HP - How much damage the ship can absorb
DR - Thickness of hull, absolute damage absorbed
Crew- Number of crew currently serving on the ship
Crew - Man - How many crew are required to manuver the boat
Crew - Cannons - how many crew are required to man the cannons
Crew - Speed- how many crew are required to man the sails
Man - Gives a bonus/penalty to control rolls
Cannons - Gives a bonus/penalty to cannoneering rolls
Speed - How fast the ship moves

Ship to ship actions:
Bombard - quick contest of skill between gunner(cannons) and sailing(ship), MoS damage to both crew and ship HP
Chain Shot - quick contest of skill between gunner(cannons) and sailing(ship), MoS damage to crew and MoS penalty to manuverability until a repair roll takes place
Grapeshot -  Quick contest of skill between gunner(cannons) and Sailing(ship), 2x MoS damage to crew, ¼ MoS damage to ship HP
Flame Shot - Quick contest of skill between gunner(cannons) and sailing(ship), 1/2xMoS damage to crew and 2x MoS to ship HP
Explosive Shot - Quick Contest of skill between gunner(cannons) and sailing(ship) 3x MoS Damage to crew 3x MoS to ship HP- Requires follow up roll of Engineering(weapons) at a penalty equal to the gunner(cannons) MoS.  MoFx5 crew lost from cannons (Spill over goes to general crew), MoF damage to ship.
Board - If one ship has zero speed (due to having no crew on speed currently) and is within speed distance, it can be boarded with a quick contest of Sailing(ship) vs Leadership [to see if the downed ship can get people on the masts faster than the other ship can get on top of them).
Ram- It is a LONG action of Sailing(ship) vs Sailing(Ship) requiring an accumulated 25 success points.  Cannons cannot be fired during this period


Crew actions
Leadership- After any crew loss from ships systems a PC can take a leadership roll as an action and move MoS crew from general service to specific posts.

Fix- After any ship damage a PC can roll Mechanic(sailing ship) to repair MoS/4 HP to the ship (Gadgeteer1 turns this to MoS/2 and Gadgeteer 2 turns this to MoS), you can default this from Carpentry -3 or engineer(sailing ship) -3.

Rally- Taking a turn to rally and prepare crew rolling the lower of leadership and the trait you are trying to raise adds MoS to that trait next turn.