[Spaceships] GURPS EVE, and related ideas . . .

[tshiggins]

Wow, that was a long delay between responses. :)

As for characters with individual ships, I suppose that could work out. It certainly works okay in Eve. It makes an RPG campaign even more about ships and combat than character interaction, which is OK, I suppose.

While you can create fully-automated ships for your campaign (or anything else you like, for that matter; it's your campaign), in Eve that's not how it works. One piece of fiction in Eve's magazine, Eon, told how crewmen thought they had great jobs, because most of the time they got paid a lot of money to do fairly routine work.

Moreover, when the fecal matter hit the whirling blades, they didn't hesitate to bail out in an escape pod, as soon as the main defenses dropped. They didn't even wait for the secondary defenses to kick in. As soon as the combat started to go against their ships, the crewmen bailed. Once the ship blew up, the insurance company sent death benefits to their families, and the crewmen signed for the next trip -- sometimes even on a ship piloted by the same person.

Rinse and repeat.

That's because the crewmen don't matter. Not in the same way the pod-pilot does. To the cybernetically-enhanced transhuman floating in the tank, the crewmen have no more meaning than any other of the ship's replaceable parts. He doesn't know them, he doesn't care to know them, and his only concern regarding them is that, when he sends commands through his mindlinks, they efficiently carry out their tasks. They're just slots that need to be filled and, as long as the slots get filled, that's all he cares about.

Eve doesn't concern itself overly much with issues of morality. It is an exercise in naked self-interest, in which cooperation is good because it increases the probability of positive outcomes. Alliances can and do shift, frequently, and today's friends are tomorrow's targets.

Some groups do engage in ethical behavior (my group is one such), but that has as much to do with annoyance at griefers as much as a desire to make New Genesis space a better place for everybody.

Eve works well as a computer game, in which nobody has to care (particularly) about anybody else who plays. However, as the basis of a table-top RPG setup, it would have some issues, I think.