Mass Effect Space Ship RP?

[xCRAZYxFACEx]

The idea I have is simple: the player in a one on one RP plays the role of a starship captain who commands a frigate. The captain would have several companions in the game much in the vein of the mass effect games, though a touch different for reasons I'll explain a bit later.


The main draw of the game is space combat between vessels and upgrading your ship/buying new ships. So you'd start out with a ship and a small crew, build up a bunch of companions, and upgrade the ship as you see fit. It would take money and materials to upgrade your ship, which could be earned by salvaging wrecks, trading goods, and taking on pirates. The combat would have dice rolls to see what weapons hit, how much damage is taken, what various sub-systems are doing, and how much heat is built up.


So, combat and material finding would take place as ship to ship, instead of in combat missions. Don't get me wrong, the person could rp as going in as their commander and some companions and doing an infantry fight, but that would all be done without rolls. The mechanics are ship based, the roleplaying is character based. See what I'm getting at?


My question is: how do I reconcile this? How do I keep the 'gameplay', so to speak, interesting while the player is only controlling their character? It just seems like a weird dynamic to me and I don't know if it would work or not. What I don't want is the same space battle being described over and over and over again. Any advice for this? Or do you think this is a non-issue?

 

[Lexielai]

Depends on how much you and your partner enjoy getting into the nitty-gritty of space combat. Would you be playing the GM?

 

[xCRAZYxFACEx]

I would be playing the GM, yes

 

[Lexielai]

In that case, the interesting part about combat is that you're challenged and you don't know for certain how it's going to play out. You have to set the ground rules. You get the final decision on a lot of the big moves that your partner makes in combat: how the enemy responds, whether it succeeds, if a random variable changes everything, etc. In some ways, you have to be competing to beat your partner. At the same time you want to be fair and reward him or her for making smart decisions, so you should allow for brilliant successes every now and again between failures and mediocre results from in-battle decisions.


While unlike tabletop games or video games, there is no dice or computer dictating how it plays out, you'll still be the GM and the final arbitrator of how the universe responds. You'll have to take a lot of power for yourself, and for the most part, only allow your partner to control his or her own character. That way your partner sometimes wins, sometimes loses, but is still challenged in a winnable way.