Wednesday 7 December 2016

Utility Closet: Spaceship Character Sheet

The last campaign I ran was space opera, set in the Endless Space universe. Being space opera, the players had a starship of their very own. It was more than a means of transportation – it was where they hung their hats and charged their power cells, where they slept and kept their stuff, and where they brought their prisoners (my players were quite sensible about not fighting to the death). The main problem of starships is that they have all sorts of statistics and resources to keep track of; power, fuel, reaction mass, rations, weapons, ammunition, etc. It got confusing for me to keep track of these on separate papers or files, so after the campaign ended I drew up plans for a record sheet to use if I ran another space opera game.

I posted it a while ago on the official GURPS forums, with minimal interest shown, though the one person who replied had some very useful input. Now that I have a blog that people seem to read, I thought I'd share it to a wider audience. This is only the second iteration, so I'm mostly looking for feedback, critique and improvements at this point; what more would you want in a spaceships' character sheet? Tables for quick references? More empty boxes for keeping track of miscellaneous things? Have I left out something huge? Obviously there's lots of empty space; my hope is to be able to fill it while keeping the sheet both attractive, simple and clean, and useful. Please let me know in the comments!

2 comments:

  1. It's a pretty solid design so far. I don't have time to really look at it now, but it looks very good in general.

    I'll try to give more useful feedback later.

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    1. I'm putting together a Star-Trek inspired game right now and something like this will be much better organized for players to view, rather than the system-by-location outline form I made up. Some of the things I'd like to see added to this would be a small craft section for shuttles or fighters and the like. Also, either another block to define the crew, or alternately a line in each section to define the crew for each section (so the performance block would have a line to write in the drive crews, weapons would have a line for gunners/guntechs, accommodations would have a line for life support/hospitality staff, etc.)

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