sgtarbuckle's page

The problem with using ship mass/size for skill DCs is that there is no real need to make your ship bigger at higher levels. You would generally have to be of higher level if you want to make your ship bigger, but if you don't want to make your ship bigger, there is no real reason to do so -- especially if all of your skill DCs are getting easier because your ship is staying the same size.

If the ship stat that controls skill DCs is in any way under player control, the players will have a strong incentive to keep that stat as low as possible, whatever it may be.

I really don't see that as a problem. If the players don't want a larger ship I don't think they should be railroaded into having one. And really I doubt any of my players are going to want to go too large anyway with the logistic considerations that come with it. The point of characters progressing is that they get better at doing things. And the heart of the original discussion I believe was why characters are being penalized for making their ship better.

We are talking about special maneuvers here which would logically scale in difficulty with the frame size of the ship. I haven't run the numbers on this yet and I'd be curious if anyone has but I'm wondering how many levels or tiers would it take to max out the upgrades on say a medium frame ship? My thought being that you can only pack so much gear into a certain frame size.

So just pulling numbers out of the air...am I going to max out a medium frame ship at tier 11 or 12 or so and because my party doesn't want to have to hire extra crew to run a larger ship then the PCs continue to level up and not invest to raise the tier of their ship further. If that's the case the PCs skills of course continue to increase thus making special maneuvers easier. Following this line if they then decide to increase the tier of their ship they're going to have to go to a larger frame size and with the increase in tier the DCs increase but the size of the frame increases as well...which you could argue is a logical progression for the DC increase.

I don't believe the intent was that PCs are REQUIRED to increase the tier of their ship unless they choose to. If we look at the ship examples presented in the CRB it seems more the case that a ship can exist at whatever tier sort of in a vacuum. In other words a ships teir is more along the lines of a tech level or how "good" it is.