| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
After listening to Jason Tondro's Fly Free or Die Developer Diary series as far as it has gotten, he talked about the meta-universe effect of the sort of publishing standard of placing new spacecraft on the back inside cover of adventures, and how it has created fat, flat spacecraft being the defacto norm for many adventure, and how he'd like to see things switched up a bit.
Certainly, you can make the effort to make them sleek and slender and/or push them to be two story and find a way to split up the page to put the multiple floors on it. You can also push for less symmetrical and more bizarre designs for the uniqueness. But I know that all could have impacts their sort of informal standard (a page for the starship), and likewise would have other impact on page counts and layout for instance.
However, I'm also wondering if in some cases a basic design could make a ship feel far more two dimensional by doing even some minor things on a normal map. Such as the dotted lines on the Oliphant that was intended to represent the greater storage due to the new technology equipped on it.
I'm also thinking what would stop you from having a corridor with staterooms off to each side, pictured as a single map, but show how the main corridor's hall to the stateroom splits, one portion heading up steeply and the other down steeply. With a pair of basically identical staterooms stacked on top of each other than one is a half-floor down, and the other half-floor up and the doors are offset a bit in the horizontal. This can even include having a corridor opening into a area (science lab) and have clues that show this portion of the ship/chamber or system is much taller, potentially showing an upper catwalk, or coloration to show it is labeled as a 3 story tall cargo bay, with tether points on the walls etc.
I guess my point is, I don't know that all levels have to be separately mapped in all cases. Having important parts mapped, and somehow showing there is a layer of storage accessible at 13 points above the main floor that range in partial height to almost double height at certain spots might be enough to help give a more 3-dimensional feel.
Also trying to remember give a lateral view of the ship on the map might help encourage them to be less 'routinely' a fat, flat, symmetrical wedge. (with a corner cut out for both the compass point and the legend)
Even encouraging it to be build with a sort of split level, where technically not more than one floor at any one place, it would help the design be more 3 dimensional and varied, and things like engines and other infrastructure of the ship can explain other depth not otherwise being specifically mapped.
For some designs, what is wrong with instead of a traditional flat map like a blueprint, it is a map with labeled components representing the ships rooms and passages or other rooms/components with arrows marking where this bulkhead is the same as the one there. Where that design lets you have doors in the floors and ceilings reasonably depicted and used, without worrying about flipping pages or counting squares. You have the components that are nearby one another depicted nearby. Especially if much of the shape or surrounding space is not character accessible anyway, so you don't have to have it on a flat 2d blueprint grid type map.
I love the idea of some more varied craft designs, but I'm wondering what are some ways to open up and display these new designs that would be easy to interpret, and use in adventures.
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Also, the current format for ship maps tends to make them all the same size range too. I'd love to see some of the bigger ships mapped out. Might have to do a general layout map not to combat scale, then have the battle maps for areas where encounters take place.
I think the largest practical size for a ship at battle map scale would be to have a ship that takes up 2 or 3 standard fold-out maps places end to end.
Bigger ships could take up an entire book of maps. Would be cool to have an AP that's based around a large mother ship the PC live on.
The real problem is that printed (2D) representation just always fall rather flat to me.
I am an engineer who works in AutoDesk Inventor and flies through 3D models all day, and so a 3D model like that would be amazing (please note, Inventor would not be a good a program for this, but some 3D CAD program probably is).
However, then you make computers mandatory for a table top role playing game.
Of course, I can't say that I don't want Starfinder/Pathfinder to be translated into a computer based medium to be played with friends. And the Owl Cat games are good, but they simplify certain things and the game loses some of it's charm in the process.
|
|
It's very possible in Second Life to do that, the problem is once you have built it in 3D it seems funny to play it on a VTT. I scripted my own VTT in Second life and others have made them as well. There's even a virtual version of GenCon in Second Life that runs parallel to the real convention. When I was reading Junkers Delight I wanted to what it would feel like to be on a red planet with lower gravity, so I built part of it and scripted a gravity override. I have friends in Second Life that do Star Trek RP and have full-size ships set up for it but there doing live-action, not VTT style.
Second life would also be a good platform to do live streaming from.