Best Design

[Kehlin Yew]

i agree about the whole blink of an eye kind of thing.... but if your PCs are getting better stuff, whose to say someone won't see it and start hounding them about where they've gotten it, or start coming after thier stuff more often?

And then if they're getting good stuff, it gives the gm the chance to expand even more, stronger NPCs.. things like that.

[Boomer]

I always look at it this way.
There is a HUGE diffrence between the mass produced, and the high performance. The 1 million spent on the freighter got them a nice, well rounded craft. Than they spend a few more millions and convert it into a high-end speedster/assualt vehicle. It took a lot longer to install those new parts than it did to actually build the craft, and the cost has been multipled severely.

And the party is not the only ones capable of doing this. The Falcon we all know and love is a good example of a severly tweaked craft that can out-preform almost anything else on the market by vast sums. If only it wern't for the myriad of other problems it was plagued with.

Just about anyone who invests the time and money can be about three steps ahead of the off-the-shelf competition.
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My backpack has jets!
I'm Boba the Fett!
And I bounty hunt for Jabba Hutt,
to finance my 'vette!

[Lord Aramus]

Thats why I have always loved the tramp freighters guide, lovely book that covers exactly the woes that come from rampant ship mods.


and as for some of the other thoughts.. one of my favorite tricks in any setting is to give the party access to ancient but advanced technology or a researching breakthrough.

Sure it allows them to own all over your campaign for a short while, but once that reputation as "capital ship killer" gets around, certain criminal and governmental agencies get real interested in what allowed your Ghtroc Freighter to take down an imperial bulk cruiser.

Some of my best "aaaaugh, run, its another pirate armada!!!!" campaigns have started out that way
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[Jedi Skyler]

Plus, remember the Sun Crusher. That sucker has a hull rating of 50D! No one could agree on what should be done with the thing, so they plunged it into the heart of Yavin. Of course, that didn't stop a 4000 year old Sith lord from getting his apprentice strapped into it, but it was finally dropped into a black hole. If you have something uber-powerful, you're going to have everyone and their brother chasing you down to get the tech from you in some way or another: Ask for it, try to steal it, try to kill you and then steal it, or simply blow it out of the sky so no one can have it. So you either have to deal with that, or you'll end up having to deal with some other kind of drawback to balance the fact that you have this totally kick-butt ship that'll clean just about every clock in the galaxy. Otherwise there's no fun, no suspense, no question about who's going to win. You have to be at least able to die, or there's no risk, hence no reason to play.

[scott2978]

I prefer not to even read the post-movie books, much less include their crazy uber-ships like the Sun-Crusher in my game. I've designed a ship or two before, but when I go to that length for a ship or even a speeder to make it really detailed, I think it's important to give the ship some character as well as just a deckplan. Like, what makes this ship unique? Even if it's a run-of-the-mill tramp freighter, it should have something that makes it unique if it's so important in your game that it has a deckplan. for one ship I designed, part of the ship was converted into an entertainment center, complete with a transperisteel wall and a dance floor with a disco globe and a gigantic holoprojector stocked with all the latest holomovies. The name of the ship should have some significance too. Either a sentimental tie-in to the owner or to the ship's own past, or something like that. The Milenium Falcon doesn't follow this model, but it does follw my idea that the ship should be like a character and not just a piece of equipment. In an RPG it makes the surroundings seem more real if they have a significance and a tie-in with other things in the world, even if those other things aren't in your game. Like giving the ship a big patch of hull that's the wrong color because once-upon-a-time it was damaged in a big battle of some local importance.

Just want to mention here that designing a ship for an rpg group includes more than just stats and deckplans, the game will be more fun if the ship has character too.

[Jedi Skyler]

[Rahl Jynco]

Here's a link to one of my custom ships, the first one is the stock version, feel free to use it, the modified version was made for a bounty hunter.

http://www.rancorpit.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=558

If your a GM that always GM's and never plays a PC, I recomend making a Starship Engineer and doing all the rolls yourself, take all the failures and add days to the cost as if your totaling your payment from a customer.
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Drive It like you stole it...

I deal with temptation by giving in...

[Jedi Skyler]

Those look pretty good, Rahl!