Running Drinax, my PCs are at the point where they've got an additional ship and crew in their meager 'Fleet'. So far they have assigned this ship to plod a route from Clarke to Palindrome and back playing pirate, while the PCs take care of the main missions. At some point every couple of months they plan to meet up and divide the spoils.
Since this seems to be an obvious strategy for this campaign, I can only assume other GMs have dealt with a similar situation and I can see this getting out of hand once they have multiple other ships doing the same thing. I'm wondering what other GMs have done to easily generate results for ship-encounters/combat/booty for the NPC driven ships in a way that doesn't require myself or the PCs to roll through fully fleshed out encounters.
I know there are random encounter tables, but I'm looking for suggestions for things like: roll 2d to determine encounter, roll 2d to determine if combat/boarding ensued, roll 2d for success/failure in combat/boarding, roll on random booty table for spoils or ship damage table if the combat roll failed.
Maybe I've just worked out what I'm looking for above, but I'm still interested in other people's approach here.
Thanks!
Since this seems to be an obvious strategy for this campaign, I can only assume other GMs have dealt with a similar situation and I can see this getting out of hand once they have multiple other ships doing the same thing. I'm wondering what other GMs have done to easily generate results for ship-encounters/combat/booty for the NPC driven ships in a way that doesn't require myself or the PCs to roll through fully fleshed out encounters.
I know there are random encounter tables, but I'm looking for suggestions for things like: roll 2d to determine encounter, roll 2d to determine if combat/boarding ensued, roll 2d for success/failure in combat/boarding, roll on random booty table for spoils or ship damage table if the combat roll failed.
Maybe I've just worked out what I'm looking for above, but I'm still interested in other people's approach here.
Thanks!