Ship combat: who can do what?

[Vortex]

In ship combat, people can only occupy one role per round. That means that if you don't have enough people for all the stations, you have to move people from round to round because (for example): a gunner can't make a sensor roll.

But everyone can make a computer use roll and computer use can replace all the operations rolls (at -4). To me, that means, you can do things from other stations if you use computer use. Is that the case?

In my game, there were only 3 people piloting the ship, the CO, a gunner and a pilot. On the first round, the pilot was at the sensor instead to establish initiative and try to get a lock. So I let the CO do the piloting with computer use. It works but something seams weird. Especially since it means that a single crewmember with exceptional computer use could do pretty much everything.

 

[Gabriel_Luna]

I ran into this problem in the past, and I think it boils down to a "speed of plot" issue. If the ship was designed to run with a small crew, well a small crew should be able to run it. If it's a warship with hundreds of crew, three people probably shouldn't be able to pilot it.

But then if they HAVE to be able to pilot it, you should probably let them. Impose some penalties for doing two things at once, point out they can hire a crew at the next port, but if it keeps the plot moving, I'd say let 'em have it.

How we solved it was to simply assume some stations had multiple uses. Depending on the situation and level of your PCs, you might impose a -4 or even -8 if they are trying to run sensors and pilot at the same time, but it seems to make sense that navigation would have a sensor console as well. Or that the CO would have access to the sensors, or whatever you need to kludge together to make sure the party doesn't die in the black of space. And once they got to a port, they had several NPCs to choose from to hire as crew and it wasn't a problem next time.