Ttrpg combat tends to suck. It's either a crunchy mess invariably buckling under its own mess (and the fine line between codified maths and the freedom of roleplaying) or, in lighter, more narrative systems, reduced to a simple skill check, with half of them games still treating combat as their primary action encounter type, just content in having it be a simple roll-off with no texture.
I've got a lot of thoughts about that, but today I've had a far more specific one: about how spaceship combat is so common, with all the sci-fi systems around, but usually sucking extra hard.
The issue here is that the game wants all the players to have something to do, but with starships being bolted on top of a Space Dudes Doing Dude Things in Space framework, this usually boils down to everyone being responsible for one type of dice roll, granting some bonus based on personal skills. The problem here is that there's usually just two verbs that matter: Shoot and Move, which is not really enough to sustain niches for the entire party.
So we either get designers shrugging and saying "let everyone do the same combat roll and call it an exiciting scene" or jumping through hoops to carve out niches for everyone, oftentimes ending up mushing all of the possible verbs into a singular textureless goop of some samey abstract advantage for the final resolution.
But hey, it just so happens I spent the last year working on a game about managing a sports vehicle and juicing the move verb for all its worth. Some thoughts collided and now I'm left wondering if there would be enough juice in the Wartime Adventures of a Tank Crew little genre to sustain a game?