Philosophy

Deckplan Philosophy

There are many people out there who construct deck plans. We each have our own philosophy on the subject. A basic outline of mine may be helpful to anyone with questions, or a general interest.
I create deck plans for use with the Star Wars Roleplaying Game (personally WEG 2nd Ed since I loath corporate mismanagement of a social hobby) and I started creating them for a couple of reasons. Firstly I became fascinated at a young age with the concept of them. I have spent many hours gazing at the Millennium Falcon blue prints found in the Star Wars Sourcebook. (Little did I know I was taking the first steps into trying to solve the riddle of the ship.)
When I started gaming Star Wars (at age eleven, in 1987) very soon I was having to doodle maps of all kinds. My fondness for ships led me to start doing better sketches of these vessels between adventures. It all started there.

1: It allows players to navigate the ship with ease.
It should be absolutely obvious where the hatches are, what fire arcs there are, how they can get from A to B, and what options there are to do so. Basic navigation is the SOLE purpose of actual real world deck plans, anyone who tells you otherwise has misunderstood a few basic concepts. Deck plans are different from technical diagrams because of this hugely important function. As such the only areas of a ship I depict are those that are normally occupied by the crew and passengers.

2: It provides a quick orienting function for players.
Players can see straight away what kind of 'feel' the ship has. It may be confined and functional, or luxurious and expansive. It could be almost anything, but a player can see much of that straight away from a good plan.

I've occasionally received criticism for not including the locations and graphical representations of the equipment and essential mechanisms of the ships, such as the alluvial dampeners, or the positive flow charge vents. You won't find the shield generators, or comms arrays depicted anywhere on most of my plans. This is quite deliberate. Firstly to do so would be contrary to the first purpose of a deckplan; it quite simply is NOT necessary to know the actual location of the quantum field analyser for any kind of game play on the ship that doesn't directly relate to the thing, even then most game play that directly involves it will have no need to have it depicted on the deckplan. In the unlikely event that it is necessary to know the location, then GMs are recommended to do one of the following;

A: The device may be located above or below the habitable deck area, in which case it's position can be drawn directly onto the deck.

B: The device may be located on the same level as the habitable deck, but not in the habitable section itself. In this case the position can be marked on any reasonable area of the ship's blue footprint.
In either case the only really important factor is that its position remains constant. It should still be where it was left barring unusual circumstances if the crew need to get to it again. I use this basic policy constantly in the games I run, for pretty much any factor. Creating completely ad lib is perfectly fine, but consistency is necessary. Simple notes allow the GM to maintain an absolutely consistent world without having to plan everything out in advance.

As far as I am concerned, the majority of ships in the Star Wars universe have been altered, fixed, changed so many times that the actual gear on board will vary widely. Given that my plans are made available for any other players it would diminish their usefulness for the equipment to be shown as it denies another GM the ability to decide for themselves where the equipment is, and what it might be.

It may be worth noting that on certain unique ships I do include the equipment, the Phoenix being a prime example.