Ship Captain Specialization Skills: Charm, Leadership, Negotiation and Piloting (Space)

For Ship Captains, their vessel and their crew are everything. Without them, captains are imprisoned in an incomplete existence. With both, they’re free. To protect this freedom, they demand an unmatched excellence from everyone aboard and provide the kind of leadership that gets these results. If crew members aren’t highly skilled when joining a crew, Ship Captains will push to them to become so through inspirational words and leading by example. In exchange, crew members become a family and gain access to a wealth of camaraderie, connections, and experience.

Ship Captains captain ships. It’s what they do and who they are. For most beings, investment in a vessel is an unfathomable dream. For Ship Captains, the lack of a vessel is an unbearable nightmare. Once they’ve tasted the freedom only a starship or wide-ranging skimmer can provide, it becomes impossible to return to a predictable life and a seemingly meaningless existence. Ship Captains control their own lives.

In order to live their dreams, Ship Captains rely on the contributions of an effective and close-knit crew. While they can find jobs and know the best places to sell goods, they aren’t necessarily the finest of pilots, engineers, or fighters. When needed, they can always step in to fill a vacancy in order to escape pursuit, make a temporary fix, or shoot a blaster, but the best captains have specialists to fill these roles. Such specialists tend to travel with a single captain for extended durations. As captains and crews become comfortable with each other, all members learn how best to perform their key responsibilities and where they can most effectively support everyone else. For many, this professional arrangement acts as a surrogate family structure, with the captain as parent.

As surrogate parents, Ship Captains are responsible for keeping everyone in line and for pushing them to be their best. When there is a dispute between crew members, captains resolve it. When a decision needs to be made, captains make it, and when shipmates doubt their own capabilities in a moment of crisis, captains instill them with confidence. Ship Captains themselves must be strong to earn the respect of their crews, but they cannot operate through strength and threats alone. If that strength can’t be tempered with compassion, every crew member will eventually find reasons to leave.

This compassion is one reason why some captains rebel against the injustices of the Empire. For some of them, the Empire’s human-centric policies are intolerable, as they view species, beliefs, and affiliations as largely irrelevant as long as shipmates meld with the rest of the crew and perform well. Many others see the tightening grip of the Empire as a threat to their independent existence. This threat can be even more pronounced in light of a captain and crew’s past transgressions against the Empire.

Independent and driven to stay that way, Ship Captains are dangerous threats to the Empire. No matter what role, legal or otherwise, they may have had before they gained ownership and command of a vessel, they offer much to freedom fighters. With the capability to lead strikes with effectively supported crews, they give hope to and signal the possibility of a more powerful organized resistance. Wherever they are needed, Ship Captains can get there and inspire their crews to victory.