Iām of the mind that āCrewā as a concept is too varied to treat as a mere Asset. Thereās a world of difference between Players who want:
- a nameless faceless crew under their command
- a trusted contact
- a personalized team
- a robot to follow them around
- or a Chewbacca for their Han Solo
Thereās also a sliding scale of a Player being fine to have crew as an NPC vs a Player wanting a companion that they have control over, like a space wizard and their familiar. And in a similar vein, as you say, the issue of investing in Crew possibly feeling like a detriment or dud based on the GM. Personally, I think the only way to fix this is to always have Crew be under the control of the Player, with clearly defined mechanics as to what they can do.
As an aside, perhaps generating Crew, in whatever form they might take, could be a part of character creation? The galaxy is a big place, and no matter how much of a loner you might be, everyone knows at least someone. This has the advantage of fleshing out backgrounds and giving the GM story hooks to use, as well as signaling early on for the players that the presence of crew should be something they think about (e.g. it should be discussed whether having teams of people onboard the ship fits with the planned tone and setting of the game). Not to mention that Crew could really gum up a Shipās components, in the sense that the Playersā Ship potentially needs to have living space for all of them, if everyone chooses to have Crew onboard the ship rather than as contacts. So it really benefits the game to think about this as soon as possible.
I like how Companions ( http://companions-aw.org/ ) handles its āThe Commanderā playbook, which has the Player being the leader of a small team. You can have a maximum of 3 characters in your team, but can increase the max size through advancement. You divide 3 āesteemā among the Team members, with each character starting at 0 esteem, and you raise a single characterās esteem by 1 every time you advance. When a character reaches 1 esteem they gain a āspecialtyā, which allows them to use a single Move in your stead or at your command, and they roll with +esteem. They get +1 forward to this move if their specialty matches yours. Any consequence happens to them instead of you, and you canāt gain any experience from their actions.
To adapt this mechanic for UW, one idea might be that Crew always matches one of the Careers, but they only have one half of their Career Move. For example, an Academic Crew might be able to āanalyze biological, political, or economic dataā, but be unable to āinspect debris, damage, materials, or artifactsā. And if a Player doesnāt want multiple crew members, perhaps they can spend multiple āCrew Slotsā on a single Crew to give them more abilities. A Player could also choose to assign their starting Assets to their Crew, such as having a Protocol Droid Crew with a built-in (Cybernetics) universal language translator.
Of course, these ideas donāt really handle large āTeamā/āFacelessā Crews. But maybe itās better to always treat such groups as pure NPCs that will generally follow the commands of the player characters to the best of their abilities, with outcomes dictated according to and appropriate to the narrative. After all, they arenāt necessarily all loyal to you, and thereās issues of how to track damage for the group, etc.
