Best rules for a space trading game?

I would like to run a space-trading campaign. One where the players buy ships, travel, and buy and sell commodities while upgrading their ship and perhaps either fending off pirates or committing piracy of their own.

I am looking for a relatively lightweight set of rules, but ones that include rules for ship building, trade and galaxy generation. Class Traveller has all of this, I understand, but is not lightweight.

I have purchases the Traveller PDFs, as well as Starships & Spacemen, White Star White Box Science Fiction RPG, Thousand Suns and probably others during various DTRPG sales, but now that I have to actually READ all of this material, I am hoping you folks can point me towards the best material without me having to read all of those books. (I have skimmed most of them, but not done a deep dive yet.)

Any suggestions?

I'll recommend NEW The Science Fiction Roleplaying Game. I'm biased, but I think its quite excellent! And just $10 right now.

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/191271/NEW-The-Roleplaying-Game

The ones I've used: Classic Traveller Bk 2 & Bk 7†, T20 Traveller's Handbook, Mongoose Traveller 1E, Space Opera, Albedo (T&I/Chessex), and both editions of WEG D6's Tramp Freighters. I've also run trade based games in FFG's Edge of the Empire. I've extensively analyzed GURPS Traveller Far Trader. I've played both Firefly and Serentity RPGs; neither actually has a trade system. Spacemaster, at least the version I have, lacks one as well.

Realism: GTFT. It's grounded in 20th C trade flows. It can accurately replicate late 20th C trade flows... I think it sucks for doing traveller because they didn't do their research far enough back. But for Trek, it would be a fine representation. It's also complex, a bit awkward to use, and not terribly user friendly.

Simple Playability: WEG d6 Star Wars' Tramp Freighters. Very simple, very playable. Not very interesting, but a good baseline from which to build.

As a campaign focus, my preference is a tie between T20 Traveller's Handbook and Mongoose Traveller 1E's system. (Caveat Emptor - I had a hand in the creation of both of these.)

Some comments on others:

FFG Star Wars - not really a system so much as hiding trade rules mechanics in sidebars as an afterthought. It is kind of bland, but works well in Edge campaigns. Requires a lot of GM input.

Space Opera - system is a simplification of CT's, looking like Bk2 was inspirational. It plays. As with all things SO, it's not easy to use.

Firefly and Serenity: Trade and Commerce is essentially a macguffin - the game isn't about the trade and commerce, but the trade and commerce activity is a way for the GM to "direct the plot."

Spacemaster - in the edition I have, it's not actually covered as such.

FASA Trek - Trader Captains and Merchant Princes has a trade system. It's poorly presented but fairly simple. If you are running in a Trek setting, it's readily adopted to other Trek games, since it uses default skill rolls.

Albedo - T&I/Chessex versions - The Ship Sourcebook provides the needed operational information, but it's pretty basic. In terms of realism, it's ships are the most realistic, but the trade and commerce mechanics are rudimentary. Most are put off by the fact that the setting is anthropomorphics...

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
†which is fundamentally the same in MegaTraveller, Traveller: The New Era, and T4

Thanks for all of the suggestions, and taking the time to write that up.

What does 'GTFT' stand for? (Google's suggestions were far off the mark.)

Look up Rogue Trader by FFG...

might not be the most rules-light system out there but the atmosphere and the fluff of that game are in a league of their own.

Thanks. I cannot find that one online. No PDFs on DTRPG or its own site, and Mongoose is sold out of the core rules. I'll have to keep my eyes open for the game on ebay and amazon.

outlander78 said:

Thanks for all of the suggestions, and taking the time to write that up.

What does 'GTFT' stand for? (Google's suggestions were far off the mark.)

Click to expand...

GURPS Traveller Far Trader.

As for Rogue Trader - it handles it halfway between MacGuffin and downtime activities. I wouldn't say it's good as a trade system, but it's decent as a metaplot system. The PDFs went away just a few weeks ago, when the license ended...

Thanks. Also ... argh! I have been reading "Designers & Dragons" about the history of the RPG industry lately. Limited-duration licenses killing games and limiting access to classics is a recurring, frustrating theme in the hobby.

I understand you're looking for suggestions on a system but my suggestion is about the campaign concept. I suggest you ensure you and your players have a common expectation for what your space-trading campaign will entail. My group played in a campaign set in the Star Wars universe where we were the crew of a traders/smugglers aboard a space freighter.

All players were on board for that general concept but we had different ideas of how it would play at the table. Half of the players assumed the campaign would focus on buying and selling goods and making the best deals to make the most money. The other half of the players assumed the trading/smuggling angle was simply the backdrop to generate other adventures and interesting scenarios. The GM synced with the ideas of the first group so sessions primarily consisted of haggling, bartering, planning travel routes, and budgeting fuel, food, etc. The campaign didn't last long because half of the players were in a campaign that did not meet their expectations.

If we did a better job coordinating expectations for the campaign we could have gotten on the same page from the get go or saved time by passing on the trader/smuggler campaign for one that everyone was enthusiastic about.

Right now my preferred rules for a space campaign would probably be in order:

N.E.W
D20 Future
GURPS

I adore the N.E.W. ship building rules at the conceptual level, particularly the emphasis it gives to giving 'soft' design features like crew comfort 'hard' advantages. That's just brilliant and something that is very welcome and needed. It also looks to be a pretty tight system overall. I'm a big fan of D20 as a universal but light system, and I think it captures the heroic model really well in a way that overemphasizing realism in a world with artillery just won't. And GURPS has an amazing amount of resources out there to draw on that let you mix and match off the shelf components, but unlike D20 is a bit on the heavy side and can be hard to run and not compelling in combat.

In my opinion, don't get too heavily into economics simulation as economies are vastly too complex to run by simulation and will always require a heavy hand of fiat. You'd be better of running the ship economy as a hybrid simulation/narrative model, using something like the Firefly series as a good example of how to use economics as a steering mechanism for the game. A few simple tables for profit margins and unexpected maintenance costs are probably all you need.

In particular, I need to call out Wednesday Boy's superb and insightful comment just above mine. A pure trading game is a game really intended for just as DM and a single player (or at most perhaps two players). The logistics of running a ship and managing a small personal 'household' economy can make for compelling game play, but it doesn't make for compelling gameplay for a group as most of the group will simply not have enough to do most of the time. You'll want to make trading and keeping things running and managing the finances part of what drives the gameplay, and not the focus of it. Again, the Firefly series is both instructive as to how to use that to drive story, and why something like Firefly doesn't directly work as a table top RPG game unless really only Mal is a PC. Think how rarely the full cast shares a scene. RPGs work when the full cast is sharing a scene.

As long as I'm calling out Firefly, consider spending some time reading 'Tales of the Ketty Jay', which takes the same idea and runs with it in a Steampunk setting AND also works rather better as an RPG template because (with the exception of the two fighter pilots, which tend to fall into the NPC category quite often) most of the cast/crew works together most of the time.