Best rules for a space trading game?

[outlander78]

I agree that simulating an economy won't make the game better. Shipping some gold from a to b affecting currency prices ... oh look, everyone left.

In the past, I have had fun playing computer games like Wing Commander Privateer where you fly missions (delivery, beat down some pirates, protect a convoy) to earn money, move goods from a to b to earn money, and use this money to make repairs and ship upgrades. I really like this style of play, and hope to make a fun campaign out of it, without worrying to much about real economics (who understands them anyway?).

 

[Celebrim]

In the past, I have had fun playing computer games like Wing Commander Privateer where you fly missions (delivery, beat down some pirates, protect a convoy) to earn money, move goods from a to b to earn money, and use this money to make repairs and ship upgrades. I really like this style of play, and hope to make a fun campaign out of it, without worrying to much about real economics (who understands them anyway?).

Sure, but once again, I want to emphasize that as a source of inspiration, Wing Commander Privateer is a useful model only for a table top RPG with about 1 Player Character. It's an absolutely terrible model for your game play if you have like six PC's, because you'll end up with comparatively little cooperative play and long stretches were an individual player has nothing interesting to do.

One of the hardest things in my experience in running a science fiction game is avoiding a problem of hyper-specialization - particularly in skill based games with open character creation - where you have like a computer hacker, a fighter pilot, a tough mercenary, and a face man and each can solve one problem well but none of them can solve problems together or share spotlight at the same time.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

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.

Great call on using Firefly as a model--that's exactly how the campaign was sold to us!

 

[aramis erak]

I agree that simulating an economy won't make the game better. Shipping some gold from a to b affecting currency prices ... oh look, everyone left.

In the past, I have had fun playing computer games like Wing Commander Privateer where you fly missions (delivery, beat down some pirates, protect a convoy) to earn money, move goods from a to b to earn money, and use this money to make repairs and ship upgrades. I really like this style of play, and hope to make a fun campaign out of it, without worrying to much about real economics (who understands them anyway?).

(Classic) Traveller Bk 2, MGT 1E, or T20:Traveller's Handbook all work at this level.
So does Space Opera (by FGU). (Which, surprisingly, is available on DTRPG...)
FASA-Trek's system also works well on this level.

WC: Privateer is inspired heavily by Elite, which is itself very much like Traveller, in terms of base prices by good and variation by local.

Not having looked at N.E.W. ... I can't speak to it by comparison.

I can say that the Serenity and Firefly games DO NOT work on that level. Serenity provides the costs but not the base prices nor expected profits. Firefly provides neither.

 

[Celebrim]

Great call on using Firefly as a model--that's exactly how the campaign was sold to us!

Firefly is the show that has launched a thousand imitations, and as one of its biggest advocates, I agree that it was the best written science fiction TV show of our generation. But while a lot of the core ideas of firefly could be used in an RPG, if you tried to directly port Firefly to a table you would be horribly disappointed.

RPGs are supposed to be inherently social activities, and one thing that I've learned that I didn't understand when I was 20 and which I hear very little talked about in the industry, as what is functional for an RPG both in themes to explore and type of play depends heavily on the number of players you have. If you're looking afield for source material to base your RPG on, you need to consider ideas like:

a) Is the original source material largely the narrative of a single protagonist (Private Eye fiction, John Carter, Conan, for example) with occasional side kicks? Then it's probably suitable only for 1-2 PC's unless you radically change the style and focus of play from the source material.
b) Is the original source material feature The One, The Chosen, The Messiah, The One Gizmo, The End of the World, or other persons of destiny (Avatar, Dune, even to some extent The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars)? If so, you're probably going to have to invent new secondary lore and a new style of story that differs from the things that inspired you.
c) Even if it is an ensemble cast with a set of protagonists, do those protagonists tend to go off on separate concerns and solve problems individually? If most scenes don't involve most of the protagonists being on screen at the same time, working on the same problem together, then it's probably not as easy to adapt to play as you might think. Or it might be limited to being more suited to a smaller group than you might think. Star Trek for example when you boil it down, ToS had only 3 Player Characters (Kirk, Spock, and Bones). Everyone else only got enough screen time to be an NPC henchmen. TNG arguably had ZERO PC's, as most stories tended to be single focus/single perspective with a rotating cast of protagonists (This is a Picard story. This is a Data story. This is a Troi story. This is a Riker story.). Firefly has a great cast of well-written characters each having their own competencies, but most of them in RPG terms are NPCs. The Captain is a PC, and it's possible that Zoe and Jayne are PC's because they tend to work together, but really only Malcolm is involved in the whole story of Serenity.

Your story has to involve an ensemble cast that works together where no one is more special than anyone else, or its not really a social RPG.

Thinking further about Firefly, it's even harder than that because the story of Firefly is these people living together, but what carries that story is mostly a series of low melodrama scenes where two characters share a private moment together (very similar to another great Sci-Fi TV show, Babylon 5). Capturing the spirit of that in a table top RPG might be next to impossible, because from a table top perspective that involves a lot of people going off into separate rooms and doing their own thing, or else most player's acting as an audience and taking enjoyment from sitting around watching people create drama without necessarily this being their scene.

 

[aramis erak]

c) Even if it is an ensemble cast with a set of protagonists, do those protagonists tend to go off on separate concerns and solve problems individually? If most scenes don't involve most of the protagonists being on screen at the same time, working on the same problem together, then it's probably not as easy to adapt to play as you might think. Or it might be limited to being more suited to a smaller group than you might think. Star Trek for example when you boil it down, ToS had only 3 Player Characters (Kirk, Spock, and Bones). Everyone else only got enough screen time to be an NPC henchmen. TNG arguably had ZERO PC's, as most stories tended to be single focus/single perspective with a rotating cast of protagonists (This is a Picard story. This is a Data story. This is a Troi story. This is a Riker story.). Firefly has a great cast of well-written characters each having their own competencies, but most of them in RPG terms are NPCs. The Captain is a PC, and it's possible that Zoe and Jayne are PC's because they tend to work together, but really only Malcolm is involved in the whole story of Serenity.

Firefly looks like a group of nine who only have 4 regulars, with the rest showing occasionally. Mal, Wash, Zoe and Jane. (I've a group that works that way now...)

Trek TOS can be said to be Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty as regulars, and scotty's player not being comfortable with the limelight, with Sulu, Uhura, and Chapel as drop-in players who can't be there regularly, but are still "Plot-immunity PC's"...

TNG, it's pretty clear that the captain is usually an NPC; perhaps his player is on call, because sometimes he uses the strap-on-porta-spine; Riker, Worf, LaForge, Data, Yar, and Wesley are regular PCs, with everyone having occasional attendance issues. When Wes' player is absent, he gets into trouble and has to be rescued; when he's solving the problems, his player is there. Only a handful of episodes in the whole run are "1 character shows"... those are obvious cases of "no one else showed up"... Future Imperfect comes to mind. And in Aquiel, Geordie's player was the only one not hung over...

Your story has to involve an ensemble cast that works together where no one is more special than anyone else, or its not really a social RPG.

It doesn't of need require the number of PCs to equal the number of players... Many a Trek GM has players have two characters; one toff, one boss. Works great, so long as they don't have to be in scene together. Ars Magica 1e-3e does the same in a fantasy context... 2 PCs per player, and whomever is is not involved in the current main story is running 1 or 2 previously written NPCs from a pool owned by the group.

Thinking further about Firefly, it's even harder than that because the story of Firefly is these people living together, but what carries that story is mostly a series of low melodrama scenes where two characters share a private moment together (very similar to another great Sci-Fi TV show, Babylon 5). Capturing the spirit of that in a table top RPG might be next to impossible, because from a table top perspective that involves a lot of people going off into separate rooms and doing their own thing, or else most player's acting as an audience and taking enjoyment from sitting around watching people create drama without necessarily this being their scene.

That latter mode can work quite well, as long as everyone gets a chance to opt in to having such scenes.

There are even RPGs where such scenes are surprisingly regular, but by virtue of mechanical scene scheduling, everyone can arrange one a session... (Burning Empires, for example.)

Scene budgets can be a wonderful tool with a group that wants to have that "lots of quiet scenes" without it becoming one PC's story... of course, if everyone is opting to include that one guy, it becomes his story, even if he does nothing in those scenes...

 

[Celebrim]

Firefly looks like a group of nine who only have 4 regulars, with the rest showing occasionally. Mal, Wash, Zoe and Jane.

Wash suffers from the problems most science fiction games have when a player creates a 'Pilot' character. The character is enormously useful, but only in scenes when no one else is participating. Conversely, when everyone else has something to do, Wash is always off stage. Whether or not he is a PC, he's the sort of character that is better as an NPC retainer.

I'd almost lean toward a class based system for science fiction, even more so than for fantasy, just to force everyone to play broad characters.

That latter mode can work quite well, as long as everyone gets a chance to opt in to having such scenes.

Sure, but it requires a particular sort of group. And it can be very frustrating to GM even if the group is good, because plot tends to advance at about the same pace as the old Soap Operas.

 

[outlander78]

Does this partially come down to how ship flying and combat work? If you have a single character who is the lone pilot, navigator and gunner, everyone else takes a backseat.

If the ship has tasks equal to the number of players, everyone has something to do. For example, the pilot handles position, orientation and evasion, and everyone else operates a weapon system (gun, missiles, etc). There could also be work for a medic, an engineer and/or counter-measures.

Another twist would be having more tasks than players, and they have to pick and choose which weapons to use, or what to repair, or if they are flying or on auto-pilot.

 

[fuindordm]

I'd almost lean toward a class based system for science fiction, even more so than for fantasy, just to force everyone to play broad characters.

I think this is a key point, and one of the reasons that D&D works so well. For a SF game, consider putting the players on a smaller ship like the Millennium Falcon. The ship is in poor repair and understaffed, so you actually need two PCs minimum to fly the ship in a challenging environment (pilot, navigator, and optionally someone to keep things from blowing up), not to mention more than one gunner.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

Does this partially come down to how ship flying and combat work? If you have a single character who is the lone pilot, navigator and gunner, everyone else takes a backseat.

If the ship has tasks equal to the number of players, everyone has something to do. For example, the pilot handles position, orientation and evasion, and everyone else operates a weapon system (gun, missiles, etc). There could also be work for a medic, an engineer and/or counter-measures.

In my experience this is a really difficult nut to crack. Giving everyone their own task helps somewhat but the trick is that their task has to be meaningful. All players had unique roles in our Star Wars Saga Edition game (pilot, gunner, engineer, sensors) but the actions available were too straightforward and binary to be adequately compelling. For example, the character on the sensors could target lock an enemy ship which sounds like it could be fun or interesting but it was a simple skill check to give a bonus on the next hit. If I'm rolling the same action every turn, it's as boring as if I wasn't involved at all.

Another twist would be having more tasks than players, and they have to pick and choose which weapons to use, or what to repair, or if they are flying or on auto-pilot.

I think this helps the issue some but the GM has to make the tasks engaging. My friend and I tried coming up with engaging situations for non-pilot characters to deal with during space combat and had some recommendations--fixing a dangerous system failure, treat wounded people, fend off an enemy aboard their ship. The conundrum we noticed is that having those engaging situations makes the game interesting for non-pilots but stretches the fiction because something terrible happens in the ship for every space combat. Or you don't stretch the fiction and have space combats where most of the players are not engaged. If you (or anyone) have ideas or ways to combat this, please share!