Space Travel?

[Joerg Baumgartner]

This thread sent me into a rabbit hole of SF sources I more or less remember having read, read the rules, seen on screen or played that I used AI assistance to create a taxonomy of FTL travel modes. Anybody interested in the intermediary seed prompt?

 

[Bill Zebub]

This thread sent me into a rabbit hole of SF sources I more or less remember having read, read the rules, seen on screen or played that I used AI assistance to create a taxonomy of FTL travel modes. Anybody interested in the intermediary seed prompt?

That’s gonna be the name of my next Cantina band.

 

[Morrus]

Anybody interested in the intermediary seed prompt?

No thanks. I much prefer to see the work of actual people.

 

[Bill Zebub]

No thanks. I much prefer to see the work of actual people.

AI is a trick. There's an actual, very small person inside that computer.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I agree that it's tedious, but I'm not sure it's because each person gets assigned to a role. A lot of games do a similar thing in combat (tank, stabber, healer, ranged nukes, etc.) and that doesn't get old. Or, at least, it doesn't get old as fast.

I think the reason it works maybe is that the different roles are diverse and all contribute in some way directly to defeating the enemy, and are also all personally at risk. It's not like games have "party hit points" that the NPCs are removing when they attack someone - no, the enemy is going after someone specific, like the wizard, the wizard is losing their hit points and he could end up dying or dead while the rest of the party is still fighting.
Most roles even attack the opposition directly (healers might be the ones that do it the least, depending on the specific implementation, and it can lead to the role being unpopular even compared to the more straightforward DPS and crowd control roles). It's all way more personal and direct.

The Engineer might be kind of a healer/buff role - but aboard the Millenium Falcon or USS Lexington, he is not tanking the attacks, the entire party's ship is. He isn't going to be knocked out (usually) from attacks. And he's never going to make an attack! The helmsman might be making fancy aerial or spatial maneuvers, but he's not dealing damage, and he isn't going to get knocked out by the enemy's attackers.

 

[Anfelas]

Mongoose Traveller suffers from "task library" disease with a complication of "must be rolling dice" or the players are not having fun.

Get rid of all dice rolls involving travel, it just happens, jut like it did in classic Traveller all those years ago.

Your space treasure map says the next clue is on Arglebargle VII so you set the course, activate the jump drive and arrive there.

Decades ago the first game of Traveller I ever played in had us using teleportation from world to world because that's where the space dungeons to explore and loot are to be found, and the referee could not be bothered with space travel boredom.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

"We travel to the Alderaan system."

Star Wars offers a good template for how to deal space travel. Once you are in hyperspace it’s very unlikely that you will encounter anything, so it’s down time. You can engage in the usual downtime activities: training, playing mini-games, crafting, character development and role-play.

You could even tell your players to talk to each other for a certain time!

 

[MGibster]

I agree that it's tedious, but I'm not sure it's because each person gets assigned to a role. A lot of games do a similar thing in combat (tank, stabber, healer, ranged nukes, etc.) and that doesn't get old. Or, at least, it doesn't get old as fast.

In other games, the PCs usually have some meaningful choices to make during combat. Who to attack, where to move, do they help a fellow PC or attack an NPC, etc., etc. In a game like Rogue Trader, Fantasy Flight's version at least, when you're in ship-to-ship combat most PCs don't have an opportunity to make any meaningful decisions. The Priest character could make a Put Your Backs Into It roll every round to inspire the crew, but it was the only way he could make any meaningful contribution during ship-to-ship encounters. It became very tedious very quickly. Though kudos to the design team for making sure everyone had something to do aboard ship.

Boring. That's just a board game, not a roleplaying game. (Except maybe in the sense that the dice rolls are generating prompts for roleplaying. But Monopoly could do that, too: "You must pay the rent!" "But I can't pay the rent!" "You must pay the rent!" "But I can't pay the rent!" "I'll pay the rent!" "My hero!")

You're absolutely right. Another problem is having these skills very often means the character is less skilled in areas that are likely more meaningful to them. In Fantasy Flight's Star Wars, being a hot shot pilot meant my skill tree was devoted to piloting but we spent the majority of the game on the ground.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

In other games, the PCs usually have some meaningful choices to make during combat. Who to attack, where to move, do they help a fellow PC or attack an NPC, etc., etc. In a game like Rogue Trader, Fantasy Flight's version at least, when you're in ship-to-ship combat most PCs don't have an opportunity to make any meaningful decisions. The Priest character could make a Put Your Backs Into It roll every round to inspire the crew, but it was the only way he could make any meaningful contribution during ship-to-ship encounters. It became very tedious very quickly. Though kudos to the design team for making sure everyone had something to do aboard ship.

You're absolutely right. Another problem is having these skills very often means the character is less skilled in areas that are likely more meaningful to them. In Fantasy Flight's Star Wars, being a hot shot pilot meant my skill tree was devoted to piloting but we spent the majority of the game on the ground.

FASA Star Trek did the best job (that I am aware of) of dividing ship combat roles between players, but was designed for three or four players and wouldn’t really work for more. It also left an awful lot of work for the GM in encounters involving multiple ships. Did I tell you about the time my starship defeated eight Orion Pirate ships? Beat that Kirk!

 

[Celebrim]

Star Wars offers a good template for how to deal space travel. Once you are in hyperspace it’s very unlikely that you will encounter anything, so it’s down time.

This does create weirdness though.

Typical Star Wars space travel involves a ship leaving the planet's surface and getting a few thousand miles away from the planet to reduce the mass shadow of the planet while calculating a jump to hyperspace. Normally this takes 3-30 minutes depending on the speed of the ship and how much preparatory time it had to anticipate the jump. For large ships like bulk freighters this time is effectively reduced because they generally load and unload from a position a few hundred to a few thousand miles above the planet using smaller ships called barges to ferry loads back and forth from the planet, and then generally leaving on fixed schedules so they can precalculate the jump (often spending up to a day optimizing the jump while being loaded or unloaded).

What this means is effectively that space travel is quite rare and generally only occurs near planets in routinely travelled areas. So it's actually quite easy for a law enforcement agency to hang around in any place it needs to be, since the space it needs to patrol is a tiny tiny area compared to the vastness of space and if needed Star Wars ships can hustle around sublight space at say up to 4% of lightspeed.

So the problem you have is how to battles actually take place? In particular how does something that is a big part of the canon like piracy actually work? Smuggling is pretty easy to explain but piracy is hard because typically a ship with valuable cargo is never far from aid by legal authorities except on the most backward worlds which couldn't afford a local police force - and those worlds have scant traffic that itself doesn't carry valuable cargo. For most of the Star Wars universe, a would be pirate would have to hang around a hyperspace transfer point exactly where the authorities would be hanging out and would simply not be able to attack a ship, rob it, and get away in time to avoid being attacked themselves.

So a lot of the answer for me turns on "hyperspace jumps are very difficult" which is nothing that comes up in the canon. But my estimate is about 1 in 500 hyperspace jumps go bad and result in some form of problem where the ship then has to spend some amount of time travelling at sublight or else is stranded for some time needing to replot a new jump (often requiring hours) or rescue. And since galaxy wide there are millions to hundreds of millions of jumps daily, that's a lot of ships that in some level of distress every single day. And instead of a rescuer, you get a pirate who jumps in before the authorities can arrive and robs the stranded "motorists". This is one of the places my complex hyperspace failure rules come into things, as the PCs are themselves familiar with missing jumps and having to handle the problems that result, then if around them NPCs having problems with failed jumps that doesn't feel contrived.

The other thing you can do as a Star Wars pirate is rob systems where there is significant in system real space travel between mining facilities in the outer solar system and highly populated colony/refinery worlds in the inner solar system. That traverse can take several hours to half a day and an in system hyperspace jump can be too risky to make it worthwhile, which means a pirate can ambush ships in the middle of the transit away from places authorities are most likely to be loitering. Hypermatter and strange matter and other exotic types of matter is the "gold dubloons" of the Star Wars universe, with cargos that can be really valuable relative to the size of the cargo.