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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6947705" data-attributes="member: 4937">Right now my preferred rules for a space campaign would probably be in order:N.E.WD20 FutureGURPSI 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.</blockquote>

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