Space Travel?

[Paul Farquhar]

Gameplay that just breaks down to a series of dice rolls isn’t really desirable. You might as well reduce it to “the engines break down, roll to fix the engines”, or simply leave it out. It’s only good gameplay when meaningful choices are involved (or the consequence of choices). For example, when the party take on passengers, they might talk to them, or investigate them a bit. So there may or may not be an attempted highjacking later on. The first episode of Firefly is based around who you choose to take as passengers, and the consequences thereof.

Travel does not need to be a long string of random encounters. It’s fine for most journeys to be a red line on the map. That makes it more significant when an emergency does happen. There are a number of ways to indicate the passing of time during a journey, such as getting up to fetch snacks, leaving the players to chat amongst themselves, or timing hyperspace to coincide with the end of the session.

 

[Breaking Star Games]

This is a problem in my experience with every single Sci Fi RPG in one way or the other.

The solution in my opinion actually draws inspiration from Delany's "Babel 17" of all places where he has each ship crew position actually have an off-ship skills that correlates to ship skill at a one-to-one level. For example, all great ship pilots are also by default great professional wrestlers. Now, I wouldn't necessarily copy the setting (shudder) but the core idea there of having generic skills that equate directly to "If I'm good at this, then I'm also good at some job aboard a starship (or visa versa)" is I think a very strong one that I'd employ if I had to design my own Sci Fi game.

I found in my Scum & Villainy game, ground vehicles and especially Drones became a very potent option to help diversify their suite of pilot-able things and let them roll their Piloting skill more. Drones often get taken by the tech wiz/engineer-type in Sci Fi. But I think they are a broad enough tool to have actively-pilotable one especially when flashiness and speed of your classic hotshot pilot are the goal like recon or destroying a target through a dangerous area. Bonus, you get to make it much more deadly when they aren't in the seat.