Henry said:
I found answers for myself in the two problems you faced...
I simply didn't take their gold, and rather let them use it, which they invariably did to improve their ships with modifications, or to pool and buy a bigger ship, or to invest in various money-making schemes. However, I didn't let them buy magic items, except at some rather inflated prices (remember, 2nd edition really disparaged the "magic item shop" as well as didn't have wealth by level guidelines) and they were always desirous of another money-making scheme, and I did let those pay off occasionally... only to fail later on.
Oh, I agree whole-heartedly, and my players were usually fairly good sports about "pimping their rides", etc. to bleed off excess treasure....but after five or six ship captures, there was still a fair amount of gold available, and while the magic shop mentality wasn't actively encouraged, there were still things like spell and magic item research, plus hiring spell-casters for raise-deads, restorations, etc. that suddenly became soooooo much easier due to the surfeit of available coinage. Yes, of course then you can throw in quest requirements and such for the spell-caster side of things, but it was never quite as neat as I wanted, and they always ended up with faaaaaaar too much spare gold hanging around (even after I bled some more away for training costs).
Let's face it, 20-40 K gold pieces for a single encounter (just for the ship) and over 50K for helms was really one huge hunk of change for a group of adventurers to have (at most levels).
Henry said:
Maybe the creatures weren't, but ships piloted by said creatures certainly were. And the occasional Radiant Dragon, or Space Worm, or (what were those living asteroids called?) was enough to wreak occasional havoc on their ship, causing them to have to spend more money on repairs, etc. Even the pirates of the real world found out the hard way that adventuring costs money - and only a few were smart and savvy enough to retire wealthy.
Yup, and to be sure, I sent in my fair share of Astereaters (I believe that was the name) not to mention the wandering gravity monsters, Radiant Dragons, etc. But if you sent in more ships with pirates, that just gives the PCs more treasure in the form of vessels and helms (as I found out to my chagrin) and the costs for repairing vessels, hiring crews, etc. were simply too low (even if you multiplied them by five or ten times) to realistically be able to drain a party's astronomical (if you'll pardon the pun) resources that they gleaned from ship capture.
And a lot of the really cool creatures (such as the Horg from the Grinder region in the Greyspace accessory) were supposedly absolute terrors of space....but were certainly no where near big enough to stop a vessel, and certainly weren't likely to be piloting one themselves. Of course, the Horg probably aren't a great example because steering through the Grinder at spelljamming speed would be a sure way to meet a large chunk of rock at a very uncomfortable velocity, thereby virtually ensuring that people travel slowly through that asteroid belt
Ah well, there were (to be sure) solutions to be found (as Henry has pointed out), but they were never entirely satisfactory to me, and doing that many work-around exercises to maintain a stable campaign did become irritating from time to time. YMMV. Still a very cool setting with a metric buttload of potential....just needed a little tinkering...
Cheers,
Colin
