TIPS Sought for Sustainable Sci-Fi (not Star Wars) Gaming

[Votan]

Or did you just mean "magic vs cybertechnology"?

Magic versus cybertech versus Decker/technomancer

It's hard to pull off a magic tech blend, for example.

 

[Votan]

Taking the ship they're on should either be ridiculously difficult or simply not worth it.

Command, Engineering & Life Support sections, for instance, might be protected by exterior-wall strength bulkheads. IOW, unless you have a pass, can trick your way in, or you have hand tools as powerful as ship weapons, you're not getting in. In the absence of that, those areas might have permanent installations of Marines (or robotic defenses) to guard them.

Or, perhaps the crew is under orders to not to resist brigands, but just press the "Big Red Panic Button" which just arms the "We've been commandeered" emergency beacon, located on the outer hull. Once the ship is taken, its effectively marked as a rogue, stolen ship. Disarming that is possible, but it takes time.

Just having every serial number on the ship correspond to stolen property is a pain. ALl repairs now need to be done by the party (no yard work). Any inspection could discover that thye ship was seized by an act of piracy (in analogy with the 1700's, the last time such navy opperated without long distance commincation) this would probably be a death penalty offense.

There may be buyers but they know the players are desperate renegades and prices will be either insulting or measured in bullets fired. After all, seizing a ship means that the players are rogues and murderers with no conscience.

It's liking hijacking a US navy destroyer today -- the crew will fight hard and the number of safe havens will be . . . limited.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I ran a Star Wars campaign (although you could do this with any sci-fi system) where all the players were part of a Swoop Bike racing team*. Two of the characters were the actual Swoop Bike pilots, one was the mechanic, one was the owner/face-man, and the last was the cheeky droid.

At no point in the campaign did the players do any of the following...
1. Fight a stormtrooper.
2. Fly off planet.
3. Kill things for money.

It was great fun and while having the Star Wars flair and background we loved, it had nothing to do with rebels, the empire, or jedi.

DS

*This campaign ran from 93-95, predating the Pod Racing scenes from the movies by a decent margin. George Lucas is stealing my interwebz!

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Now, salvaging a ship on the other hand....

Good way to start the campaign in media res too, play begins with the team entering the abandoned ship, either through the airlock, or through the enormous puckered rents that have been blown in the side of the ship.

Mind you, the pilot who brought them out this far will also want a cut of the profits, but making your nut is a good reason to pick up jobs.

And finding out what happened to the original crew can also be part of the fun.

One way that the team might know about the ship is that they were part of the original crew, much like [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NPuBEZPgjY]The Mary Ellen Carter[/ame]. (Which made a guest appearance in Traveller: The New Era. : ) ) They know where she is, and insurance has paid off the loss, leaving the ship open for salvage.

The Auld Grump

 

[shocklee]

Practical considerations

Just having every serial number on the ship correspond to stolen property is a pain. ALl repairs now need to be done by the party (no yard work). Any inspection could discover that thye ship was seized by an act of piracy (in analogy with the 1700's, the last time such navy opperated without long distance commincation) this would probably be a death penalty offense.

There may be buyers but they know the players are desperate renegades and prices will be either insulting or measured in bullets fired. After all, seizing a ship means that the players are rogues and murderers with no conscience.

It's liking hijacking a US navy destroyer today -- the crew will fight hard and the number of safe havens will be . . . limited.

Unfortunately I think my comments said more about the maturity level that we were playing at when the Traveller rules first came out than anything else. So that said, lets look a bit at this.

• You would normally be hijacking a merchant ship and not a military craft.
• If I really hijacked a ship in the Traveller setting, how easy would it be to catch the perpetrators? I'm going to assume for the moment that the ship is outbound from the system and is in a backwater system.
  
  The setting has a limited faster than light communication system. The control that the local authorities have is limited to inbound ships heading for the populated system. The authorities would need to be very lucky to be in the right place to intercept a craft before it jumps if it were hijacked on the outbound leg. Finally, the only way that news of my crime is spread is via mail being carried by other ships jumping out of the system and into the system where I'm located. If I stay out of the more settled systems, I might be able to stay ahead of the notification of my crimes.
• The fastest way to end your campaign is to arrest and imprison the PCs. The player response is 'this game blows, whose up for some D&D?' No matter what justification I want to use for 'letting them get away with the theft', this was the real problem at the time.

On a more recent note, I just started running a Diaspora game with a couple of players. We just finished creating the cluster and the starting characters; it looks like this may end up being a fun campaign. The death of this game might be the lack of players.

 

[Votan]

Unfortunately I think my comments said more about the maturity level that we were playing at when the Traveller rules first came out than anything else. So that said, lets look a bit at this.

• You would normally be hijacking a merchant ship and not a military craft.
• If I really hijacked a ship in the Traveller setting, how easy would it be to catch the perpetrators? I'm going to assume for the moment that the ship is outbound from the system and is in a backwater system.
  
  The setting has a limited faster than light communication system. The control that the local authorities have is limited to inbound ships heading for the populated system. The authorities would need to be very lucky to be in the right place to intercept a craft before it jumps if it were hijacked on the outbound leg. Finally, the only way that news of my crime is spread is via mail being carried by other ships jumping out of the system and into the system where I'm located. If I stay out of the more settled systems, I might be able to stay ahead of the notification of my crimes.
• The fastest way to end your campaign is to arrest and imprison the PCs. The player response is 'this game blows, whose up for some D&D?' No matter what justification I want to use for 'letting them get away with the theft', this was the real problem at the time.

Well, the last part is always going to be a problem with any setting in which there are limits on player behavior. If the first level characters decide to loot a Great Wyrm red dragon;s horde (also a rich source of treasure) one has to decide if the party being roasted makes the campaign less fun.

I'm not saying that pirates can't exist; if we use the age of sail as an anology then they most certainly did. Hijacking ships did happen -- the key was to assume that the ship owners know that the ship that the players are on is worth 10's of millions of credits. So getting to be on a crew might require references. Or, if the owner is willing to hire a bunch of unknowns then maybe he is up to soemthing sleazy . . .

Seeling the ship becomes an adventure (as cheating ship theives is fair game) and any reasonable legal system would make seizing a ship by force harshly penalized (age of sail analogies are death sentances) so it may be hard to sell it discreetely as people will become suspicious if standard verifications are not carried out (and if ship info has been tampered with . . .)

Hiding out in remote systems will work but these systems can't offer much for the ship (my castle and a thousand serfs for your metal dream device) and dodging civilized vessels and the odd patrol boat can be quite fun.

This is even more cool if some elements of a ship are hard to disguise (say the drive signature). The result of hijacking a ship is a "space pirate" campaign where the players flee the navy and need to make a living on the fringes (or in uncivilized systems) where they now have to guard the ship from other scum. Instead of a 10 million credit payday the ship theft is a tense (and dangerous) adventure followed by a "flee the authorities" and "hide out in the outlands" camapign. It's good sci fi tradition -- even Han Solo had a death mark.