There's so many things that are coming up making a GURPS: Traveller: Interstellar Wars campaign that just never came up when the party was a bunch of murder-hobos.
The characters are from The Terran Confederation operating a Lightning class light freighter. The captain is in the employ of the ship's owners.
The first thing that came up, should status and stigmas be for The Confederation or for Ziru Sirka? Or both?
The next thing that comes up is the settled/unsettled lifestyle question.
If you're settled then 80% of your starting wealth is tied up in hearth and home, 20% is available for adventuring stuff.
Unsettled means you can drop 100% at your portable adventure stuff.
The question matters since the starting wealth is $50,000 and a conventional civilian vacc suit (without helmet!) costs $10,000; or exactly 20% of the standard starting wealth.
Grumble.
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Well, if you play it straight. Then, yes, your stupid suit without helmet sucks up all your available funds. Which forces players to rely on whatever general suits the ship already has, or go without, which totally sucks.
ReplyDeleteWhen faced with this problem in Classic Traveller, I used a cheap rule that the ship must have basic, dumbed down vacc suits for each crew position and emergency suits/rescue balls for each passenger carried (low berth not included.) Thus the new crew guy with no personal suit gets stuck with some hand-me-down suit (give it -1 on all rolls, maybe -2 if condition really sucks or the captain is a right-cheap bastid) and it will encourage the player to scrounge or save for his own.
Then, the player can use his base $10k for personal items, like tools, mini-comp, gun (which can also be a required part of the 'ship's locker' and would you really trust some lowest bidder piece your cheap captain bought surplus? (again -1 DRM may be applicable to hit, for malfunction, etc.)
The gun thing. I remember my dad talking about his unit in Korea, right after the war. The unit armorer took all the pistols available and assembled some really decent shooters for pistol qualifications. Same thing can be done with the supplied ship's locker's guns. Give a reason for a character to purposely draw an armorer skill or whatever GURPS uses (maybe basic/advanced machine tools or whatever is applicable) to assemble something decent out of garbage. Same can be done with the suits, especially if on a 4-man crew, 3 of the crew have their own suits, leaving 4 General Purpose basic suits for the poor schmuck who is suit-less to assemble 1 really good suit out of all the pieces-parts.
Would also give a player a reason to try to scrounge from the local spaceport flea market or salvage from dead bodies pieces/parts needed to fix suits or guns or whatever. Frankenguns and Frankensuits, could be fun.
And it would also encourage all the players to get the same damned brand and type of suit, gun, etc for both themselves and for the ship's locker so there are pieces-parts available in case of an oops moment.
DeleteAlso encourage ship-owners to update their safety equipment (suits, guns and stuff) by giving them better port fees or less 'safety inspection violations' by officious port officials or space-guards, if you want to go that route.
For my space setting, I assumed that it was probably closer to 50/50, with a lot of the mundane/domestic equipment being the spacer equivalent of what would be had planetside. Skinsuits and helmet are your space undies and mandatory, a full on vacc suit is the spacer equivalent of a car (going for armored probably dips into the adventure gear counter unless there's a good reason), optionally some manner of lightweight personal transport (bike, scooter, etc) for while planetside if the crew get a large enough tonnage allotment, all manner of personal goods (library, personal computer hardened vs. space, VR rigs and games, hobby equipment suitable for shipboard life, improved spacebed, etc). These ships spend months, if not years at a time out traversing the void even if it's not all spent in transit. The crew live aboard them, more than anywhere else they wind up.
ReplyDeleteI'd suggest treating them as semi-settled, with the ship as their settlement. Most of what they own will wind up being able to be shuffled between ships and temporary berths, but at least some reasonable portion of it won't qualify as adventure gear.
Would cheaper-but-still-good suits be available on the secondhand market, or as surplus? The Ziru Sirka has been in space for centuries (millenia?) and AFAIK their gear works just fine on Solomani as well as Vilani.
ReplyDeleteI'm definitely leaning to the crew getting issued suits. Emblazoned with the company logo in the company colors, of course!
ReplyDelete