Big Jobs in Book 6: Scoundrel?

[zero]

Hello, it has been some time since I was here last, though it is good to see that the recent release of Prometheus coupled with interest in running Aliens in Traveller has brought my Alien in Traveller thread up to Page 1 again! :wink:

I came to ask something as I have been running Traveller games again (well, Cstars... but the system is the same...). Namely, my Free Trade ship has realised it is having a hard time making money in it's first few months before it can really afford some good spec trade.

My ship needs to bring in money for Patron jobs that total 1 MCr or more. Whilst Merc tickets are good for that if saving up the Ticket Adjustments to boost the Pay Grade, the crew would still like to... y'know, live to see the next month. Agent pay is of course nowhere near a MCr even at the highest pay.

So, I was wondering what kind of pay is there for the more unscrupulous work in Scoundrel... Is it possible to get over 1MCr for a job in that book or will the crew be victims to a different high-paying Patron each month to make ends meet?

 

[Easterner]

SCOUNDREL: No.

 

[locarno24]

or will the crew be victims to a different high-paying Patron each month to make ends meet?

Pretty much. Not that that's a bad thing. :mrgreen:
You could always look into some light piracy to help ends meet.

 

[alex_greene]

Characters have three options for making the big creds.

Speculative trade - the greater the risk (radioactives, xenomorph eggs, contraband) the bigger the profit.

Piracy and hijacking - again, it's up to the Referee to have the characters stumble across a nice, fat cargo, and pray that it isn't just a Naval Q-ship and a baited trap.

Patronage. Your ideal job is a Patron who'll splash out mucho creds for a milk run job; a wealthy old merchant transporting his beloved princess home from her boarding school planet to see her one last time before he dies, or some such job. (Of course, there are twists, even in a milk run - the "Princess" might be eighteen, hot, uninhibited and cause nothing but trouble on board ... or kidnappers might be lying in wait ...)

Chances are, though, your jobs will be somewhat suboptimal - high risk, high reward jobs that nobody else wants, such as infiltrating a passenger liner and abducting some rich guy's precious princess that someone's transporting home from her boarding school planet one last time to see him before he dies ...

As a Referee, you must weigh the risk against the reward at all times. Low risk, medium risk, high risk, and the same for the rewards. Lucky Travellers keep landing low- to medium-risk jobs, like the "Train Job" or "Ariel" or the robbery at the start of Serenity, or even the job in the pilot of Firefly where they had a chance to salvage Government-stamped food bricks from a wreck left behind by the war, or the heist in "Trash" where the crew of Serenity secured the Lassiter.

You want to avoid low-reward jobs at all costs. Whether they are boring low-risk ones like standing on a street corner counting blue cars going by and taking photos of all the yellow ones, or dangerously risky low-reward jobs such as standing on top of a skyscraper in a storm in a copper posing pouch for a charity calendar, unless the reward is something unexpected (the photos taken are presented to a solicitor, who bequeathes the Traveller a packet of money for fulfilling a dead man's slightly less-than-sane wish to carry on his favourite hobby of carwatching, or maybe the calendar catches on sector wide, leading to the Traveller's face and body getting recognised by every hot, lonely, rich woman in the region) don't bother.

And don't forget to throw in a Whedon now and then.

 

[nats]

My ship needs to bring in money for Patron jobs that total 1 MCr or more.

WTF!! What have your players been doing? 1 MCr! Jesus, let them eat cake.

Let them learn the hard way and be chased over the galaxy once they start missing payments. Whatever you do dont give them 1MCr. They will just have to sell their ship or downsize or start catching liners to other planets. Or maybe they should start looking for work on their planet instead of bumming around the star-lanes wasting money. Life is tough. Make them learn the value of money and living within their means but dont give them handouts.

If they want 1MCr for a job they will need to do something extremely dangerous and probably will all die in the process. personally I would give them the job and make it impossible for them to complete and survive - just to be extra mean!!! Then they will have the mafia on their case as well as the authorities. Ever see Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels? That's the kind of twisted web of crud they need to fall into for getting that much in debt. Ha ha haaar.

 

[alex_greene]

My ship needs to bring in money for Patron jobs that total 1 MCr or more.

WTF!! What have your players been doing? 1 MCr! Jesus, let them eat cake.

The story isn't set in 2012, you know. If the characters want 1MCr, let them see an opportunity and take it. That cheap piece of art that the dead passenger leaves behind turns out to be a van Gogh from Earth worth millions; or the characters were kind to a crabby passenger, whose crabbiness turned out to be caused by the pain of a terminal illness he'd been suffering - and he bequeathes a chunk of his six billion cred fortune to the ship, enough to keep her flying for a year.

That's why Traveller rocks and reality sucks; you can make things happen that wouldn't happen in this world of carpooling and reality TV and unemployment.

 

[Captain Jonah]

Like Alex I feel traveller is a game of adventure and exploration, of great trade deals and exploring million year old ruins.

I hate with a passion games that are set up to keep the characters poor and scrabbling for every credit. I don't want to sit round a table and play traveller for that, I have real life for that.

Ship based games will routinely have debts and mortgages running to large fractions of a million credits, even hauling cargo and a few passengers a 400Dton Subby can be handling half a million a month if its doing well.

It’s a matter of scale. To gutter scum in the low part of the star town owing the leg breakers a thousand creds may be huge. To people who own the mortgage on a 50+ million credit ship and who are used to having hundreds of thousands of credits a month go through the company account a Million isn’t an insane amount.

Needing to pay it off quickly is unusual but these are Travellers after all.

Anyway. Less scrupulous work.

Well there is smuggling, that nice older chap who lives in the very expensive penthouse with all those guards may have a few choice cargos that need to be delivered without anyone getting nosey.

There is piracy of course. Being legitimate traders they are in a good position to hear a few rumours like who is hauling the expensive cargos. Hitting the right ship and having the contacts to fence the goods quickly and at a decent price can bring in that much in one run. All those 100,000+ credits a Dton cargos. Of course getting recognised or caught in the act is a bit awkward.

Insurance scam. Run a cargo as normal, take out insurance then fake a pirate attack. Sell the cargo and claim the insurance. Difficult to pull off as those greedy insurance companies do like to investigate such claims and it’s a lot of work to pull of a good fake.

Steal and fence your own cargo. Good once but it will ruin your reputation locally and getting caught will have unfortunate consequences (or death depending on who’s cargo you stole).

Fraud. Selling fake mining claims, fake ancient sites etc. Again it needs to be something really big to scam that much money and the person you ripped off is likely to be upset.

 

[alex_greene]

An interesting path to those million cred jobs: run an adventure for a Patron that looks to be run of the mill, ordinary. Perhaps that rich Patron with the wayward daughter.

On completion, he has a word or two with his friends in the TAS; and suddenly, in his last will and testament the Patron gifts the whole party full TAS membership, all bought and paid for. No blackballing - the man had Megacreds to spend from his pocket change, so buying membership for a million creds apiece was nothing for him.

From that point onwards, they can all claim their free Cr. 20000 High Travel tickets once a month from the TAS whenever they appear at a TAS hostel (any class A or B starport), to use as and how they wish, and get access to the members-only section of the TAS jobs site, where the local Nobles put up the serious Megacred jobs as compared to the hardscrabble slumming non-TAS Travellers end up with.

Not to mention bumping into some serious weight in the members-only section of the TAS bar.

 

[zero]

A bit of perspective - I am running Cstars, atm the crew are in a Perth class Bulk Freighter, 2000 dtons of ship and a mortgage payment of 1,947,980 per month.

Ontop of that comes in maintenance, which is 467,515 credits per month and Life Support which comes to 15 staterooms and 40 grav-couches (so at 2k per stateroom and 100 per grav-couch, not counting costs for grav-gel, thats 34,000 creds).

They have a cargo hold of 1,162 dtons, that means an initial payment of 1,162,000 if theyre lucky enough to completely fill it with freight cargo (not always the case).

They then need to make 1,287,495 credits before passengers are invited in. Now luckily in Cstars, passengers go for the following costs - 1k (sleeper), 2.5k (mid-class), 5k (high-class) for the inner system and then the outer system has 250 per week for a sleeper and 750 per week for an awake passenger.

If theyre in the inner system, where everything is a fortnight from each other and you can make 2 trips in a month, they only need to take on 125,495 creds of passengers, which is perfectly fine.

However...

At the moment, the crew are making some journeys that are a little longer, like a whole month from Saturn to Jupiter, so passengers take 1k for a sleeper and 3k for a waker, so they're needing to make a bit of money on the side...

...Sometimes quite alot if the freight isn't coming in and I don't want to limit them to just toing and froing from Mercury or Venus to Earth over and over (the economy on Mars is terrible, not even worth the trip). I'd like to allow a trip a little further out, as far as Saturn at least.

As you can see from my other topic, I'm building custom smaller trade ships for the setting, an inner system trader is already up and I'm hoping to get a new ship up that can take the journey from Jupiter to Saturn.

Anyways, thanks for the suggestions, alex_greene and Captain_Jonah, good to see some reliable old faces still lending a hand to a fellow traveller! :wink:

 

[alex_greene]

Glad I could help out. The players may have to sweat a bit, but I do believe in allowing them a disproportionate reward for their efforts. It gives them the sense of having earned their cash by their own hand, their skills and their quick thinking. That's all Traveller is really about - giving your players a sense of incredible achievement.

Anyways, thanks for the suggestions, alex_greene and Captain_Jonah, good to see some reliable old faces still lending a hand to a fellow traveller! :wink:

You're welcome. Any time.

 

[Captain Jonah]

Not got any books handy but shouldn't those month long runs to the outer system worlds pay a higher rate for cargo than for the inner system runs. If they take longer it makes sense that they cost more since the overheads are higher and the ships get one run a month not two.

Anyways, thanks for the suggestions, alex_greene and Captain_Jonah, good to see some reliable old faces still lending a hand to a fellow traveller! :wink:

What, WHAT ! What are you calling me now. Insults, thats all I get round here. Insults. I'll have you know I can still remember the 60s. Young Whippersnappers everywhere these days :roll:

OLD.

Bah

:wink:

 

[IanW]

Its a simple job, no complications.

I need you to go to a villiage called Provorovkha, and pick me up this list of military equipment. You'll find a permission slip from the Deputy Sector Vice-Admiral as to why you're carring it if you run into any patrols.

Advise the starport why you're landing outside the extrality fence with plenty of time, wont you.

You'll need to talk to Colonel-Major Stok, and pass him my regards and this bottle of brandy.

COACC shouldnt be a problem either - your code for landing clearance is here.

The cargo is two TL6 armoured vehicles and a crate full of TL6 infantry small arms.

If you really must know, one of my nephews likes driving these things and shooting up the landscape with his friends.
******

Well. When the deal was done, Provharovka was an innocent little villiage, with a local armed forces depot.

Now it's a battlefield, as two of the balkanised TL6 worlds powers have an armoured stoush.

You'll be pleased to know that no Imperial Rules of War are being broken - theres no nukes, no biologicals and the only chemical weapons being used are slugthrowers and internal combustion engines.

 

[IanW]

Earnign a million credits, fast, try 2.

May I suggest filing the serial numbers off the Bre-X story ? To get your attention, I might as well start at the finish "And then the site geologist got dropped out of a helicopter, and nobody went to jail. The End".

http://geology.about.com/cs/mineralogy/a/aa042097.htm