I can finally explain EXACTLY what "Ship Shares" are to my players!

[Yenaldlooshi]

Ship Shares... what the heck are they and why do they exist?

Yes, I know the rules as written. I know those backwards and forwards. Please don't post rules clarifications unless you see I have made a mistake because I am pretty sure I know what the rules are.

But what ARE ship shares? Not in terms of game mechanics, but in terms the game world.

This is my take; they are benefits, financial devices, negotiated by commercial brokers with various companies and military branches to help provide monetary pension benefits and starship purchase incentives. They are basically a starship purchase incentive program, like we have on earth now for home owner first time owner assistance, that when it isn't activated for a purchase, it just provides a yearly pension.

GMS, I highly recommend you take my advice:

1) NEVER let players "cash in" Ship Shares for Credits directly. You will be tempted to give them too much and they will be OP out of the gate. They can take the yearly pension of Cr1000, or they can buy a ship, that's it. If you are feeling charitable, say your game started on day 001 and they just got their first dividend (the Cr1K per share).

2) House Rule: Ship Share's must be paid back in cash when a ship is sold that was purchased with them. This is to stave of "Share Laundering" and profiteering. (This is also how real life home incentives work too in the first 3 years of ownership, btw.) Fail to do this, and I will take my 5 shares, buy a launch and then resell it back. I don't care if I do get -3 on my broker roll because I don't have that skill. I will still be rolling in Cr and you will see me in Battledress the very next day unless the GM does the usual "umm... you can't find it for sale... law levels... etc."

 

[mavikfelna]

I like your rule for share laundering. I would apply it ships after a fashion as well, as I have had a half paid off labship benefit that I didn't want and the GM allowed me sale it at the standard old ship purchase price + broker roll and pay off the remaining 20 years of mortgage and it easily left me with enough to buy the customized exploration ship we really wanted with only a few additional shares needed to be thrown in. Having no economic pressure as a crew was nice, but it could have easily been an excuse to not adventure from lack of need.

As for what shares are, they are described differently in different places and versions of the game but are essentially what you said, a combination of investments, pensions, loan guarantees and incentives for purchasing and outfitting ships and for providing pension benefits. They also represent personal capital in relationships with others willing to invest in your ventures.
I allow them to be sold off for 1% of their value because some of that share's represented value is indeed cash or other investment but it is probably penalized for early withdrawal or being used for something it wasn't intended for and 10KCr is usually easily enough to extract from the player's wallet.
There is a JTAS article, can't remember which one off hand, that has an article on portfolios for rich characters and I remember something in there about treating ship shares as a portfolio investment so I think that's where most of my idea about what a ship share actually is came from.

 

[Anstett]

Post in thread 'Ship Shares - how do they work in your Traveller Universe?' https://forum.mongoosepublishing.co...n-your-traveller-universe.126010/post-1018377

How I deal with it to stop the idea of 'abuse'.
Part of the reason I do it this was is to give more options for roleplay and using the Traveller's backstory to influence what options they have for their future.

Using your battledress option:
Sure go buy it.
One of your fellow travelers has multiple income streams (read potential adventures)
Another traveller has subsidized trade route to help make strong future.... if they can avoid a bad deal

The battledress sits and waits for someone to hire that traveller (they choose to go the more mercenary route) or it sits in storage until your merchant fellow traveller needs you to bring it out.

Always lots of options for the players to have fun with means there is no best/optimal strategy for ship shares or really anything.

 

[Condottiere]

It's a clumsy game mechanism to let the individual characters in the party be (in)vested in the starship.

Could represent any number of things, from picking up scrap that's actually a valuable working piece of spacecraft component, to using influence to get that mortgage, and/or a favour from a spacecraft mechanic to do some repair work for free.

 

[Yenaldlooshi]

Using your battledress option:
Sure go buy it.
One of your fellow travelers has multiple income streams (read potential adventures)
Another traveller has subsidized trade route to help make strong future.... if they can avoid a bad deal

The battledress sits and waits for someone to hire that traveller (they choose to go the more mercenary route) or it sits in storage until your merchant fellow traveller needs you to bring it out.

Honestly, as a fellow GM, I have never understood what I call "GM BD Phobia", the fear of players having Battledress. Every GM that has it seems to think they have to consistently trip up their players from getting it, or in an almost vengeful way, make sure that if they get it, then in their very next combat, the opponent has the means to defeat it and make it useless. For me, if you have the Cred, you have the planet with both the TL and LL that would allow for it, make a broker or admin or streetwise roll and go get you your BD! Just like any other piece of gear.

It really does not make that much difference in my games. That is, if you are GMing like a Traveller Referee and not like a D&D Dungeon Master with science fiction themed dungeons.

Too many Traveller GM's fear BD because they fear for their NPC bosses in personal combat. My NPC "bosses" are not waiting at the end of a "space dungeon" for personal combat. There is so much more power in my Traveller world above what a few paltry Travellers might have in the way of small arms and personal armor. I worry about them being OP in terms of Social ranking and Persuasion skills than if they have BD.

In the game, a Type S courier with a single beam laser is far more dangerous and OP in the game world when compared to a marine in BD with a fusion gun, and yet Type S's are a low level mainstay.

my 2 bits

 

[Anstett]

I am not afraid of the players having any gear they want to purchase, come out of Character Discovery with etc.

Because we treat our game as Cooperative Storytelling it will be up to the players as a whole to choose how the story would work with the Battle Dress example. To this point we have not had a Cohort of travellers want to pursue a Mercenary type of Vignette. If there were two or three like minded players I am certain there would be a story around it.

 

[rinku]

There's also the point that it really doesn't matter what personal combat gear the players have when they're outmatched in space and the other guys aren't interested in boarding. And it really does not take much to outmatch an adventure class ship in space.

 

[rinku]

My space pirate JUST got her hands on battle dress as an end of arc reward. Am I going to wear it much? Nope. Her TL12 Cr25,000 mustering out benefit vacc suit is FAR more comfy and useful. If we're headed for deadly danger, is she going to switch to the battledress and gun up? Heck yeah. But we REALLY try to avoid those situations, man.

 

[Yenaldlooshi]

There's also the point that it really doesn't matter what personal combat gear the players have when they're outmatched in space and the other guys aren't interested in boarding. And it really does not take much to outmatch an adventure class ship in space.

Right? As I have said, A scout courier with a single beam laser is more OP than a PC in BD, yet the PC world is awash with 100, 200 even 400 ton ships that PC's have with multiple turrets of usually double or better and starship weaponry that could level a squad of troops in BD in a heartbeat.

 

[Condottiere]

Depends on what it's being used on.

If you bring a spacecraft laser to a gunfight, in the trial, that's like using a tank gun.