No Starship Campaigns

[Condottiere]

The tone set in any role playing game is set by the group playing it.

In ShadowRun, I tend to have my characters opt first for non lethal disabling of most mooks, since my character is actually breaking the law, and they're just doing their job.

Until they decide to open fire.

That's not how it started out, but developed on reflection.

The essential skills required onboard a starship are pilot, astrogator, electronics, mechanical, and engineering.

Optional are coolie, steward, gunner, security, and medical.

Astrogator could be replaced by outsourcing the job, not by getting a tape by the starport, but by a local freelancer, who will do it for a lot less.

Electronics and mechanical maintenance could have a local garage do it.

Which means that the true bottleneck is if you don't have a pilot or engineer, qualified or not.

The rest are sort of nice to have.

 

[Vormaerin]

Actually, since the topic is non starship campaigns, you don't actually need a pilot, astrogator, gunner, steward, or engineer at all. They might be useful once in a while, but that's true of any skill.

I would say that Electronics, Medic, and Mechanics are, in fact, the only essential skills mentioned in your entire post, since they are likely to be relevant at least some times in any style of sci fi campaign. The others might or might not be useful.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Admin, Streetwise, Computer
Medic, Electronic, Mechanical
Bribery, Forgery, Vehicle

 

[swordtart]

Makes for a good agent campaign. Travel (mostly) arranged by the government or company whose agent you are. Of course they could (all or some) be double agents.

Or travel agents

Actually I had a board game called Blue Water Shipping. I think it was a custom made game for corporate team building as the premise was somewhat dry. You played managers who ensured shipped goods got delivered (it wasn't a trading game, you just managed the delivery). Periodically an event would require you to deploy an agent (the Blue Water Shipping agent) for them to troubleshoot a particularly thorny issue.

That could form the basis of a game, corporate agents unblocking labour disputes, legal issues, personnel issues etc. You could take any of those published patron adventures set on random systems and just make the patron your parent company. You wouldn't need your own ship as you could just hop on the next company vessel going that way.

 

[swordtart]

That's nice, I guess?

Btw, working passage exists because it was a real thing that used to happen when tramp steamers and sailing ships were the norm and you need to replace crew at whatever port you happened to be in. Obviously, today, you'd have radioed ahead that your crewman is sick/dead/fired and can you fly someone in to be waiting for us? Thanks!

But tramp ships don't have that luxury in Traveller and, frankly, most tramp ships are barely profitable as the setting is conceived of. So saving a salary for a month is not unreasonable.

Obviously taking a large party on as working passage is unlikely (though there are a number of Amber Zones and Patrons examples that are essentially that), but the game has adventures for solo and duo players just as much as it does for parties of a dozen. So ruling it out because you think a campaign means a big group of paramilitaries is not justified.

I agree entirely.

Gunner positions on an armed merchant are ideal for working passage. Any navy dropout has the skills and the pay is so low you'll find a better job first chance you get. 99% of the time it is just sitting around. I had a captain that was ex-Navy and he had a policy of employing carefully vetted ex-Navy who had washed out after basic training to give them a second chance. That gave them three jumps worth of travel to get somewhere they might have a better chance of finding work where their reputation was unknown and they could start afresh and a reference.

Some crew positions may be mandated by regulations, but the captain might not be able to afford to staff them. I had another captain available for charters who had all the necessary skills but just needed extra warm bodies signed on for the audit trail. 90% of the time they would be doing nothing during the trip or at best standing a watch (with the computer being trusted more).

One way to make that monthly cost is to reduce your outgoings. If you don't actually have to pay a few tens of thousands a month for crew costs that is less you need to make in freight and passenger fees.

Auxiliary crew, even if they are military, will not be carrying their guns on them whilst on the ship. They will be locked away if the captain is sensible. It is of course a referee decision if they want to make it trivial to hijack ship, but I would tend to assume any captain taking on casual crew will have taken obvious precautions.

 

[swordtart]

A 1 in 6 chance of death is Russian Roulette and is, in fact, completely insane to do.

That's why we have the Mix-Corp low berths

To be fair the chance of dying isn't nearly as high as it is made out (for a healthy person at least). With care even a half-way decent Medic with the right tools can revive most people successfully. The main risk is if the revival is in an emergency. In an emergency however everyone has a chance of coming to grief.

 

[swordtart]

Actually, since the topic is non starship campaigns, you don't actually need a pilot, astrogator, gunner, steward, or engineer at all. They might be useful once in a while, but that's true of any skill.

I would say that Electronics, Medic, and Mechanics are, in fact, the only essential skills mentioned in your entire post, since they are likely to be relevant at least some times in any style of sci fi campaign. The others might or might not be useful.

And available to every character as background skills (assuming your have the EDU to take them all). I'd add Admin to that list though.

 

[swordtart]

Obviously, you have to either make them more reliable or take them off commercial vessels. Or assume the Imperium is even more dystopian because transporting people in a thing that kills you regularly is perfectly normal and folks are bad enough off that they take that chance.

And once you add in that Frozen Watches are a thing... the reality is that they are not failing on any chance that is able to be modeled on a 2d6 roll

Emergency Low berths are a completely different thing in the RAW.

I assume that there are plenty of reasons for even risky low berth travel. A system might exile criminals in lieu of a death sentence by just deporting them to a random system in low berth. Terminally ill patients might low berth to a system with advanced medical care. They might be clones or organ donors being delivered. Some might prefer it to a lingering death on a hell-world after their indentured service is over. Militaries might offer that as the only route to repatriation after service (harsh but economical).

Also with only half-way decent medical care the chance of death is greatly diminished, and that is at the point of revival, so you could have excellent facilities in some star ports rather than relying on a maybe dubious ship's doc.

 

[Endie]

[for mongoose] there is a very heavy leaning towards "have ship, will travel" planet of the week adventures.

I think I’d disagree with that. Just from the adventures I own, these do not require the party to own a ship, although some do provide one and in a handful of them the party could even end up owning it:

Last Flight of the Amuar
Theories of Everything
The Calixcuel Incident
Theories of Everything
Exodus
Makergod
Pirates of Drinax
Stranded
Flatlined
Death Station
The Lost Garden
Singularity
High and Dry
Errant Lightning
Invasive Species
Islands in the Rift
Last Call at Eneris Cantina
Secret of the Ancients

 

[Terry Mixon]

That's why we have the Mix-Corp low berths

True enough and one of the reasons I created the AutoBetths.

To be fair the chance of dying isn't nearly as high as it is made out (for a healthy person at least). With care even a half-way decent Medic with the right tools can revive most people successfully. The main risk is if the revival is in an emergency. In an emergency however everyone has a chance of coming to grief.

Yep.

 

[Vormaerin]

And available to every character as background skills (assuming your have the EDU to take them all). I'd add Admin to that list though.

That wasn't meant to be a comprehensive list of critical skills. That was a specific comment on the list provided by the person I was responding who, who gave a bunch of ship crew skills as important despite the fact that we were discussing groups that weren't in the ship operating business.

There are a number of very useful skills, even beyond the list (of CT skills ) that Sygtrygg gave.

 

[Vormaerin]

I assume that there are plenty of reasons for even risky low berth travel. A system might exile criminals in lieu of a death sentence by just deporting them to a random system in low berth. Terminally ill patients might low berth to a system with advanced medical care. They might be clones or organ donors being delivered. Some might prefer it to a lingering death on a hell-world after their indentured service is over. Militaries might offer that as the only route to repatriation after service (harsh but economical).

Also with only half-way decent medical care the chance of death is greatly diminished, and that is at the point of revival, so you could have excellent facilities in some star ports rather than relying on a maybe dubious ship's doc.

None of those would justify low berths being on nearly every commercial transport or the fact that you can almost always find passengers for that transport.

I'm not sure about your assertion of real medical care. The rule in the CRB is a Medic (Int) 6+ or they die. Bonus for the passenger's END, but that's normally 0. The standard for a starship medic is Medic 1 and Int +0. Hence the 1 in 6 chance of death. Yeah, if you have a better TL low berth or the EMT on the ship is particularly good you can get the chance down to like 1 in 12. But even a 1 in 36 chance is commercially unviable, because not enough people are going to take that risk even if you have a dystopian lack of liability issues in the future.

You can, of course, assume the ships have much better medical staff than the rules suggest (a net +3 guy costing basically double the normal salary of a ship's medic. But then I would ask why are you even using the Dumarest low lottery trope if you are working directly contrary to it's intent? At that point, I would just rule that low berths IMTU aren't death traps. Maybe that's the roll to avoid coming out of low berth with severe jetlag type symptons, which would explain why people take low berth and why they'd pay extra to avoid it.

 

[Vormaerin]

I think I’d disagree with that. Just from the adventures I own, these do not require the party to own a ship, although some do provide one and in a handful of them the party could even end up owning it:

Last Flight of the Amuar
Theories of Everything
The Calixcuel Incident
Theories of Everything
Exodus
Makergod
Pirates of Drinax
Stranded
Flatlined
Death Station
The Lost Garden
Singularity
High and Dry
Errant Lightning
Invasive Species
Islands in the Rift
Last Call at Eneris Cantina
Secret of the Ancients

I'm going to disagree with a bunch of that list as having anything to do with a no ship campaign. I wasn't talking about 'adventures that work for parties that don't roll a ship out of chargen.' Most of those adventures are not playable if you are not a party made of ship's crew.

Are you running Pirates of Drinax purely as hijackers, otherwise it is a ship based adventure? Secrets of the Ancients absolutely requires the party to own and operate a starship. As does Singularity. Last Flight of the Amuar, Exodus, Invasive Species, Islands in the Rift, are fairly long term stories around being the crew of a starship. Though technically you don't have to take it, High N Dry's purpose is to get the PC's a ship and you wouldn't get hired for the mission if you weren't a freelance ship's crew.

It's true that you could have the PCs captured by Oghmans in Makergod instead of being on Marduk in a ship. It had been a while since I read it and off the top of my head I recalled all the stuff about fighting oghman raider ships and crewing ships.

I would argue that half a dozen adventures (and none of their signature campaigns) being applicable to groups that aren't built around being a ship's crew constitutes a "heavy leaning" the other way. I never said they didn't support it at all.

 

[mavikfelna]

Singularity doesn't require a ship, it's provided. However, the only crew skill you really need is Steward, as everything else can be done by ship's crew. And you don't control where the ship goes, only have some input on the route it runs.
Note, I am a player, not a GM in a Singularity campaign currently.

 

[Vormaerin]

*sigh* Why is it difficult to understand that a campaign structure in which the players are the crew of a ship is not a no ship campaign? The players are bound to the ship. They are not free to just go climb Mount Anekthor for a month.

But, anyway, it's clear this isn't a topic anyone is actually interested in. I thought there might be something fun and interesting to talk about in terms of running campaigns where the ship doesn't feature as a centerpiece. But the only posts have been about how can actually do this or that with a ship or can't actually do something without a ship. So, I'll accept that this isn't a topic of interest and let it go.

 

[Midas]

*sigh* Why is it difficult to understand that a campaign structure in which the players are the crew of a ship is not a no ship campaign? The players are bound to the ship. They are not free to just go climb Mount Anekthor for a month.

But, anyway, it's clear this isn't a topic anyone is actually interested in. I thought there might be something fun and interesting to talk about in terms of running campaigns where the ship doesn't feature as a centerpiece. But the only posts have been about how can actually do this or that with a ship or can't actually do something without a ship. So, I'll accept that this isn't a topic of interest and let it go.

Sure it's an interesting topic, and I'm sorry if my specific question hijacked your thread. It just strikes me as odd that Travellers would scrounge for patrons, use rumors, call in favors etc, but in four decades of playing, no one has ever asked "I go down to the Port Authority and ask if there are any ships heading to Enope. What do I find out?"
And then the referee scratches his head. "Y'know, I don't know how to answer that."

OK, for just a simple trade game, our Traveller has a few admin related skills and a small nest egg. He uses the speculation table and finds a good deal on something that will sell well on a world two parsecs away. He rents some cargo space and buys a high class ticket (because it would really sour his day if he got bumped), and is off. I'd have fun just playing Space Monopoly, with the occasional patron - it's a girl, there's always a Damsel in Distress - in a one off scenario.

Is this what you had in mind?

 

[Vormaerin]

That particular question didn't hijack the thread. "How does this get handled" is fine and on topic. As I mentioned before, the designers never really questioned whether a ticket to a particular planet could be bought. It was assumed you could and the only question was when and that was better answered by the GM than a random table.

Traveller is very inconsistent about interstellar shipping. On one hand, they say that people travel by starship the way they take international flights. On the other hand, they also wanted to allow for backwater shenanigans like the pulp era sci fi that influenced the game.

And there's been evolution over time. The Spinward Marches pre Fifth Frontier War releases under GDW was the outermost fringe of the empire where the Empire barely had any forces and it was mostly home rule internal bickering. But they needed a lot more Navy to have a wargame about naval combat, so post 5FW, the Imperial presence was much stronger.

Then GURPS actually tried to put serious thought into the interstellar economics and chose a model that was very shipping friendly, making it very clear there was LOTS of trade and quite large trade ships and passengers. And that's pretty much stuck since.

And no one has ever really wanted to make two sets of rules, one for the Core and one for the Fringes.

These days, if you want a proper "fringe", you need to use the Trojan Reaches or one of the other somewhat outside of the Imperium regions, because the level of Imperium-ness has gotten quite high all around. Like, the encounter tables let you encounter pirates but trying to work out how that was possible with how Jump drives and the Imperium functioned became increasingly difficult as the Navy got more and more upsized.

 

[Vormaerin]

So when I am talking about a no ship campaign, I am taking about a campaign where the characters do not have a ship they are associated with for any significant length of time. They might take a job on a ship here and there, if they have the relevant skills. But there's no particular expectation that they have Engineer, Astrogation, etc to actually meet the crew requirements. There was some sidebars about working passage above, but I consider things like "Aces & Eights", where they are hired as shipboard security to catch a swindler to be working passage, not just "my pilot got arrested, fly me to the next planet". Or being brought on as entertainers if the PCs have performance skills or other kinds of prestige that would make a liner journey sparkle.

In my campaigns, I like to emphasize that there is a lot of system ship traffic. I don't have ships jump from planet to planet with in the same star system unless it's going to take 2+ weeks to get there by in system ship. The lost cargo space and cost of fuel for jumping makes a big difference and my experience with shipping IRL is that businesses will almost always take a "order farther in advance to take a slow cheap ship" over "pay more for faster delivery". There are exceptions, but no one is going to pay for a jump ship to take their ore from belt to Earth if they can put it on a system ship.

That means that while there's no commercial shuttle to Rock #43, there are charters (with or without a pilot) that any moderately developed system would have so they can go to that rock when they need to. And, of course, there are both legit, gray market, and black market versions of said charters.

No ship campaigns probably do tend to have a smaller area of operation, though since I tend to run my sandbox games in a contained area like the Reft Islands, that's not a big change in my personal experience. But I really like to have recurring characters and locations in my games and that's easier without the temptation to "just go spinward, old man"

A lot of people think that mobility (aka a starship) is flexibility. I am not convinced on that score. Without your own ship, there is usually just extra steps involved in being able to do the ship type adventures even if your crew has the skills. Like how Magnum had to always go find his buddy T.C. when he needed a helicopter. Granted, you can also find a way to store your ship or whatever if you are going to go spend 2 months on a climb of Mount Anekthor looking for space yetis. But I think it is generally easier to hare off on whatever strikes your fancy without the burden of a mortgage (and especially without the burden of a subsidy). I can see that some groups might find it annoying to figure out how to get somewhere off the beaten track, but my group finds it a great way to use allies, contacts, and various social skills, generating a lot of RP opportunities that we'd often skip in just 'get in the ship and go'.

This might just be my players, but I find they are less obsessed with money when they don't have to worry about keeping The Fat Pig of Aberdeen in good financial condition. The difference in scale between ship expenses and normal expenses is pretty substantial. So they are more willing to take a Cr5000 credit couple day job when they aren't spending ten times that on mortgage, maintenance, and berthing fees.

Obviously, a TAS membership benefit is significantly more valuable in a no ship campaign.

Obviously, if you run your campaign with different assumptions (for instance a much lower level of interplanetary and interstellar shipping, especially) that would make having a ship much more valuable. And you may not be remotely interested in running adventures like the Harrensa Project, Nomads of the World Ocean, Legends of the Sky Raiders, Tarsus, Ascent to Anekthor, or other such that keep players planetside for lengthy periods of time. No worries. Everyone knows that ship based campaigns work great and there's tons of resources for those. I'm not trying to be like "this is better." I was just hoping for a discussion about how you can thrive without a ship playing Traveller. Even within Charted Space.

 

[rinku]

I'd like to throw in that interstellar traffic density is mostly unimportant unless you HAVE to be somewhere by a given date. At which point it will matter if the world is a backwater or not.

If the travelling group is on a world, adventure can be found there until opportunity arises to move on. A ship arriving with enough berths for the group is such an opportunity - it's up to the players to choose that option, or stay around. Naturally there might already be incentives that push them in that direction, but that's just particular campaign stuff.

If the world is techy, you'll still have the potential for space stuff in-system.

But time can be pretty fluid, unless your campaign style is to count the pennies and the seconds. Two months or two days on a planet doesn't much matter most of the time.

 

[Sigtrygg]

*sigh* Why is it difficult to understand that a campaign structure in which the players are the crew of a ship is not a no ship campaign?

One addendum, a player or a couple of players being temporarily forced to crew a pirate ship, or working passage on a merchant would be a no ship campaign in my book.

The players are bound to the ship. They are not free to just go climb Mount Anekthor for a month.

But, anyway, it's clear this isn't a topic anyone is actually interested in.

Are you kidding? it is how Traveller was meant to be played. It is certainly the way I and my group of gamers have run the game for over forty years.
I will shortly be posting a list of the CT Adventures and Double Adventures wherein it can be shown the majority of Traveller adventures are no ship adventures - probably because the chances of a ship being granted during character generation are slim.

I thought there might be something fun and interesting to talk about in terms of running campaigns where the ship doesn't feature as a centerpiece. But the only posts have been about how can actually do this or that with a ship or can't actually do something without a ship. So, I'll accept that this isn't a topic of interest and let it go.

I have been resisting the urge to comment because I have often posted that my longest running campaign is a no ship campaign and wanted to see what others would say in response to your proposal.

The consensus is that the vast majority are wedded to the ethically challenged merchant but not really a merchant campaign.

Jump ships are means to travel between worlds to have adventures and make your fortune, if you want to concentrate on paying the mortgage on the ship, paying the overheads then I don't think you have much time for anything else.

Traveller to me:
exploring the ruins of dead civilisations
interacting with different cultures
troubleshooting other peoples' problems
planet of the week adventure.

Dumarest, The Stainless Steel Rat, Deathworld, Future History et al,

Do you remember the Firefly episode where Mal and crew were trying to find loose change to pay for refueling? How about the Star Wars episode where Luke finally paid off the mortgage on his W-wing, and the never to be forgotten episode where the Enterprise was refuses docking at deep space seven because the Federation had not paid the docking and refueling fees in advance.

Most of the sci fi involving ship crew the ship costs nothing and has no upkeep costs.