Simplified Ship Finances?

[Ahmad Romanov]

I totally get players and referees that want the detailed bookkeeping and really enjoy crunching the numbers on trade and profit... that is all cool. But I am not sure if it fits my own personal play-style to do that... I was wondering what you all thought of this solution to keep the "business" side of running a starship in the background while focusing the game session itself on adventures and action.

Basically, players have their own private monies (counted in CR as normal, and privately owned by the individual player, whether it is cash in the pocket or a big bank account on some planet). They use this to buy whatever personal items they need during the game.

Separate from that is a starship slushfund... it doesn't have an exact CR amount. Rather, the ship has a vaguely defined "operating cost," which could be "hundreds of thousands of credits," or "tens of millions of credits" and so on. I reality, though, the starship account will just be a target difficulty to meet expenses (routine, formidable, etc.). Whenever a roll is required (such as when the pilot gets a bad mishap and damages the ship, or some system gets blown off in combat, or just when the ship needs its an annual maintenance overhaul), the players roll dice against the difficulty.

The risk qualifier for the test is based on the situation... can't repair that drive plate? Maybe it will hold on another month before it blows... Uncertain and hazardous! Want to upgrade a room to take high passengers? Safe, obviously. Overdue on a payment and the bank is trying to take the ship? Confrontation, fateful... you should have run from the bank's repo-bounty hunters when you had the chance!

The players will always be aware of the current difficulty... it will be higher if the ship is on a mortgage, lower if the crew just scores a big payout, higher if they haven't had a job in a while...

When the crew earns money for a job, they can decide how much of that is going into bonuses (basically, money that goes straight into the players pockets as CR) and how much is going to the starship account). For example, the referee could say "Ok, the duke pays you the promised 60,000 credits for the last job, what are you going to do with the money? You can probably each take 5,000 credits without increasing the ship expense difficulty, but if you go without pay, you will actually lower it one level for a month or two, buying you time till your next job."

If you really need to eyeball that quickly, then you can probably assume the monetary payout (in CR) for a mission x 10 gives you an operating cost range. So if you complete a single job worth 60,000 CR, it would cover the recent expenses for a ship in the "600,000 CR per annum" operating cost range (based on the assumption that the players will run about 10 big missions a year, or one every two weeks, with lesser missions neither significantly contributing to or taking from these earnings). Thus, if your ship has an operating cost in the single millions, this mission probably wouldn't reduce the the payment difficulties, and might actually give them a tighter deadline to earn money (before the expenses difficulty goes up) if the crew skims too much for bonuses. A huge payout after a seminal moment in the campaign and the players should automatically get to reduce the ship costs (maybe they buy out the ship entirely from the bank, or they make enough to sit comfortable for a while and take on pro-bono work or just explore and travel to a new sector).

To be clear, the amount of expenses that a ship is worth is entirely up to the referee and usually just indicates how much money he wants to hand out in his campaign... a campaign where a Free Trader could be operated for mere tens of thousands means he wants the players to be able to skim a lot of cash bonuses and be comfortably rich (a "Monty Haul" game, if you will). A campaign where a Free Trader costs millions or tens of millions to operate annually (maybe it's old and unreliable, maybe the bank has a heavy lean on the ship, maybe the licensing fees are exorbitant) just means the referee wants to keep the players a little more desperate and hungry.

Now, this is not really a system for handling speculative trading... if you wanted to do that, I would probably just treat it as mission. You buy the goods "automatically" and you get a payout (plus or minus some broker rolls for haggling) if you get them to a specific world in a specific amount of time. More valuable goods simply take up less space and thus restrict the amount of other cargo missions you can take (i.e., you can afford to buy 15 tons of computers or 75 tons of cheap tourist souvenirs). The "value" (really, the base payout for the trading mission) is unchanged, however... it's simply up to the referee, as to how much he wants a trade mission to be worth (just like he decides how much a patron might pay for any other kind of mission).

Thoughts?

 

[Ahmad Romanov]

I should probably add that I would expect players to exploit the above system, just like they min-max the default trade and finance rules for optimal gains. That's not necessarily a bad thing and shouldn't automatically be punished... after all, there is a reason that most of the independent ships flying around out there are clunkers in bad need of repair. In the same way, if the players neglect to cover operating expenses (and instead line their pockets), then the difficulty will go up and they will be unable to cover things when the ship breaks down or needs refits and upgrades. It's the players game, so they can play that as they see fit.

In general, I would NOT recommend forcing a roll for outright ownership of the ship if the mortgage is falling behind UNLESS you really want the players to lose their ship (which, if not done right, would probably amount to bad refereeing). If things were getting ridiculous and the players were pocketing all of the money, I would simply start requiring rolls for basic things like fuelling the ship up or paying a berthing bill to leave a planet. Players might unload some of their personal wealth to cover these instances (no roll necessary), but it should be enough of a wakeup call for most groups. Of course, if you want to introduce a bounty hunter, then you could say "your expenses have risen to formidable due to mismanagement... you receive a letter from the bank stating that if you don't correct this by the end of the month, the bank retains the right to send an armed repo-man to reclaim your starship!"

 

[Ahmad Romanov]

Sorry for three posts in a row... is there really no way to edit your posts on this forum? I see no button to do so!

Anyway, I wanted to add an even simpler way to manage the above. Players would simply be paid their monthly salary (according to their job on the ship, with unusual professions just getting a base salary modified by the player's initial roll to negotiate the best possible wage). That is the player's regular income and it is included in the nebulous category of "ship expenses." Now, if the captain or the crew collectively want to get "bonuses" after a mission, then the referee could simply word it like this:

"This mission paid enough to drop your expense level to routine for 3 weeks... perhaps it would be a good time to buy that new ship computer? Otherwise, if you each take a 1,500 CR bonus, then that lets you instead keep the ship running for 7 weeks at your current expense level of difficult before the expenses raise to formidable."

The players could then sit around the table for a few minutes and discuss priorities... repair the broken airlock or make a little more money? One player wants a new suit of battle dress, but then again the ship really needs a laser turret, and a luxury suite upgrade would allow more high passengers and more money down the line...

Technically, I suppose you could give the players endless variations of bonuses, but it gets complicated to do so (you'd have to keep eyeballing thresholds for expense increases). Instead, it should probably just be a "take it or leave it" offer... either 1,500 credits or nothing... and then move on with the adventure. Of course, if you keep it brief, a quick back and forth let's you negotiate something satisfying, but I wouldn't give a lot of options because it would be simply too complicated.

 

[Condottiere]

Reasonable observers would note that starship costs and expenses are incredibly cheap.

Players are operating in a command economy, in other words, it's dictated by the dungeon master, who may or may not randomize business opportunities.

 

[whartung]

Rather than model is at the CR level, model it at a "successful/unsuccessful" trade model. Every time they "successfully" trade (however you define that), they gain "trade points". Every time they fail, they lose points.

A ship requires N trade points per year in terms of maintenance or whatever. And a constant drain of points to operate (1, 2 points per month, or something).

You could argue that this is normal trade, but with amount rounded to the nearest 10,000Cr or something. But I'm thinking more abstract than that.

On a good day, they have a extra successful trade, and that nets them more points.

In the end, they either have more good trades than not and learn whether they can keep their ship.

 

[Ahmad Romanov]

Reasonable observers would note that starship costs and expenses are incredibly cheap.

That is probably true! I am new to Traveller so I haven't got to the maintenance sections of the book. I think the issue for me is that I don't really want to bother with much bookkeeping when it comes to the players' ship... maybe I will eventually, but for starting out I'd like some way to hand-wave it (the combat rules alone are hard enough to wrap my head around!).

Players are operating in a command economy, in other words, it's dictated by the dungeon master, who may or may not randomize business opportunities.

Very true. Since the referee provides the job opportunities, he also ultimately controls the players' income and thus their ability to pay ship expenses. This allows him to tailor the campaign to the playstyle he wants... "get rich quick" or "just scrapping by" or something in between.

Since this is all really the whim of the referee, why not fudge ship expenses too? It seems odd to me to have to do a lot of math every session just to calculate something (ship maintenance) that is based on something the referee is actually just completely making up (income).

I thought a little bit about what the actual purpose of maintenance rules are... I think it could either be a mini-game in itself (which is fine, but just not my cup of tea), or it could be a plot-device... keep the ship flying, pay for repairs, upgrades, maybe eventually buy a better ship. The ship is a character in its own right, a reason to keep adventuring (to keep the ship flying) and obviously a means to keep adventuring as well.

But if you treat the ship as a plot device, then there is no reason to feel constricted to a math-intensive system as well... I kind of suspect the same is true about ship design. I've read a lot of comments that the MegaTraveller ship design system is too complicated or doesn't work. But why can't the referee just fudge it by looking at a similar class starship and moving a few of the vaues up or down? Real life engineers don't follow rules... they break them. Why couldn't there be "impossible" starships (from the perspective of the ship design system) in the far future?

Half of the reason I am thinking these things is because MegaTraveller has a lot for a new referee like me to absorb... fudging things would be quite a relief and let me start running the game without mastering every rule in the book. The other half of the reason is that is simply my playstyle preference!

Rather than model is at the CR level, model it at a "successful/unsuccessful" trade model. Every time they "successfully" trade (however you define that), they gain "trade points". Every time they fail, they lose points.

A ship requires N trade points per year in terms of maintenance or whatever. And a constant drain of points to operate (1, 2 points per month, or something).

You could argue that this is normal trade, but with amount rounded to the nearest 10,000Cr or something. But I'm thinking more abstract than that.

On a good day, they have a extra successful trade, and that nets them more points.

In the end, they either have more good trades than not and learn whether they can keep their ship.

I like that too! I want a simple system that isn't too opaque to the players... they should always know where they stand (financially) and what is at stake (when they do or do not complete jobs). I'll admit that my CR equivalency idea is pretty abstract and the "ship expenses difficulty" could be a little more tactile and tangible. Trade points might just do that.

Are there any other suggestions along this line, or has anyone done anything similar?