Challenges for nobles or wealthy characters?

[Leitz]

What sorts of challenges would fit for a noble or very wealthy character? Obviously we have a background of fiction to draw ideas from but few Traveller games seem to deal with the idea.

What challenges would you through that someone, other than the silly "you lose all your money" trope? What game tools would be different? Have you ever played or gamed in this sort of theme, and what was it like?

 

[Supplement Four]

Have him own the ship, 100%. He's got a small business to run. He's got ship payments to make (or reduce his wealth by the amount of the ship). He's got to pay the crew their salaries. There's ship upkeep, expendables, and fuel.

He'd pay for any ship upgrades.

If they lose money while speculating, that will hurt the money man in his pocket.

And....my favorite...space combat. Run a pirate scenario, and your rich PC will be completely interested. That's his money being stolen.

Repairing the ship from battle damage ain't cheap.





Look to the challenges of Baron Oberlindes in the Aramis subsector. Tukera doesn't want him in the subsector. Vargr corsairs threaten his shipping.

Trade War!



Or, look to Game of Thrones for the adversity that Nobles can face. Family is sometimes the enemy. Tyron is a noble and rich, but he manages to find himself in all sorts of predicaments.

You could do the same with your rich noble PC.

 

[Sir Brad]

For the Noble it's kind of in the contract, they have to keep on working when they get the call, unless they want to give up the Title and keep the Courtesy title and whatever pension they may have built up.

if they want to keep the benefits but not fill the responsibilities well they will spend their lives one step ahead of "The Call" or the "Pink Slip".


if they have Money, well "Poverty is Owning a Star Ship", or you can have them do what they love, GM'ing a character doing Adventure 0, they have "Never have to work again" money, but they are doing what they love (working as a Scout & getting in to trouble) so they keep on keeping on, half way through the subsectors, if they finish on time (at the rate they are going no problem) they will get themselves a Rejuvenation treatment and buy a minor title, but that's years off yet.

 

[Supplement Four]

And...just because he's rich doesn't mean that you can't limit resources. Wealth takes infrastructure.

Is he going to carry it around with him?

If so, it can be stolen.


Or, he's got some sort of "Universal", as they say in T4. Electronic money. Well, these aren't available on low TL worlds

So, you can delay funds from time to time, effectively taking the wealth away from the character. Funds transfer can be delayed. It was supposed to be on the last transmission of that X-Boat, but it wasn't.

I work in the financial industry, and this happens today. A Fed Fund that was supposed to be deposited in the targeted account doesn't make it for three days. This does happen, more frequently than you would think.

Well...lots can go wrong when there's parsecs between banks.

 

[Drakon]

What sorts of challenges would fit for a noble or very wealthy character? Obviously we have a background of fiction to draw ideas from but few Traveller games seem to deal with the idea.

What challenges would you through that someone, other than the silly "you lose all your money" trope? What game tools would be different? Have you ever played or gamed in this sort of theme, and what was it like?

Well, lets see. There is the whole invasion by the Vargr. Then the Virus sending waves of kill crazy machines all throughout the system. Trying to keep the family together, alive, while undermining the Vargr, battling farm equipment, and rebuilding society should be pretty challenging.

Have not played it yet, still compiling information.

 

[Lycanorukke]

What sorts of challenges would fit for a noble or very wealthy character? Obviously we have a background of fiction to draw ideas from but few Traveller games seem to deal with the idea.

From a gaming point of view they both have the same problems - the player could buy their way out of trouble ("Ancient ruins? I'll hire a merc company and the world’s greatest professor for the expedition"). Stopping this by upping the threats rapidly becomes silly or a Monty Haul scenario. So you have to clip their wings by spinning scenarios which require brains over brawl.

To separate the two types (noble or rich) is to define their job. The primary difference between the two is one has 'sanctioned' power the other has 'buying' power.

Starting with the nobles (sanctioned power), what do they do to earn that power? Obviously they have to do something for the Imperium and you use that as the basis. A PC wouldn't be happy stuck at the usual noble desk job so select something that requires a hands on approach.

Eg. The Noble is a 'circuit judge' for the MoJ. They have to trudge along a string of backwater frontier worlds dispensing Imperial justice when required, with occasional diversions for 'emergency sessions'. It may sound boring so you spice it up with the 'spaghetti western' feel. Assassins, special investigators, corrupt officials, wrongful arrests, murders, etc. Things which require the deft use of iron and velvet hands to solve.
And your patron Noble will be upset if you get to many cases wrong...

Rich can be further broken down into 'independent' and 'dependant'.

A Vice president may be rich but is dependent on his employment. However this may slip into the 'lose your money' or 'rich problem solver' tropes so you change it slightly.

Eg: The person is rich and powerful because they are member of the local equivalent of the Illuminati. The Grand Master (or whatever) sends them out to solve problems and they have a nice slush fund assigned to fix the problem. Think Deus Ex types - each trying to manipulate the outcome on a planetary scale to suit themselves while countering the opponents. Running and Gunning is _not_ what you do for secrecy. "These people, they're like ghosts. Always in the shadows, hiding behind lies and proxy soldiers...".

Independently Rich is the tricky one. The PC has cash with no obligations to tie them with. A way is to ask how they made their money and how do they maintain it. You could have them running a small mercantile company, but this can fall into the 'lose your money' or 'Merchants and Markets' scenario.

Eg: The PC is an information broker (Like the Shadow Broker from Mass Effect)
. They bounce around worlds collecting juicy information and selling it to those who pay. They use minions to collect the actual data but they have to collect it themselves and keep on the move to prevent getting tracked. Sure you could use an Xboat but the info could be months out of date as opposed to weeks. And of course maybe they have a FTL comms artefact to give them their 'uncanny' ability to know what is happening, something that every power in the region would want for themselves.

On Edit: Forgot to mention. Another big factor is what the players want. Sure you may like 'Spies and Conspiracies' but the players may want to play 'Bombs and Blasters'. But that is for the specific GM to work out as they know (or should know) their players tastes.

 

[kilemall]

Parties.

Parties, or if you prefer social events, are the workplace of the Noble. Connections, insults to honor, deals, character revealed, betrayal, billions of credits at stake- where you are interacting with powerful people who know how to wield it, and many who are arrogant and 'to the manor born', depending upon the specific cultural setup of your nobility.

You may wish you were back in a comfy safe fight with pirates, where at least everybody knows who to fight and who to trust.

Here are some episodes in Legends of the Galactic Heroes, where being a noble is tough sledding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx5laXg6S-c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7j-qahz_xQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tmFLrAqILI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNBvXnZD8OU

 

[Leitz]

I'm liking these ideas!

One of the things a recent game pointed out is the value of good NPCs. My character is neither rich nor noble, but has a lot of NPCs under his direction. There was a some stress knowing that my character could not change things that were in motion.

How much does one know about the NPCs? If you were a merchant finishing up chargen, wouldn't you have comms going with a dozen or so people you've worked with over the years? "Hey, I'm putting together a crew."

From a chargen perspective, what do you think about having a split career? Let's say you're using CT. If the PC is a lesser part of the "family", be it noble or wealth, they go through LBB 4-7 normally, and then join the family business after leaving the service. However, if they are an active family member then they use Book 1 for their career and a similiar "skills light" career for nobility or wealth. Lastly, if they are a full time member of the family from the start they use an extensive chargen process similar to LBB 4-7.

As has been said, though, the basis for nobility/wealth needs to be thought through. A person who just lucked out on a 400% markup deal can be very different from a blue blood family or a megacorp CEO.

 

[Dr_Skull]

The most important thing to aristocrats is out-doing other aristocrats.

If your noble is a baron, you need another baron with equal resources--and both of them are dying to get the promotion to Count that's coming when another noble family dies out.

The challenge is for the pc Baron to out-do the npc Baron.

 

[epicenter00]

Remember that in Traveller, power is judged not in magic items or "levels" unlike D&D. However, money functions like magic items and skill levels like D&D levels.

Having one player that is super-wealthy while everyone else in the party isn't is like giving one party member a bunch of +3 weapons and armor and a ton of miscellaneous magical items while everyone else has nothing. It can be very unfair to the other players.

Essentially at that point, your solutions are to either make everyone at a similar wealth level or that character becomes the focus of the party at least for you (as the GM) because you have to take into account the incredible power of that the wealth brings. The more wealth, the worse it gets.

However, until the character has "effectively unlimited" wealth, it's not really as great as it might seem.

1) Hirelings and Mercenaries: They're bought and paid for with money. They're not the character's friends. Mercenaries will fight for their hirer, but they won't die for them; if the going gets really tough, they may activate their blood chit and simply surrender to the enemy (if they think their enemies will honor the surrender).

* High quality mercenaries will be expensive and pretty picky about their contracts - they know they're in demand so might not like some open-ended contract with nebulous goals (like the kind characters typically want). Life is important than money to these people, and if their job sounds like a suicide mission, they might not accept no matter how much money you offer them.

* Cheap, mercenaries are more common, but they you're less sure what you're getting. They may lie, swindle, steal, desert, and worst of all possibly even betray/sell-out the character. "You know, me and the boys have been looking at all this Ancient loot in this site you're having us guard. We've been talking to the crew of the ship, and well, we sell this stuff and split it up and we've figured out we'll still make a few hundred times what we're being paid..." or "You didn't even bother doing your background check well, I am with the Ine Givar..."

2) There's always someone richer and more powerful. An adventuring noble isn't doing one of the very important things that nobles actually do - going to those endless circles of holiday parties, attending the Ascot races, the balls in Vienna, taking the cure in Southern France and the equivalent in Traveller. That means they're not setting up the critical circles of noble friends that their opponents have. The wealthy character goes up against someone like that and their money doesn't mean much.

3) Your good name can't be bought with money. Honor is a cornerstone in Imperial society. While a lot of "darker and edgier" Traveller games like to ignore that, there's a lot of people for whom no amount of money is worth the potential damage to their good name (their honor) -- particularly some of the people that you really want to bribe. Lower-ranked working nobles and similar types may be very hard to bribe or persuade with money because they're worried about how that'll reflect on them and their descendants. ("This guy is waving 100,000Cr to let him and his friends bring PGMPs and Battle Dress through my custom's office. It's obviously important for him to get this stuff through ... exactly what is he planning to do? If he goes on a massacre in town shouting "the Rule of Terra!"...")

* Similarly, if the character runs around believing his wealth will clear his name of everything ... the honor-based society of the 3I might have something to say about that. You can be some multi-million credit person and certainly you'll have influence and power because of it. Your wealth and connections will probably let you do some really heinous things and not go to jail. Your hobby may be trying to be the new Elizabeth Bathory and your wealth may even keep you out of prison. However, you'll quickly acquire a reputation even if you're not doing something nearly so bad. This reputation will make you untouchable to many nobles and they'll be biased against you because you have a certain reputation that makes them not only not want to associate with you, it makes them want to see the back of you on a J-6 starship going somewhere far away, and hopefully staying there. If things get bad enough, some of those nobles, even if they're poorer than you might start passing around the hat to hire someone to do something very permanent about you. It's likely the person they hire might give them a big discount because they realize they're doing a community service -- you know, those groups of 5 term Scouts, Marines who have SEHs, and a Merchant Prince all floating around the universe in a J-2 ship trying to make ends meet exist in Traveller, after all.

4) Time often cannot be bought with money. The character may be extremely rich, but sometimes that doesn't matter. If the characters are on some X starport TL0 world doing some safari hunting or something and then some slavers show up to capture "entertainment" for super-jaded noble's sordid tastes, yeah, that character might be able to hire mercenaries ... but he needs to get back to civilization to do it. What's he going to do right now, though?

5) Resources are local. Yes, the player is extremely wealthy. Yes, to go explore the ruins on Karnak IV he spares no expense and hires a 50 mercenaries in battle dress, FGMP-armed grav sleds, and even four rampart fighters. But even a relatively poor insurrection on the planet could muster 500 guys with katyusha-style rockets and rifle grenades who can reduce such a large (and difficult to miss) expedition to smoking wreckage simply by being able to control the location and time of the engagement. Yes, the player has more money and could easily hire another force ... but that doesn't do anything for him now, when it matters.

 

[wbyrd]

I am currently working with this scenario in an online game I run. As a result of a previous campaign several characters ended up with a LARGE amount of money and resources at their command.

The group leader just bought a Frigate outright, and has a small estate to call home now..yeah its that much cash...I spent two years trying to kill them with everything an enemy army could muster..from gunships and battledress, to assassin androids, and psychotic telepaths...half the group survived and got filthy rich....

How to handle it. I put them in a scenario where their resources, cash, and high tech weapons armor, and a used corvette are NEEDED to handle the situation.

One player has to deal with a person of even greater resources looking to put their head on a pike, literally.

Another is duty bound, by her military background to assist. A third is looking to climb the ranks of his social order by performing well beyond call of duty.

The rest have crafted backgrounds that make them eager to get involved for persona or professional reasons.

the adjustment to a group that isn't worried about taking payments, or making money, or customizing their new ship for maximum profit making potential....It's been interesting to say the least.

However they, as I said, NEED the sort of resources to raise a small army of veterans and mercs....cause the enemy has a LARGE army throw-away gun fodder, and elite soldiers to throw at them.

 

[casquilho]

Just thinking this is where I can turn to TV shows for ideas.

Kidnap of Family member etc.
Blackmail, they have the goods or someone has the goods on them
Big Trouble with Daddy (Daddy is pissed and sends them out to "learn from real life". They have money, just can't get to it as easy)
Need Protection from __________
Thrill Seeker - Looking to try out the other life.
Run Away (with a gold card?)
Rich People bet on strange things
Odd Sports like Race Pods etc
Rich People going to very poor zone to do humanitarian work.

Lots of ideas that their money will not solve per say.

 

[salochin999]

A noble family that has been around a long time may have picked up little fiefdoms on multiple planets along the way. So the family send the player to check up on a holding on a backwoods planet.

Or an extension of that idea make it a "stronghold" type campaign where the players have to build up an estate in some remote location.