What are "luxuries" in the ship design?

[Whipsnade]

The mundane becomes interesting when it means something (or appears to). Characters have to be characters, not just video game enemies. Even shooting and flying fall flat in an RPG if there's no story or conflict involved. Every encounter should involve conflict if it's worth playing out.

Saundby,

Good examples all, but none of them specifically required a PC with Steward skill. The pilot could just as easily been visiting the butcher, an engineer could just as easily been in the street market, and a gunner could just as easily have been pressing the Valgrave's pantaloons.

I tried to make the Steward skill more useful and I've mentioned some of the methods I used, but in the end those methods could have involved nearly any player and nearly any skill; i.e. the engineer can handle life support purchases and the medic could keep an eye on nutrition. Allowing it to act like Liaison-Lite or Admin-Lite didn't really help either because some other PC usually had real skill. If I'd gone to the extreme and made the steward nearly the sole source of most of my "hooks", the players would have groused about that as well they should have.

Despite all my attempts to make the skill useful and interesting, it simply was too vague and it's role too little supported with rules and tasks. In the First Three LBBs the only use mentioned for steward skill involved carrying high passengers. If there's just one level of the skill somewhere in the crew, you can carry high pax. Later on the steward skill allowed for DMs on the pax table, but even that was very little.

In the end, the "official" uses for the skill were very limited, any of my home-brewed uses were weak, and the story arc uses you mentioned had to be parceled out among all the PCs.

Perhaps it's because I never had a player who really threw themselves into the job as steward. Instead, as the GM, I was always coaxing the player "stuck" with the job into roleplaying it rather than just going through the motions and I was always trying to come up with interesting tasks I could plausibly say belonged to the job alone.

My groups usually hired the job out even when they possessed the skill. The player with the highest level would act as a backstop until the group could afford to outsource the job to some NPC they trusted or purchase a robot. I even had groups avoid carrying high pax because they believed it was too much trouble. This tendency gave me a "handle" on them naturally but, when the group becomes aware of your handle, it doesn't work very well.

For me, Steward was more trouble than Jack-of-all-Trades.


Regards,
Bill

 

[atpollard]

STEWARD SKILL:
A wasted effort in the ‘large skill list’ universe. It should have been THE skill for all interpersonal interaction in a ‘small skill list’ universe and it deserved a better name (Liaison works for me, or Charisma if you can avoid the DnD connotations). The ‘steward’ should be the ‘face man’ for the group - able to talk anyone into anything.

LUXURIES:
For Amenities (like have been mentioned by others), I typically just assigned extra tonnage at the same cost as staterooms. One long duration ship I designed had a small garden with a sitting area and a hot tub. The ship was too small to accommodate it with only the ‘stateroom tonnage’, so we just allocated an extra ‘stateroom’ to pay for the extra 4 tons of ‘Luxuries’. (and noted that the life support could support two people more than a stateroom count would suggest.)

With respect to the MgT ‘Luxuries’, the cost and tonnage is too high for just extra ‘stuff’ for the passengers to do. Since it replaces Stewards, it is clearly more service oriented than ‘stuff’ oriented. I would suggest, however, that it need not be an expensive 1 ton box that fits in a closet and plugs into the wall. Using the fancy new airline seats as an example, it could also represent dozens of small upgrades scattered throughout the ship that make it easier for customers to care for themselves. Upgrading the kitchen from an automated food dispenser to automated food preparation. Add an automated vacuum to constantly clean the floors. Upgrade the laundry from an automated washer and drier (for the steward) to an automated dry cleaning that returns the items cleaned, pressed and folded. None of these things require 1 dTon, but rather all of these things combined require 1 dTon and 100,000 credits more than the standard models.

 

[shield]

That would make sense, since it replaces stewards, it has to do all the stuff stewards do,

What do stewards spend most of their time on: cleaning rooms, laying out fresh bed clothes, food preparation and serving, entertaining passengers and general dogsbodying.

So all of the above + possible 3D holograms of entertainers to stop the steward having to do his song and dance everynight , a bar tender robot, those little robot vacuum cleaners etc.

Cheers
Richard

 

[Galadrion]

Whipsnade:

While I happen to enjoy roleplaying the steward (and generating the opportunities therefrom), there is no rule which says everyone has to. Or even should. Different groups have different priorities - if your group would rather be a troop of pirate-thwarting roustabouts of the spaceways, by all means, gear your game that way. If they don't seem to get any value out of Steward skill, let that rule lie fallow. It's not a particularly good idea to try to shoehorn players into a role they don't want - that allows them to complain of being railroaded, with considerable justice.

In contrast, I have, on more than one occasion, played a character with absolutely no combat capability. (It usually took the connivance of the referee to generate said character - the generation tables are, quite clearly, biased that direction... because that's what most players want. It's actually quite difficult to generate a non-combatant under the rules as written.) I usually wound up having a great time with those characters, because I happen to enjoy the challenge of making such a character useful enough to justify the rest of the group keeping him on, despite the obvious drawbacks of having someone along who the rest of the group has to protect. It's all in what a particular group is looking for in the line of entertainment. Most gamers these days tend to focus on the combat, but some are looking for something else... or something more. Those are the people who are going to get more out of Steward skill, as well as some of the other less-used skills. For the combateers, let them either use luxuries to substitute or hire some help. It won't really hurt your game in the long run.

 

[Whipsnade]

While I happen to enjoy roleplaying the steward (and generating the opportunities therefrom), there is no rule which says everyone has to. Or even should. Different groups have different priorities - if your group would rather be a troop of pirate-thwarting roustabouts of the spaceways, by all means, gear your game that way. If they don't seem to get any value out of Steward skill, let that rule lie fallow. It's not a particularly good idea to try to shoehorn players into a role they don't want - that allows them to complain of being railroaded, with considerable justice.

Galadrion,

I agree with everything in your post, especially the bit I quoted above. I tried very hard not shoehorn players into certain roles and tried equally hard to avoid railroading too. The fact that I quickly found myself as the permanent GM of our group may attest to how well my players enjoyed my games. Or maybe how much they loathed GMing, who knows!

One thing I tried very hard to do was to allow a player to use every skill they possessed at least one time during a campaign. I wanted them to think of the PCs as "whole" characters and not as a collection of skills both useful and useless. Because of that I fretted over the Steward skill, among others, and continually tried to come up with ways it could be used. Each time I produced a new wrinkle that involved players with the Steward skill I found that they couldn't care less. If they could have erased from their PC card they would have in an instant and seemingly nothing I could do as a GM ever made them change their opinion.

Over my career as a GM I found ways to regularly "include" skills like Animal Handling, Artisan, Forward Observer, and History, but I never was able to turn the trick with Steward. I too had PCs without combat skills, not that a lack of SMG-2 or ACR-4 was a handicap in the types of campaigns I ran. Before MT introduced the 0 level homeworld skills, I'd given players with normal backgrounds something akin to Handgun-0 with the proviso that they practice.

I won't say that I was always successful in balancing each session or spreading the action around, but I didn't have too many gripes from players about their character's inactivity. I always tried to have something for everybody in every session. Sometimes I tried too hard and my "fingerprints" showed, but the effort was always appreciated.


Regards,
Bill

 

[saundby]

On specific gameplay results with or without the Steward skill:

In the roleplay situations, I give a more favorable response to those with Steward by those in allied service roles. The butcher, grocer, launderer, etc. will react more positively or openly to someone that they sense is "one of them." It's usually done tacitly, though in situations where the character's skill isn't obvious, the player can roleplay to get the advantage.

The steward is in such situations as I cited because the are the Steward. The pilot doesn't have the steward skill, so what does he know of the difference between a professional pressing versus just out of the fresher and hung up as-is? If he does try to iron, what will the result be? What does an engineer know about dealing with shopkeeepers versus just paying what's asked for what's on display?

I provide different roleplay experiences for different characters based on their backgrounds. A pilot in the same situation won't get the same results. Something that gets said at my table moderately often: Player A: "Hey, that didn't happen for me! Player B: "Well, that's because you're not an X."

The hiring alternative:

NPCs have their own agendas. An NPC steward may pass info on passengers to the crew, but it'll probably be filtered. They also accept hush money, and may be confederates with someone with interests skew to those of the players. My thought when they hire the job out: "Oh, goodie! This is going to really be fun!"

Machines (luxuries):

Machines don't talk, though they can malfunction. A high end auto-press might still choke on fat coins in a pocket ("Read all instructions before use, intended for use by trained operators.") If the engineer tears it open the foreign gold will still be revealed, but the circumstances will be different. Machines won't report what was revealed in a stateroom while cleaning, who is ducking into whose room at odd hours, and so on.

Steward can also get a character a berth on a ship when the passenger list is full, and is a position that can have a lot of influence on a ship.

I strongly expect that the reason behind the Steward skill is the Dumarest books, where Earl uses a Steward-like skill to dramatic effect. I didn't read these until recently, but having friends in the hospitality industry when I started running Traveller gave me the info I needed to flesh it out.

 

[Galadrion]

One thing I tried very hard to do was to allow a player to use every skill they possessed at least one time during a campaign.

To me, the key word in this sentence is "allow". If you provide an opportunity (and preferably a few of them; not everybody will pick up on every opportunity), then the players have the choice to take advantage of it... or not. With my GMing style, I'll tend to build in rewards if and when players take advantage of such chances - I really don't like systems which take the semi-complementary approach of penalizing them when they don't take a particular course. In my view, the natural penalty of passing up on an opportunity is the forgoing of the benefits of that opportunity... and little extra penalty is ever needed.

And if the players consistently ignore a particular choice, you can always sit down with them out of game and ask them why. If they flat out tell you it doesn't interest them, you can safely stop offering such choices. But you may just discover that they've never even thought about the possible benefits... and it created a conceptual blind spot for them. That can even be enough to change their behavior... or not.

(And another possibility, if you've got players of a subtle enough bent. If you do stop offering such choices as a result of such a conversation, and you've told them that you're planning to do so, then you can later reintroduce the option and thereby tip off a suitably subtle gamer that something significant is up. But you have to know your players well enough to know they'll pick on something that devious, or else it's likely to be wasted effort.)

 

[Whipsnade]

To me, the key word in this sentence is "allow". If you provide an opportunity (and preferably a few of them; not everybody will pick up on every opportunity), then the players have the choice to take advantage of it... or not.

Galadrion,

That was pretty much my style, present the opportunities and let the players opt for whatever they wanted.

With my GMing style, I'll tend to build in rewards if and when players take advantage of such chances - I really don't like systems which take the semi-complementary approach of penalizing them when they don't take a particular course.

I never penalized anyone for not using Steward and, as I've written, I tried very hard not to railroad anyone. You can find a thread I started here called "The Fixers" dealing with a campaign I once ran. In it, the players swerved away from what I'd penciled in as the campaign's goal in the first session. I swerved right along with them and fashioned a new goal to meet the player's actions. The resulting campaign was far superior to the one I'd originally set up.

In my view, the natural penalty of passing up on an opportunity is the forgoing of the benefits of that opportunity... and little extra penalty is ever needed.

Agreed. You've plenty of carrots as a GM, you needn't use any sticks. The game itself can apply any required smackdowns.

And if the players consistently ignore a particular choice, you can always sit down with them out of game and ask them why. If they flat out tell you it doesn't interest them, you can safely stop offering such choices. But you may just discover that they've never even thought about the possible benefits... and it created a conceptual blind spot for them. That can even be enough to change their behavior... or not.

I did speak with them outside of the game about their likes and dislikes. I routinely had "debriefings" after campaigns too. I repeated what I've remembered about their complaints regarding Steward in this thread. However, I still couldn't help thinking that my players' opinions of Steward were somehow my fault as a GM.

I felt, and still somewhat feel, that I failed as a GM to portray Steward, plus it's potential uses and benefits, effectively enough to my players and that's why they ignored and belittled it.

It was my fault, not their fault. I just couldn't get the idea across.


Regards,
Bill

 

[aramis]

Given that my players interpreted steward as primarily doing laundry and cooking. Never had a problem with players reading more into it.... nor less. It is the skill of providing the needed food service and laundry service in a manner consistent with the expectations of high passengers.

 

[Galadrion]

It was my fault, not their fault. I just couldn't get the idea across.

It wasn't anyone's fault; it simply wasn't the entertainment your players were looking for. So let it go, and go with the game everyone wants to play. If that means there's no steward in the group, then there's no steward. It's not really a terrible loss, if there are other things to keep the game fun. <Shrug> It's no worse than a Traveller game in which Varg'r never show up - just means that they never make an appearance, not that it's not "Traveller".

 

[saundby]

It was my fault, not their fault. I just couldn't get the idea across.

Best laid plans and all that, I understand completely.

If I hadn't had friends I could draw on to know what to do with Steward early on, I couldn't have made anything of it, either. It started with me showing my Traveller rules to a friend who worked at a small family motel, who ended up practically running the place as health problems occupied the family who owned it. He read the Steward description and said, "Great, I can play a character who does the same thing I do all day, but in a poorly ventilated steel box on a planet with weird light and an unbreathable atmosphere, rather than a rotting wood and stucco building that at least gets good sunlight and a decent breeze."

I had two other friends who were bellhops, another who was a maid, and a yet another who was one of those folks who coddles VIPs at amusement parks. I pumped them for stories, and put what they told me into my games. The idea of the Steward as the JoT for people skills came to me about 7 or eight years later, after learning more about the trade.

I expect one could find the forums where the hospitality industry workers hang out these days and get similar background material.

 

[epicenter00]

This is the key imo. "Luxuries" replace what the Steward does. None of those amenities you've all suggested, nor any of the expendables mentioned, does that. And on the expendables while I'm thinking of it, "luxuries" can't be that either because it's a one time cost, not a per trip or per pax cost.

Actually, the aforementioned do replace a steward. "It's all self-service and we can't lower the price, so we're going to throw in free liquor..."

That's basically the gist of it. For those of us old enough in the United States (or perhaps in some parts of the US it's still done - nowhere around where I live) but there used to be a difference between "Self Service" and "Full Service" as the gas station.

Self Service was where you had to pump your own gas, walk over to the clerk and pay for it, and you're lucky if there's a plastic bucket with a squeegee in it to wash your window. This is standard now - a few older route gas stations still have rusted signs denoting "Full Service" or "Self Service" but it's all Self Service now.

For those of you not old enough, there used to be a thing called Full Service where you pull up, turn the engine off, and someone jogs over. They'd ask you what kind of gas you wanted, how much you wanted to pump (or just fill it up), and so on. They pumped your gas for you, took your credit card (or cash) and brought you the receipt and/or change. Depending on where you went, the clerk would wash your windows for free or for a small fee. Full Service fees were subsumed into the cost of the gas - Self Service gas was cheaper per gallon but you had to do everything yourself.

That's how I see "luxuries." People like having someone waiting hand and foot on them, running things up to them on demand, someone to know basic remedies when someone becomes ill or can recommend things from the ship's stores for insomnia or whatever. This person has the authority (and know-how) to clear the tables from the dining room to make a small open space for exercise, knitting circles, whiskey and cigars, whatever. That you have someone to order around and will wait on you makes you feel important and pampered and makes traveling on cramped ship a lot more tolerable. Since Traveller (unlike the modern United States) is a very obviously an class-divided and openly class-conscious society, people above a certain rank are going to expect someone like that as a given. Given a lot of authors for Traveller can't really imagine what this means, it sometimes comes out a bit garbled like in this case.

Now, in theory, without all these Steward's services, what should have been done is that the price of the ticket should have gone down (and the ship just wouldn't attract higher paying customers). However, instead, they came up with the idea that perhaps with sufficient "luxuries" (choice in self-service items?) the ship could attract upper-class patrons who perhaps have no problem having their manservant do such things and otherwise "rough it" for amusing stories to tell at their destination, or for such persons who are willing to go without a steward because they want to leave ASAP as opposed to waiting a few days for a better-appointed ship to show up.

 

[rancke]

Actually, the aforementioned do replace a steward. "It's all self-service and we can't lower the price, so we're going to throw in free liquor..."

If that was the case, you'd have an increased life support cost for the passengers rather than (or in addition to) the increased construction costs. Besides, the passengers are arguably already getting something in the neighborhood of $300 worth of food (wholesale) per day.

I like the vending machine idea. Or dispenser, since, as I said, I think the food is already pretty luxurious.


Hans

 

[Morninman]

If nothing else, this thread has convinced me that I'd find playing a Steward a pretty walloping fun time.

As to what luxuries really are, I'm voting for a mix of aesthetically enhanced accomodations and gloriously decadent automation.

As an example, a standard stateroom might have a perfectly serviceable shower, but a luxury room has a shower with multiple spray nozzles adjustable from a fine mist to a muscle pounding jet, variable gravity, a selection of soap, lotion, shampoo, and body wash dispensers, and it can double as a bubbly hot tub. All of it tastefully decorated with beautiful tiles, fabrics, and fixtures instead of the standard hullmetal.

And lets not forget the valet, a semi-independent expert system totally dedicated to making you happy in any way possible. Most people assume it's brain is inside the hovering service drone (Which looks rather like Eve from "Wall-E". Heh. ) that handles things like serving your meals and cleaning your laundry, but it's CPU is actually built into the room. For all intents and purposes it *is* the room, although it can access the ship's network to cater to your every whim even outside it's walls. Heck, if you can't find a tennis partner down on the sports deck it can even use the drone to play a halfway decent game.

That seems like a reasonable extrapolation of what 100,000 credits and a ton of space can buy.

 

[Whipsnade]

Since Traveller (unlike the modern United States) is a very obviously an class-divided and openly class-conscious society, people above a certain rank are going to expect someone like that as a given. Given a lot of authors for Traveller can't really imagine what this means, it sometimes comes out a bit garbled like in this case.

Epicenter,

That is one of the reasons why I believe Mongoose's rule is simply a meta-game attempt to let GMs and players officially ignore Steward skill and not an in-game attempt to model what stewards actually do. If players can pony up the dough and find the volume, they can still carry High Passengers.

As Dan, Saundby, and others have repeatedly pointed out, a single dTon and 100,000 CrImps simply isn't going to replace the personalized service implicit to both Steward skill and the cultural assumptions of the setting.

While Mongoose failing to "get" Traveller isn't anything new, I feel their inclusion of an opt-out for Steward has more to do with people's troubles incorporating the skill in their games and less to do with Mongoose's general ignorance of the game and setting.


Regards,
Bill

 

[MongooseMatt]

Since Traveller (unlike the modern United States) is a very obviously an class-divided and openly class-conscious society, people above a certain rank are going to expect someone like that as a given. Given a lot of authors for Traveller can't really imagine what this means, it sometimes comes out a bit garbled like in this case.

I don't think there is any part of that is correct. . .

 

[Whipsnade]

I don't think there is any part of that is correct. . .

Mongoose Matt,

I'm intrigued by your comment, and not the least because your answers to my next series of questions should give us all here a glimpse into the workings of the Mongoose company's overall "thought process".

Which statements did you think were incorrect in Epicenter's quoted comments?

A - That the modern US is not a very obviously an class-divided and openly class-conscious society.

B - That the Third Imperium is a very obviously an class-divided and openly class-conscious society.

C - That people above a certain rank are going to expect someone like that (i.e. a steward) as a given.

D - Given a lot of authors for Traveller can't really imagine what this means, it sometimes comes out a bit garbled like in this case.

After answering that, could tell us what the thinking was behind the MgT rules being discussed here? The rule that allows 100,000 CrImps and one dTon of volume replace a steward? What sort of devices and/or purchases did Mongoose see replacing the steward's role?

I do hope you answer because I've a bottle of bourbon bet on just what your answers will be.


Regards,
Bill

 

[MongooseMatt]

I do hope you answer because I've a bottle of bourbon bet on just what your answers will be.

And you have just guaranteed that I won't answer. . .

 

[mbrinkhues]

Not Mgt but Gurps:Traveller has a nice set of "luxury" elements in the Starship supplement. Granted, most are a tad heavier than 500cubic feet/1 dton. They include stuff like:

+ A swimming pool / lounge area
+ Gyms
+ Full sized kitchens
+ "Window Boxes", small hydrophonics/gardens/terraria that liven up a place

The simple "luxury cabin" part otoh is handled by increasing price for the cabin by a factor. It's basically "better quality furniture" and "nicer shells" hiding some of the gear/cabeling

 

[rancke]

And you have just guaranteed that I won't answer. . .

Why? Is thwarting Bill more important to you than to show that he's wrong about you?

Bill claims that if we ask you what kind of installations you had in mind when you wrote that rule about designing ships to do without stewards, you won't answer. Is he right? Because I'm asking now. What kind of installations did you have in mind when you wrote that rule about designing ships to do without stewards?

Just for the record, I have absolutely nothing against introducing new bells and whistles, especially if they're backwards compatible. I just like them to make sense.


Hans