Wrestling with starships bought as allies

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Even with stars that far apart, a crude estimate would have ~60 Earthlike planets in that sphere one year in radius (it could be as few as 25 or as many as 200).

And why shouldn't PCs take the time to learn new skills?

I would definitely skip over all the stars without interesting planets whatever the drive speed was. I've long lost the urge to create in detail (randomly or deliberately) a fully detailed map of outer space. Probably after I got a decent idea of the scale of the endeavor.

"Destination worlds about 1 week apart" is just the time scale I'd want to work with. Choose a different one if you want to. I'm just trying to fit my superscience drive speed to what I think is the intersection of realistic astronomy and good setting design.

It's not that I mind the characters from learning new skills during their downtime but by not giving the characters long periods of downtime I keep the _players_ from derailing the game session with browsing for skills and accounting work after they find what they want. Face-to-face time shouldn't be for reading books.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

It's not that I mind the characters from learning new skills during their downtime but by not giving the characters long periods of downtime I keep the _players_ from derailing the game session with browsing for skills and accounting work after they find what they want. Face-to-face time shouldn't be for reading books.

Minimizing the accounting work was a big part of why I came up with monthly study rolls.

In this case I suppose I might even say, "an average interstellar voyage is about three months (average distance 90 light years, about 37% denser), so we'll make one roll for 3 months and treat that as a base 450 hours." And then I'd allow the players to designate a few skills they were studying, or ONE skill if they were also standing regular watches and studying in their spare time.

I might also invite players to do social/relaxation scenes for those voyages, the equivalent of a bathhouse visit in anime.

I guess it's all in what you want in your gaming.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Minimizing the accounting work was a big part of why I came up with monthly study rolls.
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By having the players roll for their study time you're adding a step to the way I would do it if I were to do it. That doesn't do anything about shortening the decision loop about what they'd be studying either and that's the real problem.

It's just so much easier not to give the players those 3 months they'd think they needed to fill up. Study rules are so that you don't _have_ to dispatch mooks to learn new things but I don't think they make much of a mini-game by themselves.

[Michael Thayne]

This is a really interesting approach. Assuming spaceships jump to places they can "see", rather than using Warp (Blind), seems like it has a lot to recommend it. Increases the importance of the "map" without having to place a bunch of arbitrarily-located "jump points".

One thing I would look at is PK's old "Hyperjumping" article from Pyramid #3/49. It give you a way to make hyperjumps significantly faster without a hacky Enhanced Move variant. For example, "1 light-year per hour", which sounds like it fits your setting-design desiderata well, is a -20% limitation. Note, however, that I've played with the numbers on this sort of thing before, and past a certain point the limiting factor becomes your skill level in Navigation (Hyperspace), even assuming Reliable +10.

[Anthony]

I solve study rules by the simple expedient of not using them; people might get xp for an extended downtime (which they can use for whatever they can justify) but I don't track time use.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

It's not that I mind the characters from learning new skills during their downtime but by not giving the characters long periods of downtime I keep the _players_ from derailing the game session with browsing for skills and accounting work after they find what they want. Face-to-face time shouldn't be for reading books.

The solution to that is to have journey time take place between sessions. So, at the end of Session 1, you tell them that they're going to be traveling for three months (assuming you don't plan on any deep space encounters with space-pirates or whatever) between now and when you run Session 2 next week (or whenever). Then probably ask the players to decide what their characters are going to do during that time, and e-mail you their time-use sheets and such with enough time for you to modify the session to account for whatever new skills they learn.

In short, have any long downtime the PCs' have be between sessions so you don't have to worry about the players checking out during face-to-face time.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

This is a really interesting approach. Assuming spaceships jump to places they can "see", rather than using Warp (Blind), seems like it has a lot to recommend it. 0.

Well, it's the simple option and I started out just trying to figure out if it would work rules-wise. The rules for Warp are more complicated than I'd want for most human teleporters but they seem more functional as an interstellar transit means.

This approach does cut out problems caused by jumping to "empty" locations. The coronal limit will be the only place out-system ships can show up and this makes for a practical "frontier" to monitor. You probably won't get much warning time but at least no one can sneak up on you.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I solve study rules by the simple expedient of not using them; people might get xp for an extended downtime (which they can use for whatever they can justify) but I don't track time use.

An alternative option that just came to me (humorously, largely because I've been talking about how I dislike mechanics that cause you to lose character points in another thread), is to make the "studying" be purposefully vague, and give you impulse points to spend at the destination (or possibly en-route, if you run into space pirates or what-have-you) instead of character points in whatever you studied. Your weapon suffers a malfunction? Spend a "study point" (or maybe a few, not sure what it costs to override a malfunction) and it turns out you spent time tweaking and maintaining your weapon during the long transit, so the weapon didn't malfunction after all. Really need to offload that hold full of capacitors? Spend a "study point" for an automatic success, and it turns out you did some research on the way over and found a company that you just know will be interested. Heck, those "study points" could even represent morale, if you spent a lot of your time on the way over on entertainment (so you can override failures against things like Lecherousness, Bloodlust, Bad Temper, etc). So, long transit times aren't wasted, but you also don't end up with players obsessing over every minute of their time and which skills they want to improve and all that.

[Anthony]

I can easily see a point-based downtime system (spend a point of downtime on study, or on gaining money, or on your big project, or w/e).

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

By having the players roll for their study time you're adding a step to the way I would do it if I were to do it. That doesn't do anything about shortening the decision loop about what they'd be studying either and that's the real problem.

It's just so much easier not to give the players those 3 months they'd think they needed to fill up. Study rules are so that you don't _have_ to dispatch mooks to learn new things but I don't think they make much of a mini-game by themselves.

Well, I don't care about that; it doesn't seem any more of a disruption than having players take time to spend eeps, which I do at nearly every session. And in fact I think having players decide what their characters want to study, and allocate study time, and make study rolls makes kind of a pleasant mini-game. So if that's what drops out of saying "The Hyperspace version of Warp gives you an effective speed of 365c," I'm not going to have a problem with it, for that reason.

What I would care about is the worldbuilding implications. Do I want to say that the distance between Earthlike worlds averages 100-200 LY, realistically, rather than having an alternate universe with more or fewer such worlds? Do I want to have a setting where "known space" (using that as a label for places one year away from the homeworld) holds between 25 and 200 Earthlike worlds, rather than having the much larger number that a higher effective speed might imply? (For example, if you assume that it takes a week to travel between Earthlike worlds, then you're looking at 55,000-440,000 Earthlike worlds. And the travel time implies much different possibilities for trade and war and colonization.) I would do a quick sketch of the implied world, and think about whether I want to use it as a dramatic setting, and if it didn't work for me I'd come up with a different premise and implied world. But I wouldn't even be thinking about how much time the characters would be spending studying, still less about how much time the players would spend planning for that studying. Or I might think it was a good thing; I quite enjoyed my Worminghall campaign, and the players seemed to have a good time too.

But of course there's no reason you can't care about that. GURPS is a "universal" game; its virtue is that it can be adapted to either of our tastes.