View Single Post
Old 05-19-2010, 10:10 AM   #44
Kelly Pedersen
 
Kelly Pedersen's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
Default Re: GURPS Alpha Centauri

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pollux View Post
So now, I cant play a campaign for hundreds of years. So I need a way to get players involved in all the key elements, but skip the years in between.

b) 'jump over the timegap' now and then. [...] For each jump, there needs to be an explanaition.
Conveniently, such an explanation already exists in AC, no funky alien-tech necessary. :-) Stasis pods from the colony ship were preserved after the crash, and were used by high-ranking faction members. In fact, GURPS Alpha Centauri suggests this as the default reason that the faction leaders were so long-lived - they weren't actually experiencing the whole time, they were put in stasis a lot, and brought out to make important decisions, at least until the higher tech levels when they could simply live longer. You can say that the faction(s) the characters belong to want to preserve their expertise, and offer them access to the stasis pods, then bring them out again at the next crisis point.
In the Alpha Centauri game I played in, we established that the stasis pods actually had anti-aging effects, handwaving something about stasis allowing the body to clean out some of the accumulated toxins and wear and tear that contributes to age. Basically, every two years spent in stasis actually decreased your effective age by one year. That let us justify a bit more uptime for the characters in the pre-longevity time period.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pollux
I fear the moment some player says: "Hey now that the mission is done, I should invest all my cash in the stockmarket. I got a feeling that i wont need any cash for a few decades!"
Honestly, unless you're dealing with the Morganites, this probably isn't a big issue. Unless you're seriously fiddling with the factions, only Morgan is likely to have anything close to a market economy in the early days of the colony. All the others will have a more communal approach to money. Energy credits are a means of exchange between colonies, not individuals.

Of course, once you get past a certain point, market economies will start developing, and this does become an issue. My suggestion would simply be to roll with it. After each timeskip, give the characters a good-size pool of points (10 or more), and tell the players that they can spend them on social advantages like Wealth, Rank, Status, etc. The points represent the particular means of social advancement that the characters are pursuing within their faction.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pollux
Some guy could get them an update on what happened while they were sleeping and a mission briefing and they are good to go. But it feels very... static. As if the players were not involved in theire own life.
One way to do it would be to start each timeskip with a set mission, but then let the characters stay awake for some time after the immediate mission is finished. After all, if they're the trusted agent of the faction leader, it's in the faction leader's best interests to both keep them happy and loyal to the faction, and giving them some time to relax and enjoy themselves and to renew their ties to the faction does both. During their R&R times, other adventure types can be run - pursuing personal projects, problems for the faction that the characters discover on their own, and so forth.
If the characters are awake for 5 years or so at a time, that gives them time to find out about how the faction has changed since the last time, and build some connections to the new community. An interesting idea, depending on how much your players like roleplaying their daily lives, is to establish NPC relationships, either romantic or platonic, and then have them look in on those people after the next timeskip. Might be a cool idea to have a character in a romantic relationship find out that they have a child they didn't know about!
Kelly Pedersen is offline   Reply With Quote