Affording a spaceship?

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

If, on the other hand, the character is a wanderer and starts with 100% of starting wealth, then simply reduce the prices of spaceships to that of cars.

Okay...

I build a world, then I GM a campaign set in it, and I decide that in this campaign, the players' characters shall be settled by default, and that defines the cost of spaceships in the world.

Then, a year later, I decide to GM another campaign in the same world, taking place in the same time period as the first campaign, but this time I decide that the default for player characters shall be a nomadic lifestyle. So suddenly all the hundreds of thousands (if not tens of millions) of spaceships in the world, owned by thousands or millions of NPCs, get their price reduced to 1/5 of what it used to be.

Then, the year after that, I decide to GM a third campaign in this world, still in the same time period, but going back to settled-by-default, so suddenly every single ship in the entire universe gets its price quintupled.

I'm confused now. I'm really confused.

And not only am I confused.

The billions of NPCs who live in this world are also confused.

They thought that they understood ecnomics and finance. Not perfectly, even though high-TL Economics is obviously going to be at least slightly more scientific than present-day-TL Economics. But they thought they had a rough idea, they thought their experts, professors at the major business universities, had a rough idea of how stuff works, how money works, how and why prices change. Enough to usually be able to see changes coming before they happen (anticipation - a major benefit of living in an actual world is that you can develop a useful sense for what to anticipate), and always foreseee hugely drastic changes (such as prices getting divided by 5 or multiplied by 5) well in advance, when the cause isn't a paradigm shift (typically a major technological advancement, such as the development of fusion reactors), and to always be able to explain serious changes in hindsight.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

I'm confused now. I'm really confused.

That's because you don't understand what I said, and I think you're looking for an argument.

Reducing the price of spaceships is a setting-based decision, not a campaign-style one. Either spaceships are as cheap as cars (or boats) or they're realistically expensive and only affordable by countries and large corporations. This does not change depending on whether the characters are settled or wanderers.

You don't reduce the price of spaceships to 20% of their original cost; you reduce their price to the price of cars (or boats), because that's how much people in the world actually pay for them.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

That's because you don't understand what I said, and I think you're looking for an argument.

Reducing the price of spaceships is a setting-based decision, not a campaign-style one. Either spaceships are as cheap as cars (or boats) or they're realistically expensive and only affordable by countries and large corporations. This does not change depending on whether the characters are settled or wanderers.

You don't reduce the price of spaceships to 20% of their original cost; you reduce their price to the price of cars (or boats), because that's how much people in the world actually pay for them.

And if you later decide to have some PCsown a ship you arrange for them to have it by one of the methods above rather then cahnge the price of the ship.
Either they lucked into a ship (gifted them points maybe) or they paid for it out of charecter points, possibly using disadvantages.
Changing the overall price of ships is changing the setting which SHOULD be noticed by everyone.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

That's because you don't understand what I said, and I think you're looking for an argument.

Reducing the price of spaceships is a setting-based decision, not a campaign-style one. Either spaceships are as cheap as cars (or boats) or they're realistically expensive and only affordable by countries and large corporations. This does not change depending on whether the characters are settled or wanderers.

You don't reduce the price of spaceships to 20% of their original cost; you reduce their price to the price of cars (or boats), because that's how much people in the world actually pay for them.

So what you're saying is that if you want to play a campaign where the PCs own a ship, you should only do it in a setting where spaceships are really cheap?

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Ragabash Moon

So, the average character in a Space campaign has no way of ever affording a ship without spending 100 points (or more) for wealth and then blowing it all on a ship...

So, how are you supposed to allow for players in a space campaign to have a ship?

One school of "thought" is that the GM decides whether the PC party starts the campaign owning a ship, and if so, which type of ship, and what modifications, if any, it has.



My take on it is that it makes sense, in RPG character creation system design, to allow for the possibility of characters starting out with very expensive (and usually large) single items, which are hard to sell, and almost impossible to sell real fast unless you give an insane discount. Examples include owning a home, or indeed a vehicle such as a spaceship or a sea ship. Examples of non-large items include state-of-the-art cyberdecks, and permanent magic items.

If such items must be purchased using the standard wealth/starting equipment budget rules, then they are guaranteed to "happen", in the sense of players voluntarily and freely (without "hints" or more overt pressure from the GM) going for such options. And since it is desirable for player characters to start the campaign owning such items fairly often, certainly more often than once-in-a-hyper-rare-while, it is merely good game design, thoughtful game design, to include such options in the character creation rules.



A third option is for the player characters to pool resources to own a huge item. And by pool I mean non-linear synergies. That's what I opted for in Modern Action RPG, with pooled vehicle ownership, so that the PCs would be able to collectively own a sea ship or similar (or, of course, a space ship for the planned science fiction-themed expansion), with players opting out of it not contributing points towards the vehicle, and thus not having any formal say in how the vehicle is utilized during the campaign.

Here, it makes a lot of sense to provide easy "access" to ownership of off-the-shelf hulls, and charge more points for "modified" or "upgraded" hulls. And by "upgraded", added firepower (or even adding firepower to a civilian hull) is likely to be a very popular option.



A fourth option is to say that the ship isn't actually owned, but is instead mortgaged, and its full cost must be paid with monies earned during the campaign, i.e. over time. GURPS Space 2nd and 3rd Edition has some quick-and-dirty percentage values for that (you pay off X percent over 8 years, or Y percent over 12 years, and it's usually the worldbuilder's choice, as to what kind of mortgages the market will accept). I can't recall if Space 4th Edition has the same material. It doesn't quite fit ind. But if not, it's probably in GURPS Spaceships, either in the core PDF or in the 2nd volume. And if you don't have any of that, then if you ask, some kind person can probably provide you with the necessary figures from Space 2/3 (even me, assuming I notice your request).



A fifth, used in Moongoose's version of Traveller, is to divide each ship up into standard-sized "shares". IIRC MongTraveller uses something like 1 MegaCredit per share, so the cost of one ship might be 52 shares and another ship might cost 131 shares. One of the end-of-career benefits that characters can roll is shares in various ships.

In this way, player characters can own some shares of the ship, while any remaining shares must be paid off with interest, or maybe just paid interest on without any actual paying-down (depending on the financial climate of the world in which the campaign takes place).

So, say a ship costs 120 shares. One PC buys 30 shares during character creation, and each of the other five PCs buys 10. That leaves 40 shares on which interest must be paid, and nominally the first PC has 3 times as much say as any of the others, in terms of what to do with the ship.

With 1 Megacredit per share, a reasonable interest on a highly mobile asset might be 15% per year, or 1.25% per month, so 12.5k credits per month per share. With 40 shares that demand interest, that's half a million per month, or 6 million per year. On a ship costing 120 million, but which is 2/3 owned by its crew.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

One school of "thought" is that the GM decides whether the PC party starts the campaign owning a ship, and if so, which type of ship, and what modifications, if any, it has.

Nice use of scare quotes.