#CharacterCreationChallenge - Star Smuggler - Emily Pilot/Gunner

This is an odd choice of rules for #CharacterCreationChallenge, but Star Smuggler is one of my favorite games. It is a solo game where the player takes the role of Duke Springer a roguish merchant ship pilot. The ruleset is super light as it needs to be for solo play, but I've found it has enough meat to handle full parties and several players. It has some of the spirit of Traveller, but not enough to be a replacement for Traveller. 

You can pick up a set of rules for play at Dwarfstar Brainiac. The set will allow you to print and play this game, which is very nice of the authors. Due to the collapse of the company, Dennis Sustare never got paid for this one but still allows Dwarfstar to host the files. 

All characters have 3 stats: Marksmanship, Hand to Hand, and Endurance. The main character Duke, your avatar has one additional statistic, Cunning generated by a 1d6. 

Duke's stats are: 

Marksmanship: 5
Hand to Hand: 6
Endurance: 10
Cunning: 1d6 (2 in this iteration). 

He has a starship, the Antelope with Tech Level 1 guns, a hopper, and he has 1d6x100+150 Secs, the money in this system. He can use starship guns, and smaller hand weapons plus pilot the Antelope and the Hopper. Oddities he lacks are the ability to use heavy weapons (depending on the players reading of the rules) cannot drive a land vehicle and can't fix his own stuff. 

I invented Emily as a Duke analog, with a different loadout. She can use all of the same weapons and equipment as Duke, but can also drive land vehicles. She does not come with a starship, hopper, or anything else Duke receives at the start. As a consequence, she can roll for her equipment's Tech Levels and receives 2d6x100 Secs. to start. Her stats are generated as follows with results in parentheses: 

Marksmanship: 1d6+2 (8)
Hand to Hand: 1d6-1 (4)
Endurance: 1d6+2 (7)
Cunning: 3

Only her Cunning is locked in at 3, everything else is randomly generated. Where Duke is excellent in melee, she is better at Marksmanship. And by a lot. No other character receives a +2 to any stat, so she is dangerous with guns. 

As you can see from the drawing, she's had more than a few iterations. 

Star Smuggler... again... and again

Ok, in my last post I created a new ship for Star Smuggler, creatively called "The Antelope II". It's twice as big as the original. 

Crewing the ship will be a problem as will generating weekly funds to pay for it. In order to dance around these issues, I decided to create a new mechanic for Duke Springer. Duke has a statistic no other character has, Cunning. When playing, you roll 1d6 to generate this value. When replaying the game, it is suggest that you reduce this number if the game was too easy and increase it if the game was too hard. 

Since the game already allows a changing value for this Cunning mechanic, I want to use it to rapidly add crewmen. Duke can "purchase" one crewman for a point of Cunning. He cannot spend all of his Cunning on this, he must have at least one Cunning point. 

The available options are all of the retainer types from e062 to e069. The player simply chooses the one(s) he wants, include the Driver who normally won't travel outside of his or her system. In this case, he or she would. Where there is a choice of two, such as gunners or bodyguards, Duke picks the better of them.

Stats are generated just like retainers, but crewmen are different than retainers. Each crewman has a stake in the ship as opposed to drawing a salary. When items more than 100 secs are sold, they take a 1% cut. They keep this money for themselves to buy goods or save, as they see fit. The crewmen can operate independently and can be separated from the ship and/or Duke to perform their jobs. 

Additionally, they purchase their stake in the ship from Duke. When these characters are initially created, they have 1d6+150 secs. which they pay half to Duke for a stake in the ship.

If Duke is killed, one of them takes over his role. 

EDIT 1 - I tried that part and it was too difficult. I have changed it. Each crew generates their starting money and it is pooled. This pool is divided by the following formula: (pool/number of characters+2). Each person has a "stake" in the ship now, but the ship has two stakes. If the characters had 1000 secs. and there were 3 characters, each stake would be the 1000/5=200. Each character has 200 secs. while the ship has 400. The 400 secs. for the ship's stake is what is used to purchase goods for the ship. If a character purchases personal equipment, not for the ship, it comes out of their personal money. 

When items are sold, the funds are also divided up in this fashion, too. The sale of 100 secs. worth of goods would net each player 20 secs. and the ship would take twice that amount, 40 secs. This makes it much harder to generate funds for the weekly payments, but that is the cost of doing business. Save early, save often. 

To pay the 300 secs for the loan, players would have to make at least 1500 secs. a week. If the funds aren't there, all characters will kick in money from their personal savings. It's that or be hunted as a loan jumper. 

If new characters are added, recalculate the cost of each stake by adding the new character to the original formula. This means you need to write the formula down the first time you use it. The new character will then pay that amount to the ship's account to become a crew member. If a crewman dies, nothing much happens. When the sale of good occur, use the new number of crew in the formula. Yes, getting your crew killed will make more money for the survivors. It happens. 

As an added twist, these crewmen also have a Cunning skill. It is 1d6-2, with a minimum of 1. Like Duke, they can use this stat to bring on new crewmen at a later date. This creates the scenario where Duke probably isn't the most cunning person on the ship. As a consequence, if Duke enters a scenario where a cunning roll is needed, the roll is made by the character with highest Cunning present. If Duke desires to do something dangerous, he must accompany that person and pays the price of a failed roll himself.

EDIT 2 - This part didn't make sense. Duke can't decide for another crewman, he can't force them to be savvy. 

Something like Mal and Zoe's relationship where Mal has an idea and Zoe does the tricky work of getting the details right. It also covers a situation like when Simon hired the crew for a heist or when Mal brought Simon (and River) on as crew after they had started their adventures. 

EDIT 3 - The comparison doesn't make much sense now. 

I haven't even begun to categorize the rules and event changes this would require. But it seems rather workable. What do you think? Let me know in the comments. 

Star Smuggler... Again

I unexpectedly have the day off and want to revisit the Star Smuggler Universe. The temptation to reskin the characters as the crew of the Firefly is incredible, but that would take a lot of work. I am stealing some ideas, but not Firefly whole clothe. I have decided to interject some ideas from Traveller into this run through, too.

My understanding of Traveller is super weak, so I am taking some of the larger concepts and ignoring many mechanics. The main idea that I am stealing is weapon mounts are dependent on hull size. I have created a large ship, which I will dub the Antelope II and it's twice as big as a 100 ton ship.

The original Antelope was 100 ton ship with space to carry about 134 CU of goods. Sort of. I seem to get a different number depending on how I count. The Antelope II is 200 ton vessel and has 212 CU of space. That is a multiplier of 1.58 for those keeping score at home. 

Since this is Inktober, I wanted to keep the high contrast drawn vibe from the original game. I used GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) to create a new deckplan, staying as close to the original art as I could. It isn't exactly "ink" but it sort of looks like it. 

As you can see from this schematic, I have stolen a bunch of ideas from Firefly. The ship has space for two hoppers, a medical area and weapons hold. The crew area is much larger than the Antelope, holding 6 rooms or enough room for 32 CU of people. Unlike Firefly and the Antelope I, it has two gun mounts and no secret areas. The 60 CU cargo hold is of center as it was in the original design, but this ship has a second 40-CU hold fore of the main hold and bay. It can hold a second hopper, but that is not a standard option so play begins with just one. 

This ship would require a few of modifications of the rules, which I have not formally written up yet. It looks like I would have to rewrite 3 events and 3 rules: e001, e036, e157.4, r237, r229d and r217. The events cover your first day with the ship, e036 covers buying a new ship and e157.4 references the medical regrowth tank. The rules modified are r217 for starship damage, r229d for search locations and r237 for critical hit locations. In respect to hits and search locations, the only completely new things are the medical space and weapons hold. 

The medical space is simply an area large enough for several characters and the medic could hang out in there. It would count as quarters for searches and would be immune to criticals as it's a vault in the center of the ship. The weapons hold would be searched on cargo hold results and would share the immunity to criticals for the same reason as medical does. The medical space is somewhat like a turret as it has enough room for the 4 CU regrowth tank plus a medic and one patient. The regrowth tank is not a standard option, so the player would have to find one. As far as the extra crew quarters and hold, I would have each of them hit on a 50-50 chance. I think I thought of everything, but I will have to do a play through to be sure. 

Since we are talking about a ship 1.58 times bigger, I figure multiplying everything by that will give me good cost stats. The cost is 190,000 secs with an interest payment of 475 a week. All of these values are simply the original ship's stats multiplied and rounded up. At that price point, the player would get two sets of tech 1 guns and one hopper and 16 hits. 

The overly large size will create crewing problems. I'll look at that in my next post. 

Star Smuggler

One of my first experiences with role-playing and tactical games was a little game called Star Smuggler. It came with little cardboard tokens for characters, tiles for worlds, and a rich background of information on the Smuggler Mini-verse. I spent hours, days, and weeks playing.

Now you can too. 

Dwarfstar Games has contacted the author, Dennis Sustare, and arranged to host the game's digital files. Check it out here. Mr. Sustare was never paid for this game yet permitted digital distribution to Dwarfstar. Be kind and follow the generous agreement.

Update: I like to sketch up alternate ships for this game. Here is my Buffalo Class Transport.

Crew Quarters: 24 cu

Bay 1: 43 cu

Bay 2: 43 cu

Boat Bay 1: 40 cu

Boat Bay 2: 40 cu

Engineering: 16 cu

8 Hyperchargers, no secret compartments