Thomas replied to me: > Ok, from the dramatic point of view, you are right. I did not looked on > the stuff from a GM's perspective, more from a "Real Life" one.
As the Romans said, una salus victis nullam sperare salutem, or any chance is better than giving up ... > > So the colonizer transport hides in the outer system for a > > year or a decade. > > > ... or a century or a millenia ... :-) If that was the alternative, going home at STL speeds starts to look attractive. Spaceships introduced the rule that people in cryosleep age slowly, which was not the case in 3E. > I think this still depends on the size of the ship, and also on the > equipment. So what kind of boats will such a ship carry? Lots of > shuttles, or more a lighter type of vehicle? What will be the range of > these boats? The size? Will they be armed (the original plan says, we > want to colonise an uninhabitated world ...)? Week 800 will be an unarmed colony ship which is utterly helpless once it arrives. Week 806 is technically unarmed as well, but far from helpless. > > And if the GM wants ships to get lost/shipwrecked, there are > > always options. For example, assume that there can be only > > one FTL drive per ship, since even 'cold' backups would > > interfere with the technobabble. > > > > When I write vehicles, my gut reaction is to make them 'safe' > > against the failure of any one (or any two or three) gadgets > > by adding redundancy. But as a GM, I prefer ships which can > > fail in interesting, non-lethal ways. So don't take a backup > > jump drive, take a workshop and survival gear instead, the GM > > should provide a challenging planet where the 'muscle' of the > > crew can fend off natives while the 'techies' repair the ship > > and all get a chance to rescue an exotic alien princess on > > the way out. > > > Again, my point of view was different. With a GM's attitude to tell an > interesting story and to "bend" some logic accordingly, you are > absolutely right. But having players with "Why" as the most often used > word in a game session made me cautious about too much "logic bending". > You know that saying that a lie always requires another lie? Sometimes I > found that each bend requires - at least - one other bend, and in the > run of the game, it is sometimes really difficult to keep track of them. > That's why I try to get all the possible background questions answered > on beforehand, based on common sense and today's science as much as > possible - and without too much artificial obstacles like "second > stardrive interferes with onboard systems" (although sometimes this > might be the last resort, making it still an idea to keep ...). As > players are, in game they will come up with more than enough unexpected > issues the GM has to deal with ... That used to be my viewpoint, too, while I was a player and an occasional GM. I learned a lot from my last Traveller GM, who didn't want us to arm our Far Trader or get a grav vehicle. In the end, we had two missile launchers and one (!) counter-ship missile, plus a probe and a damaged missile. Ask your players: Do they want vehicles where the only alternatives for the GM are trivial inconveniences and a total party kill? But it is also important to have a logical world for the players to predict the outcome of their actions, so the background must be internally consistent and close to real physics except for explicit exceptions. Take the Traveller Far Trader. Adding a backup FTL drive would cost a bit under ten percent of payload, and the Far Trader is economically marginal anyway. So no backup drive. Explaining why a Scout/Courier has no second jumpdrive is harder. > The stages got important if considering the time frame. Looking at the > "Terraforming" of our own world there have been four or five stages > where Earth would have been completely uninhabitable by Mankind. The > "uncontrolled" transformation from one stage to the other took aeons > here, but how fast could it be done by Man? In any case, the scale would > be too large as this could be played as a RPG adventure or campaign. Hence the need to accelerate things, as in Robinson's Red Mars. Or you use terraforming as a McGuffin -- the Heroes get to fly an ice asteroid or investigate murder in the gene lab, but the progress of the project is off-stage. > While writing this, another question arises: Will someone really send > out a one-shot colony ship? An expedition, that has to do all in one go, > succeed or die? Is it not more likely that first some exploration ships > will be sent to potential worlds, than expeditions that will take closer > looks, right before the terraforming teams will show up. And only the > final ships will carry colonists that shall live on ready prepared worlds. That was the assumption for the colony ships I've written so far. Options for a combined colonizer/terraformer are: * Terraforming takes lots of workers. So you send the workers along with the gear, and if they stay for the rest of their life they're the first colonists, too. * Spaceflight is expensive, but there are powerful economies of scale. Sending the first colonists with the terraformers is much cheaper than sending two ships. Perhaps the ship will be one-way, for disassembly at the destination. * The colony would pay for itself even without terraforming, by mining or whatever, but the colonists refuse to go to a world which is not going to be terraformed (again assuming an accelerated timescale), or they would demand hardship pay. With a history of corporations weaseling out of their commitments, the colonists want to see terraformers along with them, while the corporation refuses to send them ahead of time. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
