Savage Firefly - want some "space western" adventures?

Game Master ZenFox42

So, I'm trying to make a list of everyone's role on the ship...

Emma - repair, psionic
Perry - captain
Mark - ???
Able - doctor
Daisy - companion
Harold - fighter

(Did I leave anyone out?)

I don't have the time to search thru everyone's PC, so :

Who has the (best) Astrogation and Piloting skills?

And who has the highest Persuasion die plus bonuses? You'll be doing the bulk of the rolls to find jobs. In the next post, I'm going to be calling you the Dealmaker.

Piloting d6, Astrogation None, Persuasion d6

So, I figured we'd do the first find-the-mission rolls here, so we don't have to role-play stuff as we figure this out.

For this test, you're starting in the Border. I'm going to try to do this by only naming the region you're in and the region you're going to, rather than name specific planets.

Also for this test, let's please not try to haggle for prices, we can add that in later. And no smuggling this time, too.

The Dealmaker makes a Networking (Persuasion) roll for each of the following "items" :
- Steerage passengers
- Second-class passengers
- Freight
- Speculative cargo
- Salvage

On a Success, you have found a middleman, who will take 10% of the profits for arranging the deal. On a Raise, you have found an employer directly. Each Raise on this roll adds +1 to the roll for number of passengers or lots of cargo.

On at least a Success, roll for the quantity of each item :
- Steerage : d8
- Second-class : d6
- Freight : d6 lots; 10*d10 tons per lot; the ship holds 100 tons. Each freight lot must be taken whole or not at all.
- Speculative : d6 lots; 10*d10 tons per lot; the ship holds 100 tons. Speculative lots can be partially taken.
- Salvage : you're given the destination (see next), and told what to retrieve. The buyer (me) will name a price.

Also on at least a Success, roll a d3 for each item's destination : 1=Core, 2=Border, 3=Rim.

If your destination is the Core, you will pay an extra 5% to the Alliance upon delivery, and you must have all the correct paperwork (which we'll assume you do unless you try smuggling).

You can't take on different items with different destinations, since speed of delivery is always the most important thing. So you'll probably have to figure out which one of your options is most profitable. Yes, the Dealmaker will be doing some math calculations...

- Steerage : 10p / person per week
- Second-class : 30p / person per week
- Freight : 5p / ton per week
- Speculative : TBD upon arrival (but profit or loss comes in increments of 10*d6 / ton)
- Salvage : named by the employer

And for each item don't forget to subtract 10% (multiply by 0.9) if you're using a middleman, and 5% (multiply by 0.95) if you're dealing with the Alliance.

Once the Dealmaker is done, please list the items you have to choose from, and each of their total profit.

Who decides which item to take? That depends on the players. If everyone's ok with the captain deciding, we'll do that. If everyone wants a say in the decision, we'll do that.

So, whoever's the Dealmaker, start making rolls! I'll correct you if needed. Once we've decided what item(s) you're taking, we'll do the piloting rolls.

Our Dealmaker is Mark, I believe. For your records, Perry is Astrogation d6 and Piloting d10. Notice d6.

Pilot:Nah.
Astrogation: What's that? :)
Persuasion: d8

I was planning on him being the guy that knew where to find work. I figured that he could be back up for negotiations. As for role on the ship. Well, I guess he's the cook.

Then our Companion is the dealmaker? Makes sense.

Networking(Persuasion): 1d4 + 2 ⇒ (1) + 2 = 3

Well, that's a bummer. Can I spend bennie on this one?

Mark, remember to roll your WILD die.

Yeah, the d4+2 (3-6 ave 4.5) is sort of better than Daisy's d8 (1-8 ave 4.5) because it's more stable. And the odds of getting an ACE! is 25%. Unfortunately the odds of rolling a 1 are, also, 25%.

But remember you also add the +2 to the WILD die, so we should be okay. =)

WILD! Networking(Persuasion): 1d6 + 2 ⇒ (2) + 2 = 4

Derp. thanks for that Atlas. I haven't played SW in a while, so I forgot that was a thing.

And Woot! We has job!

Your +2 is even better than that! With your lowly d4 you only fail 25% of the time, while you will roll a raise 18.75% of the time. A straight-up d8 is good but that only rolls a raise 12.5% of the time, and the d8 fails 37.5%, on average.

The wild d6 actually has a slightly lower chance for a raise, 16.67%, compared to your d4, but also a lower chance to fail, only 16.67%.

- Steerage : 1d8 ⇒ 3 Passengers Destination: 1d3 ⇒ 2 Border
- Second-class : 1d6 ⇒ 6 Passengers Destination: 1d3 ⇒ 3 Rim
- Freight : 1d6 ⇒ 1 lots; 1d10 ⇒ 10 => 100 tons per lot Destination: 1d3 ⇒ 2 Border
- Speculative : 1d6 ⇒ 5 lots; 1d10 ⇒ 1 => 10 tons per lot Destination: 1d3 ⇒ 3 Rim
- Salvage : TBD Destination: 1d3 ⇒ 1 Core

Forgot to roll for this.

So, it looks like we have 3 steerage passengers and 100 tons of freight to the Border, 6 passengers and up to 50 tons of spec cargo to the Rim, and a salvage job for someone in the Core.

Our take on the salvage job will be 85%. The others are 90%

Border Jobs:
Freight nets us 450p/week
Steerage nets us 27p/week

If we can take both, that's 477p/week of travel.

Rim Jobs:
Passengers net us 162p/week
Spec is currently unknown

GM, how are we handling the salvage job? Do you have something in mind or am I free to make up something within reason?

I would say we run for the border until we have a better idea of how all the rules play out.

I'm leaning away from ever doing speculative cargo. Or, at least, we can't do it any time soon because it seems like we need cash on hand to buy it AND we need to be able to lose our investment. That's gonna take time before we're ever comfortable enough to do that. If ever.

Heh. Rim Jobs. =)

ALL - you have to actually "roll" both the Skill die and the Wild die together to calculate their odds, which I don't think can be done statistically by hand. I wrote a program years ago to calculate the odds of Wild rolls in SW. A straight (Wild) d8 has an 81% chance of at least a Success, and a 25% of one or more Raises. The odds of a Critical Failure (which doesn't impact finding business) is 2%. A Wild d4+2 has a 96% chance of at least a Success, a 32% of one or more Raises, and a 4% chance of Critical Failure.

Mark - you have to roll Networking/Persuasion for each of the cargo options. We'll take your first roll to go towards Steerage. Please make 4 more Networking rolls (but see below first).

Also, any time you get more than one lot in Freight or Speculative, please roll 10*d10 for *each* lot. So you need 4 more rolls for Speculative.

If you want to specify what the Speculative job is, that's fine. It can be anything from weapons to tools to household items to fertilizer. If you want it to be drugs or food, those are counted in "lots" of 100*d10 items per lot (I mentioned lots in the setting, but didn't give the counts).

If you want to specify what the Salvage job is, that's fine too. It can be anything from a highly technical piece of unique equipment, to computer data on the wrecked ship, to goods that never got delivered, to a mundane object of sentimental value to your employer. I'll set the price.

Emma - the ships in a Salvage job are so wrecked there's no way they can be Repaired. Figured I'd get on out ahead of that question... ;)

ALL - I'm debating about multiple jobs to the same region. How about this instead : there are 5 suns, so the destination becomes one of the suns (which determines the region for the travel time), and you can take multiple items to the same sun, since intra-solar-system travel is pretty fast.

So, for Destination, roll a d5 :
1 = Core sun
2 = Border, sun #1 ("Border1")
3 = Border, sun #2 ("Border2")
4 = Rim, sun #1 ("Rim1")
5 = Rim, sun #2 ("Rim2")

Mark - please roll a d5 for each item. Once you've made all your new rolls, if you could tabulate the results again, that would be very much appreciated, thanks!

Also, I liked the summary by destination, and I liked the way you put the rolls in-line with their description (making the process fast and easy), so if you want to just re-roll the whole thing (so you don't have to manually combine the original information with the new rolls), that'd be fine, this is just a test.

Yep. That +2 on a D4 is amazing. 25% chance of an explode and then it's an auto raise. Better than the d8. I would still fail more overall.

Maybe next raise I can help that. Ran out of goodies at character creation :)
I went for the attractive but we can't assume everyone we are dealing with finds her attractive...

Emma - the ships in a Salvage job are so wrecked there's no way they can be Repaired. Figured I'd get on out ahead of that question... ;)

Well played.... =]

Emma said : "I'm leaning away from ever doing speculative cargo. Or, at least, we can't do it any time soon because it seems like we need cash on hand to buy it AND we need to be able to lose our investment."

ALL - I kind of hand-waved the having-to-pay-up-front for the speculative cargo, assuming you had enough cash on hand to pay for it. It's when you deliver it to someone that you roll for your overall profit or loss (if it's a loss greater than all your current cash-on-hand, it will be a number you have to track as you pay it off). But as I pointed out in the setting, on average altho it pays about 6 times as much as freight (by weight), about 1/3 of the time you’ll take a loss that takes about 3-4 freight jobs to make up. So each PC should decide how much risk they're willing to take...

Also, would everyone please post their opinion on who decides what shipments to make : the captain or the entire crew, thanks!

I prefer to delegate that responsibility to the Dealmaker. However, at least a couple of us have the Debt hindrance which states, "you must spend the starting cash amount monthly to stay in their good graces." So that's 2500 for each player with the hindrance. I don't see how the current game economy satisfies that.

Perry, have we seen numbers to back up your hypothesis? Can you give us an example? (I don't really know how much we'll make per job per day.)

Yes. See above.

What that means, is that we will probably have to speculate and run the risk of losses.
At least until the debt hinderance is paid out. :)

Figuring raises and fixed costs cancel out, and not including speculative cargo, we max out at 760/week. 6 ways that's about 125/wk * 4 = 500/month. That's a personal shortfall of 2000/mo for the Debt hindrance. I'm a dead man. We'll have to put all of our eggs into the Speculative basket.

Can the Captain spend Bennies on these rolls?

I forget the aid rules off the top of my head, could Daisy aid Mark in his checks?

Okay, I think I got it now. If you don't mind GM, I think I'd rather just start over and see if I get it right this time.

Mark Baum wrote:

Part of me wants to say he just sleeps on the floor, but if that's how it is, that's how it is. I take no responsibility for the shenanigans a couple of twelve-year-olds can get up to.

You could leave them in a room of their own short term, but Emma could probably rig in a bunk above one of the racks without too much trouble.

That brings up a good question. Could we combine two of the bunkrooms? I think that would work out better in the long run and keep from having three people crammed on top of each other.

Either of these suggestions sound quite fine, and well within my capabilities. I assume the captain would have final say on what modifications to make?

Hammocks used to be a thing on ships. Anyway, you certainly don't need my approval to modify your room.

Mark's in his forties. He ain't sleeping in a hammock if he can help it. The main thing is he wants to keep an eye on his daughters, not crowd them, so he'd rather combine two rooms if he can.

Also, GM, is there a link to the setting document? The one in the recruitment is dead.

I hotlinked the game doc on top in my character. That still works.

And Mark is asking to modify two rooms, so that seemed like a call to be made.

Emma said : "I assume the captain would have final say on what modifications to make?"

Well, the captain and me. ;)

You're talking about taking down a metal wall between two rooms. I would assume a mechanical repair shop would have a blowtorch, but Emma knows that removing that much metal might change the way stresses are distributed thruout the ship. If you do this, something *might* come up later as a result, you just don't know (hee hee hee...). Also, that removes 1 cabin for passengers - with the kids, if every room has 2 occupants, that leaves 8 rooms for up to 16 passengers - with the double room, you could take up to 14 passengers.

Everyone, let's hit a pause button on the Debt Hindrance. Now that I've seen it used, and its ramifications, I'm going to have to re-think it. I welcome ideas for alternate mechanics for the Hindrance that still make it impactful on the PC.

Someone mentioned moving produce - the problem is, the planets that have it are going to want to keep it for themselves, so buying it would be high, and the planets that want it are generally going to be economically poor, and so unable to pay for it. I would represent that as a built-in penalty to the Speculative Haggling for profit/loss roll.

I've moved the link to the setting document to the Campaign Info tab. Sorry about that - I updated the document on my Google Drive, and forgot there was a link to it.

Someone mentioned moving produce - the problem is, the planets that have it are going to want to keep it for themselves, so buying it would be high, and the planets that want it are generally going to be economically poor, and so unable to pay for it. I would represent that as a built-in penalty to the Speculative Haggling for profit/loss roll.

There is literally a scene in an early episode where they are all around the table eating tomato slices and salads. That was probably more about, "Hey, actors, what will you eat during this shot?" And they said, "We want Olive Garden." But still, that makes it canon, right?

Emma said : "I assume the captain would have final say on what modifications to make?"

Well, the captain and me. ;)

You're talking about taking down a metal wall between two rooms. I would assume a mechanical repair shop would have a blowtorch, but Emma knows that removing that much metal might change the way stresses are distributed thruout the ship. If you do this, something *might* come up later as a result, you just don't know (hee hee hee...). Also, that removes 1 cabin for passengers - with the kids, if every room has 2 occupants, that leaves 8 rooms for up to 16 passengers - with the double room, you could take up to 14 passengers.

Hey Mark, now you're cutting into our profits! The girls can sleep on the hammocks. Kids love hammocks. Hammocks roll with acceleration, which is a serious consideration in space travel. Much safer than bunks.

Regarding the *ship's* food quality, that can be built-in to the 20%-off-the-top-of-the-profits mechanism, so the crew can eat..."averagely". Not steaks every night, but not food ration bars, either.

ALL - please add at least your Parry and Toughness in your PC's description in the "Classes/Levels" bar when you edit your PC, so it shows up below your name in every post (like Emma and Daisy).

If your Toughness is 5 from your Vigor, and you have +2 armor, the format should be 7(2).

Thanks!

I could just build bunk beds.

I could even loft the beds if anyone is worried about open floor space.

if i can chime in. bunk beds or lofted beds are probably the way to go if we dont want to be cutting into other cabins.

with us planning to take passengers
we will need a cabinet built into the wall by the airlock where we can store passenger firearms.

for myself,
i will want a cabinet welded in my room for my own firearms i suggest everyone gets one those as well.

if i can chime in. bunk beds or lofted beds are probably the way to go if we dont want to be cutting into other cabins.

with us planning to take passengers
we will need a cabinet built into the wall by the airlock where we can store passenger firearms.

for myself,
i will want a cabinet welded in my room for my own firearms i suggest everyone gets one those as well.

These seem like appropriate in-character comments for Gameplay.

By the way, GM, am I good just to roll again now that I think I know what I'm doing?

As for the room situation. I'm good with getting an extra bunk in a room for Mark.

ALL - I believe in one show, the Fighter (I'm lousy with names) had a built-in cabinet next to his bed in his room filled with weapons. Let's assume that all rooms have one of these, you can store whatever you like there. But the cabinet by the rear exit bay door/exit ramp will have to be built...

Mark - roll away! Do it here since we're still working out the kinks...

Emma - you have two Repair rolls to make in Gameplay : the cabinet at the rear, and the extra bunk in the girls' room for Mark.

jane had a ton of guns in his room.

I'm working through this and I have to say that I think there's some big problems.

First, it makes no sense to have operating costs be a percentage. It makes more sense to have a cost per week. The ship is going to require the same amount of maintenance and fuel and the crew the same amount of food and water per week of travel no matter how cheap or expensive the cargo is. It also makes sense that food for passengers are a part of the costs as well. I don't know if you just want to handwave it as already baked into the revenue per passenger or if you want to have that as separate cost.

Second, Cost really should be per day if we are calculating travel times in days. None of the costs neatly divide by 7 and my calculations are not going to be perfect.

Third, we need to talk about what constitutes travel time. If it's just getting there, then it makes no sense to roll for each cargo heading to the same destination. If if is waiting on the red tape, berthing, stevedores, inspections, etc. then it makes more sense to roll.

Fourth, the way the current travel tables are set up, it's entirely possible to have travel times to a completely different system be far less than to a location within the same system. Again, if travel time is more waiting for the red tape, then it's not so big of a deal, but still something that probably needs to be addressed.

On top of all of this, there is a lot of rolling and calculations. I'm going to pause on this until I have a chance to get some answers and to think this through some. I'm going to have what I have done in a spoiler below just to give an idea of what I'm talking about.

Here is a particularly germane article: Pulse Drive

You'd think I'd have learned to let things go and just be okay with things making no sense, but nope! Here I am trying my damnedest to not pound out a wall of text on how many cans of worms that first paragraph opens up.

The problem is that, while I am no aerospace engineer or rocket scientist, I know enough to be able to construct a fairly hard setting, and Firefly is about as hard as melting cheese. It drives me bonkers and I really, really don't want to start ripping apart the setting, but I appear to be incapable of helping myself.

Then you run into the issues with the economics of the whole thing, the setup of the star system, and on and on it goes and there's a part of me that is just screaming, "THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS!" and I can't shut it up!

Sorry, just had to vent a bit. Maybe now I can actually read that article without crying out to the heavens and cursing writers who don't take the time to educate themselves on a topic before writing about it.

Okay, whoever wrote that has absolute no understanding of how spacecraft or orbital mechanics work. What qualifies as gradual in regards to a gravitational slingshot? Why are we not putting things on Brachistochrone trajectories? Why are their not fail safes to keep pilots from turning their ships into planet crackers? Why is there variability in how long it takes a ship to slow down and why is it apparently random? And I could go on asking questions, but I really don't feel like going down that rabbit hole.

Oh, and saying a rocket motor has high impulse and low efficiency is a contradiction. A rocket motor's impulse is a measure of it's efficiency. They should have said high thrust, low efficiency.

Really what they have is a warp drive, but with the kinds of issues you get with reactionless drives, namely they break physics in horrible, horrible ways. They could have gotten around it by just saying that ships use a torch drive that can't be used close to planets and stations for radiation concerns and gotten the same result without the issues that they raised here.

Let's just call it an Infinite Improbability Drive and carry on.

I GROK SPOCK

Let's just call it an Infinite Improbability Drive and carry on.

I tried! I really, really tried!

Note, I'm mostly being silly at this point.

I GROK SPOCK

You see, you post that to be funny and point out that I need to chill, and I immediately start picking about how dumb the guy asking the question is (or how dumbly he has been written.) You don't ask the actor about that kind of stuff, you ask the writers and advisors.

It's a curse! I can't switch it off once I get going. I know I need to stop, but I can't. There's that part of me that is a writer, a worldbuilder, and a science geek that keeps badgering me that this is not how any of this would work every time I just try to put it aside. It's why I said I wasn't getting into it.

Then promptly got into it.

But that's beside the point! My point is there is no point. Just my brain insisting we are all spherical cows on perfectly frictionless planes with ISO4203469 grass to munch on.

Cool. Can we game now?