Aquitaine's page

Or, one could just ask the question "Is this actually a problem in the first place?" One might then realize that this giant mess of confusion is *exactly what the abstracted BP system exists to avoid in the first place.*

Yes, of course. To attempt to address this issue is not a rejection of that design decision. It is, quite clearly, a very large thing to address, and rather than dedicate a clump of pages in an already thick core rulebook to a problem with a level of detail only some people will care about, I don't for a moment think that they should have done anything other than what they did.

Abstraction frees you up from having to worry about this stuff and gives you license to make your game about whatever you want it to be about.

But if you want economic "reality" to be a part of your game, then addressing this system with more specifics -- even a non-exhaustive approach that distinguishes for your players when they're flying around on something that costs a year's pay versus a hundred years' pay -- has its benefits. That is, after all, what homebrew is about. I don't agree with the OP in the sense that I hate the system they have. I just like to draw connections between, say, this particular corporation that the PCs have dealt with and the super-powerful gun mounted on the top of their ship. "Crap, your giga-cannon broke, and the only people who can fix it have a bounty on your heads from that time you stole that thing from them" is much more interesting to me than "welp, best go to Space Wal-Mart and buy Generic Part to fix up your ship."

But if your story is about other things entirely, Space Wal-Mart is a wonderful solution.

Back to how to actually address this:

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Since I'm working in Fantasy Grounds, the solution that is taking form is a compilation of all the major space-related corporations (using the Organisations extension for FG) along with the locations extension so we can tie organisations to places; and then extending the tables of 'generic parts' with manufacturer-specific versions that have prices (and any alterations one might find appropriate). This will be a lot of work but it has a lot of appeal:

- It doesn't interfere with the "rulebook items" in any way, so it won't mess up your bidness unless you care to use Aquitaine's Extendo-Item List With Credits

- It gives some of the corporations flavor by tying certain types of space parts to one or more specific entities -- this is especially nice IMO for power cores because I cannot keep straight wtf the book names mean so my eyes glaze over the name and I just look at the PCU output. Now I can have three different versions of "Arcus Heavy" with a naming scheme that tells me at a glance how it compares to "Nova Heavy" while also providing variations on BCU/cr efficiency for higher-grade / more expensive / military spec stuff.

- It provides a framework for PCs to hack together or jury rig their own parts, or even invent their own parts, while remaining consistent with upkeep or replacement cost w/r/t off-the-shelf items

What I'd like to do, and this may be months from now, is make an OGL-safe version of a module that has all this stuff, but if it relies on corporations from the core rulebook I'm not sure if that's kosher (even if it provides no detail on what those corporations are). But I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

In thinking about this problem, I don't think a straight "BP to Credit" conversion is appropriate -- not because the designers don't want us to; it's perfectly fine to abstract the cost of this kind of thing if you're running a heroic campaign (e.g. Luke and X-Wings) but if you're on this page, presumably it's a useful reference, but the system has to be consistent and a lot is going to depend on how "your" SF universe works.

The basic problem with BP to CR, even with unique values per tier, is that 1 BP can buy you something very mundane that you could pick up at a hardware store, or it could buy you a weapon sufficient to cause major destruction. Even in games with modern settings, you give your PCs personal-scale weapons or small-scale explosives like grenades. You don't give them high explosive missile launchers unless they're military. But now we have to contend with a level 1 PC having a button on their console to launch destructive ordinance.

The convention changes when the setting goes from "single, civilized world" to "entire universe" since 99% of everything is now untamed frontier and it's less strange to fill your ship with explosive hardware when you might run into a devouring swarm of aliens. This gets into the context of what the PCs are "buying" and where. In civilized space, there's going to be licenses and restrictions for civilians. In uncivilized space (the frontier), it's going to be harder to find facilities capable of building and outfitting high-end systems on your intergalactic space battleship.

The 10cr alarm vs. laser cannon problem manifests all over the place. It's one thing to take the same technology in your item level 1 laser rifle and just build a giant version of it and mount it; it's quite another to get hold of a reactor capable of powering a huge starship. Buying 50 1 BP rows of passenger seating should not resemble the purchase of a capital-class 50 BP gravity cannon.

It seems to me that a serious effort to solve this problem cannot avoid adding a few attributes to most every starship item:

- Availability: Difficulty of procuring and where such an item might be manufactured; also whether you can walk into Frank's Used Starships and walk out with it, or whether you have to take your battleship to drydock and dozens of people are commissioned to install it
- Legality: Whether you can just roll up to city hall in your capital cannon murder boat
- Value: Using the credit tables earlier in this thread combined with the above two attributes, a baseline value

Obviously, this information isn't going to be relevant to every campaign and I think it was the right decision to forego this kind of thing for the base rules. If you're the Rebel Alliance you don't want to be thinking about your starship insurance premiums; it doesn't work for that kind of story. But if you're independent operators and you've got to pay for your life, it does seem appropriate to know which parts of their 150 BP starship can be replaced at Pep Boys and which parts are going to require a favor from a planetary government.