The game assumes that the ship the players have will get upgraded over time and will gradually improve. But how do you roleplay the characters getting access to ship upgrades?
If it were a real shipyard, this would obviously take a lot of cash and probably way more than the players have for personal equipment.
"The mayor of Alienville gives you each a reward of 1000 credits and gives the group another 100,000 credits to go towards your starship." (which counts as 20 BP)
That doesn't really work for me, because there's nothing to stop the players from saying "let's take 10,000 of the credits for the ship and buy personal items with it."
"You open the vault and inside you find 10 BP."
That doesn't work for me either. For pretty obvious reasons.
So what methods do you use as a GM to justify the characters getting access to more BP? I have a number of ideas but I am looking for suggestions.
"The mayor of Alienville grants you access to their shipyards and will defray the cost of upgrading your ship"
"You open the vault and find a cache of blueprints/electronics/ship weapon grade heatsinks that you can use to upgrade your ship"
Lane S.:
This assumes that salvage law is very different than what is common legal practice here on Earth. On Earth we have the legal principle of the Right of Salvage. The Right of Salvage exists to provide an incentive for people to look for lost ships.
The Right of Salvage gives a discoverer the right to take possession of a wreck if he is the first one to find it and all the original crew and passengers are dead (as long as it wasn't you that killed them - that would be piracy). The previous owners have no say in the matter.
Normally if a modern ship is lost the original owners will be the first to know and will send search teams; they will discover the wreck first anyway. Alternately they might purchase the claim from the discoverer, which saves the discoverer from having to perform a salvage operation himself.
Salvage claims normally have to be filed with an authority of some kind; which authority depends on where the wreck is. Once the claim has been filed the ship is yours and anyone else trying to salvage it is committing a crime.
In the Starfinder universe, there are lots of undiscovered places, and a lot more territory in which ships could be lost. Which means the Right of Salvage would typically become stronger, not weaker.
The best method I can come up with without over-complicating things:
Most of the BPU are handed out from destroyed starships.
Between Level 1 and 2 there are 20 BPU to hand out.
Lets say there are 3 starship encounters that level for simplicity's sake (pulling that number out of nowhere):
- Allocate 10 BPU to the hardest fight
- Allocate 5 BPU to the two easier fights
- Allocate 5 BPU to "Player cleverness" to incentivise your players to work for an additional amount of resources via salvaging enemy ships, piecing apart abandoned factories or whatever other justification you can come up with.
This way they feel encoraged to work for more loot, without the feeling that WBL will be identical no matter how lazy they are.
It also leaves you room to salvage an unexpected capture of a fully intact ship you had assumed would be destroyed instead of captured.
I'd stray away from trying to convert BPU to credits under the idea that it would only sell for 10% of value, and you'd quickly run out of money attempting to buy them. Simply tell people that if they want to do more starship stuff, they've got to seek out more starship fights: and then use up your extra 25% of the BPU/level there.
I'm going to be using the BP tiers not as big bumps but in the same way I would use WBL. They won't just ding and get a load of BP, but some encounters will have things with an essential BP value.
"Alright you've blown up all the enemy fighters. There are a few bits of their frames that are salvageable. Someone make me an engineering roll to see how much you can re purpose" *Player rolls a dice, I pretend to look at my notes* "Alright that was a low roll, you end up damaging some parts as you try to extract them, still you manage to get some salvage. Next downtime you can put that to use, it'll be worth 6BP"
This is what we’ve been doing and it’s been working fine for us. We’ve also had BPs as rewards given by patrons.
The fact Starfinder has two WBL tracks complicates things but really it just requires that players buy in to it. Finding loot of two different “flavours” is no more difficult to reconcile than owning a ship separately from the PCs’ WBL.
I do not know about salvaged ships but I do know governments frequently claim part of the cargo recovered from wrecks. I know in some cases insurance companies have made legal claims to cargo as well.
Cases where ships are lost at sea with all hands are very rare nowadays.
If the salvaged ship is recoverable, typically the original owner has the opportunity to redeem a salvaged ship from someone that has salvaged it if that is a third party. This reward is typically assigned by the courts. However, if they are unwilling to pay then the salvages has a lien on the entire wreck and may do with it as they will. Often wrecks are not worth the cost of salvaging them. Even if the ship is not abandoned someone coming to the aid of a distressed ship has the right to file a salvage claim for a part of the value of the vessel.
If a ship has sunk to the ocean floor or is otherwise considered unrecoverable, it is considered a derelict and the original owner has no claim on it unless they salvage it themselves. As a part of making a salvage claim, the Salvor must demonstrate that the vessel is derelict. A derelict vessel probably isn't useful but you might be able to harvest parts or material from it.
Cargo is a bit different, since the ship's loss can be intentional (in the sense that it has been abandoned by the original owners) but the cargo may be abandoned by necessity. Title to cargo is therefore harder to take in a salvage claim. Cargo that has been deliberately thrown overboard, or sunk to the bottom but marked with a buoy, are always still considered property of the original owners. Insurers or Creditors may have liens they can enforce on such cargo. Cargo that has sunk to the bottom without markers is usually considered abandoned and may be salvaged.
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The thing to remember here though as this applies to Starfinder is that we live in a world where there are no uncharted waters. The ocean is finite and fully charted. If a ship sinks today we will have a pretty good idea of where it is.
In a universe where ships operate in space, and the vast distances involved mean that ships will often be lost in circumstances where no one knows where the ship was when it was lost.
That kind of environment will likely produce a lot of ships that are "lost without a trace." Salvage rights will be more liberal in this kind of environment because ownership is harder to enforce.
A good adventure hook though might be an insurer hiring the party to find a lost vessel. But the insurer is mainly interested in the cargo and lets the party keep the wreck as a part of their payment.
I'm giving my players a magic infused hybrid ship that is bonded to them. It properties change in accordance with the 'power' of its owners. Therefore, more build points with a level up.
I figured magic was the easiest way to overcome the role playing aspect of it. Could do the same thing as the ship is a vessel given to them by a deity and grows in power as they bring about glory to said deity.
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I'm the GM, so I can only speak from my side of the screen, but we've not run into any difficulties with BP system so far. Our campaign is a homebrew, where the PCs are bounty hunters working for the Syndicsguild. When a bump in BP comes, it usually goes like so: the PCs' advocate informs them that resources have been allocated to them to upgrade their ship in preparation for an upcoming assignment that has been forecasted to be a challenge, or, for rescuing such-and-such the XYZ Company has donated X amount of BPs as a token of their appreciation, or, so-and-so is offering payment in the form of BPs for the apprehension of evil-bad-guy, etc. It is my opinion that it takes a bit of cooperation between the GM and players to make it feel organic, like the rest of the game, I suppose.
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The ship's engineer gives the control panel a good thwack in the right place. Immediately, a whole bunch of components that were there all along start working properly.
I could also see the PCs losing a space combat and having their ship robbed of parts by the victors who might, for example, remove their Drift Drive and reduce their ship's BP total by a like amount. They could then hobble back to a shipyard and cannibalize other parts to pay for a new Drift Drive.
Just a thought for ways to have defeat in space combat not result in a TPK.
2. If the players are on a planet and are level 5, then turn 6, then have to fly back to Absolom Station, they're stuck with their level 5 ship until they upgrade it. It isn't a video game.
This seems unnecessarily restrictive to me, for no better reason than that it seems to offend your sensibilities.
This is a ROLEplaying game, taking place in the imaginations of you and your players. Adapting the narrative to make more sense within the context of literally any situation is insanely easy! There are literally no limitations!
Just say they found a rare, purified gem while on the planet that they can plug into the ship's core to get more power out of it. Or they found a crashed ship with parts they could use. Or the locals helped in some way. Or the PCs brought upgrade supplies with them tot he planet, but only just now got them up and running.
I can think of a thousand possible covers that allow the players to immediately have what they want, and what the rules say they should have, with little to no fuss whatsoever.
So I ask you all this: Why then should anyone ever restrict their players as you suggest? That seems to me like it can only risk hurting the fun with no real gain or upside. Why risk it?
2. If the players are on a planet and are level 5, then turn 6, then have to fly back to Absolom Station, they're stuck with their level 5 ship until they upgrade it. It isn't a video game.
This seems unnecessarily restrictive to me, for no better reason than that it seems to offend your sensibilities.
This is a ROLEplaying game, taking place in the imaginations of you and your players. Adapting the narrative to make more sense within the context of literally any situation is insanely easy! There are literally no limitations!
Just say they found a rare, purified gem while on the planet that they can plug into the ship's core to get more power out of it. Or they found a crashed ship with parts they could use. Or the locals helped in some way. Or the PCs brought upgrade supplies with them tot he planet, but only just now got them up and running.
I can think of a thousand possible covers that allow the players to immediately have what they want, and what the rules say they should have, with little to no fuss whatsoever.
So I ask you all this: Why then should anyone ever restrict their players as you suggest? That seems to me like it can only risk hurting the fun with no real gain or upside. Why risk it?
My players enjoy the feeling of genuine choice.
"We can press on with a lower tier ship or we can lose time but have the benefit of an upgraded ship" is a situation they'd enjoy agonising over.
I think the key is to not make it a spurious barrier but rather a win-something/lose-something situation. I wouldn't see any benefit in making them fly back to Absalom station and then return if they didn't gain anything (or those few weeks would take less than a minute of table-time).
In my group it's likely to be the players who insist you can't upgrade a spaceship out in the middle of deep space anyhow.
The ship's engineer gives the control panel a good thwack in the right place. Immediately, a whole bunch of components that were there all along start working properly.
I swear, it was the damndest thing. I basically threw a bunch of spare parts at it and it turned into a heavy persistent particle beam weapon!