It’s raining outside. We should go to a garden centre and ask them how much it would cost to have somebody come to our flat and cut the 2m Cereus in half for us.
I was talking to @frotz since he’s thinking of adapting Halberts to a science fiction game of his, which is funny because Halberst is a translation of Helmbarten which is a variant of Traveller for Fantasy. Full circle!
But then again, there are a few things I’d love to see. What would this look like? “Hallebardier – Mech Pilots in the Outer Rim” … or something?
Would you use Traveller for inspiration? Navy, Army, Merchant, Scout? Maybe Mech, Pilot, Merchant, Scout?
There’s the question of how to handle items and prices and markets. A thing that I would find extremely interesting is a post-scarcity society where there’s no point in buying stuff because if you have the right “boons” granted to you, you can just get it for free. But getting those licenses, grants, or whatever it is, will be a problem. So rewards would be stuff that grants you access to things that are off-limit by default: air/raft, guns, power armour, etc. In terms of system generation, one would have to imagine all high-tech worlds to be more regulated, I guess.
Also makes me think about Burning Wheel where you have two “skills” for wealth and circles/contacts: if you need to talk to a certain person, or get a certain thing, you roll that skill and that determines whether you can get it using your networks. One of the rewards could be +1 to either of these two, for example.
If it’s a skill we could model scouts having no resources and no networks, merchants having lots of resources, navy people having no resources but lots of contacts, stuff like that.
Perhaps if computer library access were similarly restricted, scouts could have lots of “library” skill or whatever you want to call it. “Imperial Information Security Clearance”. In our Traveller games, the use of Programming/Computers for all sorts of library science stuff was a bit weird, at times. That’s why I was thinking about this.
Anyway, I think there’s plenty of design space to think about a short scifi game. It doesn’t have to be Classic Traveller or T5.
#RPG