9 October 2023
The crew has decided to accept the offer of the Drinaxian king (ahem, the Emperor of the Sindalian Empire) to become privateers on the Empire's behalf.
Decisions Decisions ..
- We may want to figure out a decision-making structure for the characters to follow on the ship.
Stated principles: aim for something that is flexible and allows for rotation of command roles, but lets characters with domain specific skills act on them.
Suggestion: a rotating 'commander' structure, maybe like so:
With a crew of 8 we could do a schedule that puts 2 people on the bridge at all times, and that gives everyone 1 day + night with just 1 three hour shift every four days, and between 6-9 hours 'on' on the three intermittent days. We could pair 'command-capable' crew with 'non-commander' crew in two person teams, or even run them 'offset' so that people get to take watches with different crew mates over time.
(stolen from here: https://www.followingseas.media/blog/2017/5/8/best-watch-schedule-ever)
- We may want to figure out a way of paying for upkeep / maintenance of the ship and crew.
Stated principles: "the ship eats first" and "expenses that benefit the mission-readiness are considered shared".
- We need to figure out how to finance maintaining and (further) improving the ship and how to handle characters' private wealth w.r.t to that.
how much inequality among PCs are we okay with?
do our PCs have opinions about this or is it just us players?
The Economic Models
1) The Commune
All PCs pool all of their resources to improve the ship maximally at game start and provide shared starting capital to keep her afloat for the first few jobs.
All characters who work on the ship receive a salary (NPCs > employees) / a profit share (PCs > partners).
All PCs immediately get an equal share in (the company that owns) the ship, regardless of initial contribution and we decide together on payouts.
All PCs feel equally bought in.
Eliminates a lot of character-level bookkeeping.
It seems at odds with in-game reality, and may be unacceptable to some PCs.
[meta] It requires liquidation of all private assets, meaning that a lot of backstory / plot hooks become obsolete.
2) (Soon to be) worker-owned
All characters who work on the ship receive a salary (NPCs > employees) / or profit share based on % of company ownership (PCs> partners).
The company that owns the ship pays out "stock" (different from "ship shares") to partners over time and becomes a worker-owned (PC-owned) collective.
Characters who have ship shares at the start, can choose to apply the ship shares to the ship for improvements, and PCs with cash can loan their cash to the company to run the ship until it makes money.
A cash loan entitles PCs to loan pay-off + interest paid out in installments before the profit shares are made
Donated ship shares could entitle PCs to receiving some amount of extra company stock after the ship becomes profitable?
This decreases wealth + income inequality among all PCs over time to the point of meaninglessness.
Allows the company to 'get fat' and build up cash reserves by keeping the profit share of stock it has not yet given out (good for lean times / ship damage or if we get another ship and need to fix it)
Gives each PC free choice about using private wealth to improve the ship / help the company.
May make ship improvements slower if people choose not to contribute.
Is in line with in-game economic reality, but not in a way that some PCs remain 'gimped' forever because they can't afford good kit.
Creates space for politically colored gameplay (corporations hate us! workers love us! We'll let you go if you let your workers own the ship! Oops, your ship is now owned by the slaves you were ferrying!)
3) Hypercapitalists in space
All characters who work on the ship, receive some sort of salary (NPCs > employees)/ profit share (PCs > the venture capitalists).
No one donates private wealth to the ship.
The company that owns the ship can take out loans on crew-owned ship shares or other assets to improve itself.
Paying off loans on ship shares become part of the operating expenses of the company that owns the ship.
One PC, one vote.
Increases income / wealth inequality among PC's, but (if the payout is sufficient) probably not in a way that is salient since we all have "enough" money.
Nicely hypercapitalist, like the rest of the in-game universe.
Higher operating expenses due to loan repayments, Company will likely remain 'lean', since PCs can maximize private wealth instead.
Allows for easy leaving / joining of new characters.
Seems at odds with the inclinations of some PCs to leave such an amazing asset technically unowned.
Possible Ship Names
Please add your suggestions here:
| Hippocampus | (after the sea horses of Sink) |
| That Second Certain Thing | (Death and... taxes, of course. Our new business. A Culture reference) |
| The Bachelorette | (I mean...) |
| Brick's Bride | (I mean... pt 2) |
| Unlimited Breadsticks | They're breadsticks and they're unlimited. |
| Cheshire Moon | (a cat's smile) |
| Century Hawk | A very old bird of prey |
| Liberty | |
| The Grail | |
| Second Chance | |
| Venus | Ancient Roman goddess of love, beauty, desire, sex, fertility, prosperity, and victory |
| Eris | Ancient Greek goddess of discord |
| Nandaka | sword of Vishnu, representing knowledge |
| The Endeavor | |
| Nova Horizon | |
| Star Runner | |
| Phoenix Rising | |
| The Defiant | |
| The Cosmic Dancer | |
| Priscilla | Queen of the desert / Trojan Reach |
| Furthur | After the Merry Pranksters' bus |
| Aced The Kool-aid Acid Test | Culture reference meets The Beats |
| Perdita | "lost" (Shakespeare's lost princess of Sicily) |
| Albatross | Wandering sea bird with huge wingspan |
| Liabilité | Reference to the disrepair and possible malfunction of our new ship |
Possible Company Names
Please add your suggestions here:
| SpaceBums Inc. | |
| Generic Operators for Aquisition and Transportation Inc. [GOAT Inc.] | |
| Junonia & Sons | A pretty shell name for a pretty shell company |
| Alpha Solutions | When you need the A Team |
| The Jolly Rogers | |
| The Opportunists | |
| Prancing Privateers | |
Jobs on the Ship
- We get to pick jobs: which characters do which jobs on board (and do we want people to (be able to) do more than one job)?
| Role | Mandatory? | Character | |
| Captain | M | on rotation / watch? | maybe we use a 'commander' role instead? or 'coordinator' or ... ? |
| Pilot | M | Randy / Diogo / (Persy) | |
| Astrogator | M | Persy | |
| Engineer | M | Pent / Randy | (Electronics: Computers, Sensors, Comms, Remote Ops) Diogo |
| Maintenance | M | Pent / Stigo / Randy | |
| Gunner (barbette) | M | Diogo | |
| Gunner (turret) | X | Diogo | |
| Medic | M | Heloise | |
| Broker | O | Persy, once he graduates | |
| Steward | O | Persy | |
| Marine 1 | O | Brick | |
| Marine 2 | O | Franky | |
| Marine 3 | O | Stigo? |
Ship Improvements
- We get to improve the ship.
| Improvement | Current state | ship shares needed | |
| Turret | nonfunctional | 1 | |
| Holographic hull | partial function, power drain]] | 1 | |
| Maintenance cost | 10.000 cr/mth | 4 (to 2667 cr / mth) | |
| Hull strength | 72 | 2 (to 88) | |
| Countermeasure suite | DM+4 | 2 (to DM +6) | |
| Power plant | 75% (195) | 1 (260) | |
| Jump drive | DM -2 | 2 | |
| Manoeuver drive | unreliable (1/36 nonfunctional) | 2 |
Total ship shares needed for full repair: 15 or (after the start of the campaign) 75 MCr cash per PoD rules.
- Who has ship shares?
- How many ship shares does each PC want to use to improve the ship?
- Which ship improvements to we want to make (first)
| PC | # of shares | would prefer to spend on: | |
| Brick | 0 | 0 | |
| Diogo | 0 | 0 | |
| Franky | 2 | ? | |
| Heloise | 0 | 0 | |
| Persy | 0 | 0 | |
| Randy | 2 | Maintenance cost? (making other repairs possible sooner), possibly Countermeasure suite? |
Context Ship shares and PoD rules
Rules Confusion
The OG and PoD rule sets seem incompatible with each other.
We think we can mostly fix it by:
1) not equating "ship shares" to 'owns a part of a ship' (hence the concept of 'company stock' as introduced earlier)
2a) house ruling Persy's ship outside of the very broken math that starts happening when we try to convert 'actual ship ownership' to "ship shares (for PoD)",
or
2b) plain refusing to let Persy contribute any ship shares at all (and then maybe the company can try to rent or buy out the Misophist for themselves at a later date).
Explanation for who cares: in our normal Traveler rules, "ship shares" are valued at 1 MCr, and they pay out 1000 Cr per year. PoD says that at the start of the game ship shares can be applied, but if you have no "ship shares" and need to pay in cash, you need to pay 5MCr (five times more than the original given value of a ship share to make an upgrade) This makes "ship shares" virtually worthless to hold onto in the PoD campaign (this is good - we want to use them to fix up the ship!).
Persy currently owns a ship that's worth about 67 MCr, and it's 25% paid off. If he keeps the ship and rents it out as he has been doing, this pays him 25000 Cr a year (so the same as if he owned 25 ship shares, by original rules). Obviously we do not want to give Persy 25 ship shares (he would be insufferable about it, and would also break the game).
If instead he sold the ship and paid off the mortgage, he'd end up with about 17 MCr cash, equivalent to 17 ship shares (or an annual payout of 17000 CR) by original rules. We still do not want to actually give Persy 17 ship shares, because he'd immediately fix up the whole ship, which would probably scuttle half the campaign and would also make everybody else hate him / ask him to be their sugar daddy.
If we instead apply PoD RAW (rules as written) and decide Persy does not get to sell his ship before the game starts. We'd make him pay in cash and then those 17MCr would count as only +-3 ship shares (still for a payout of 3000 Cr per year). It would be an absolutely shit investment for Persy to make, because even if he applied them directly to the maintenance cost of the ship (which would drop the cost by 6000Cr a month (or 72000 Cr a year), he could not just claim that money outright, he'd at best get 20% of those savings passed on, but probably not for a few years.
In short: ship shares > ship upgrades = great deal. Ship ownership > ship shares = gamebreakingly OP. Ship ownership > cash > ship upgrades = fuck you, my PC crunches numbers for a living, bro.
Hugo's pitch to the referee
If the party decides that they want Persy to get ship shares and contribute them, I'd like to propose this: for ship ownership value to ship share conversion purposes, we assign a one-time ship share a value of 3.18 MCR (1% of the harrier value per share, which is what other sources online have cited as the original base for ship share calculations). This would net Persy 5 ship shares and a bit of pocket change, which is a sizable enough fortune for him to still justifiably be a bit of a snob about, but probably not game-breakingly huge.
It would do a lot to diminish the currently absolutely ridiculous wealth inequality between Persy and everyone else in the rest of the party, which I have personally found kind of tricky. I think Persy has the type of wealth where he could basically hand wave most problems the pary encounters (Like, sorry, but... work? for a living? Ew!), but that does not make for a fun game.
Other
Campaign Main Page || Previous: Escape from Sink || All Playsessions || Next: Pirates of Drinax Session Zero