Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[decalod85]

In sci-fi, deep dark space is cool, but not particularly interesting or profitable. You need the resources of planets/asteroid belts/comets to create wealth. So you really want to spend your time in or near solar systems.

So, in a traveller/alternity*stardrive/vorkosigan/starwars/startrek/foundation type sci-fi universe, you have multiple star systems that make up your universe. Maybe dozens, maybe hundreds.

Some are inhabited, some are not. But, the PCs must be able to reach them for adventure to occur.

From fiction, I have seen three methods that don't make me cringe too much.

1. Hyperspace, warp drive, drive space. Call it what you want, the drive is part of the ship. Navigation is the responsibility of the pilot. Ships can either jump from one place to another instantly, or must make a series of jumps to travel between solar systems.

2. Stargates, jump gates - "Fixed" points in space, known quantities, perhaps gigantic machines. Warp ships without fail to predetermined destinations. Mechanical, perhaps built by mysterious aliens from the distant past. Controlled/defended by local authorities. There may be hidden gates in a system (smugglers use them).

3. Wormholes - "Fixed" points in space, but less trustworthy than Stargates. May collapse or close. Naturally occurring. Generally watched or guarded by the locals in the system. Piloting skill required to enter and successfully navigate to destination. Not all of them have been detected/explored. Uncharted ones must be found with sensitive scanning equipment.

I see pros and cons of all three, and possible combinations...

Having only option 3 makes a lower tech level possible, as the PC's and NPC's do not have access to warp technology. It takes them days/weeks to fly across a system to reach the next wormhole. Also, wormholes that lead somewhere interesting will be quite valuable as they probably will lead to systems where no one else is exploiting the resources.

Option 2 is option 3, just safer. It also implies that warp might be capable for ships, if they are big enough.

Options 3 and 2 introduce choke points for restricting the movements of PCs. It's tough to do this with just option 1. Of course, any self respecting planetary society with a space presence would guard wormholes/stargates to prevent invasion/smuggling/criminals. Tolls and customs become options.

Option 1 is the most open, giving the PCs the capability to warp directly to anywhere they have enough fuel to reach. Local governments may have rules where ships are allowed to jump into their system.

Since space is so big, and the possibility of random encounters being so incredibly remote, you need choke points, or places where all the ships are going to and from. This is where encounters happen, this is where they bump into enemy ships. More choke points means more encounters, more RP, more combat.

This makes me lean more towards option 3, because I want exploration to be a strong component of the campaign.

What do you think? Any preferences? Anything I am missing?

[steelbrok]

I think it depends on what you want for the setting. If you're happy for the players to take off in any direction then option 1 (Traveller-like although Traveller has the benefit of 30+ years of official and fan material for referees to plunder)

This gives the players freedom but to my mind is harder for the referee
In more general terms I think option encourages a broad but probably not detauiled setting.

Options 2 and 3 allow a referee more control of both the ability to move from system to system and the number of systems that may be moved to.
This allows the development of more detailed but fewer worlds.

I had in mind a setting with stargates but the links between gates had to established in normal space. you would have big STL ships carrying one end of a gate to new systems, once there though other ships can fly through at will

If set when there are some ships still moving to create the gate network you can add world as you wish

[ValhallaGH]

I kind of liked the Babylon 5 approach, which combined 2 and 3. There were naturally occurring warp points, but there were also fixed gates (built at major traffic locations) to enter into hyperspace.

Then they stuck hazards into the warp space, making it a dangerous location.

Finally, certain kinds of scout ships and (eventually) some models of war ship could generate their own jump points, creating option 1. The impression the show gave was that this was very power-intensive, more dangerous than using jump gates, and generally regarded as a hostile act (often provoking fights).

Of course, there are times when less is more.
_________________
"Got a problem? I've got the solution: Rocket Launcher."
"Not against a Servitor."
"... We're all gonna die."

[Sadric]

The Honor Harrington universe has a mixture of 1 and 3, without much explanation (But I read only the first 5-6 books).

There are Warp curents and the spaceships sail on them with some sort of warp-sail. Better Ships coudl reach higher/faster warpwaves and could travel faster. But there are some sort of jetstreams (blackholes) that work as choke points, strategic target etc.

I liked this approach. You could travel everywhere, but slow.
There are some sort of warp-Hyperlanes as plot twists.

[Jordan Peacock]

[Virgobrown72]

I'm currently working on a Sci Fi setting that uses a combination of options 1 and 3, with ships requiring certain equipment to take advantage of naturally occuring phenomena. But, in the end, I've realized my setting is Fiction, with some science squeezed in for a framework, so i didn't sweat it too much...
_________________
"Anything smaller is just fiddly, and fiddly is not one of SvgW's three Fs..."

[Jordan Peacock]

Oh yeah -- one thing I wanted to add was that if I work with another setting with hyperspace, I'd like to make sure there are some rules that make it clear that hyperspace jumps into and out of a "gravity well" don't work, and that there's a minimum practical jump distance of some sort.

If ships have to jump in/out some distance from a planet, then at least I can have my "atmospheric chase," ala the Millenium Falcon rushing away from TIE fighters to get far enough out of the atmosphere to jump into hyperspace.

Also, it means that I don't have to deal with too-clever players who think that the proper way to deal with an enemy planet is to program a large ship to hyperjump right into the planet. E.g., arguments with players along the lines of, "At even half-light speed*, the amount of energy from a ship of that size would OBLITERATE an Earth-sized planet!" thus begging the question of why, if it's that easy, and anyone with a large ship and either a robot navigator or a suicidal inclination could do it, civilization as we know it hasn't been obliterated yet.

(*This is not to suggest that I think that ships traveling via "hyperspace" should be traveling at "near-light speeds" or anything resembling that. The whole point of hyperspace is to avoid the implications of having to deal with the physics, I figure. However, that won't ever stop a player with genocidal ambitions from trying to invoke something that sounds at least a little like real science to justify his one-ship planet-smasher. )

Instituting some sort of practical reason why "micro-jumps" won't work is to help avoid the phenomenon of "teleporting" ships dominating starship battles (and evading what meager obstacles can be put in front of the heroes), and, again, someone getting the idea of going all "kamikaze" with hyperspace-jumping ships. If there's a trend with vehicles in my games, it's that eventually the players want to deliberately smash them into their enemies. It seems to be some sort of law of roleplaying games.
_________________

[Wandering Monster]

I've been running a solo sci fi game for my wife using the FATE system for a couple months now. Solo games tend to be *very* roleplaying intensive, so YMMV.

In my game, there are three methods of FTL:

1) Jump gates : Stable but always in heavily inhabited and patrolled systems. They reliably warp a ship to any other jump gate that is currently active. Also, very, very rare, with maybe one or two per sector. Travel through them is reliable, but it's easy enough for one to break or be shut down by local authorities if I want the player to take the long route.

2) Carriers : One species (who of course is mysterious and difficult) have huge ships the size of small moons that can travel somewhat quickly over vast distances. They pop into a system, open their bay doors, and take anybody who can pay and get to the carrier before the carrier leaves (since the carriers exert a sizable gravitational influence, they try to avoid disturbing planetary systems with their presence). Once you get into a carrier, it's reliable transportation, but there's no real schedule, so getting into one is mostly luck. Because a single carrier has multiple destinations, travel by carrier takes 1-2 weeks.

And, 3) Good, old fashioned jump drives : Very limited range and slow. Jumping from one neighboring system to another generally takes 2 weeks of time. Combined with my randomly-generated Traveller system map (old habits die hard, and I find the UPP is indispensable), travel from one inhabited system to another can take months of jumping and refueling. Interstellar travel is not for the impatient.


For the long trips, I took a page out of my old 50 Fathoms campaign and run 1-3 roleplaying encounters between crew members and passengers for each trip. I'd probably adjust that to 1 per jump if I were playing with a group, but with only one player, about 2/3 of the sessions have taken place inside the ship in jump space and have only involved roleplaying encounters (with the exception of an attempted mutiny by the ex-captain of a ship they had stolen).

[UmbraLux]

[Vinzent]

I prefer engines with a jump range. For instance a ship with a jump of 3 can only move 3 hexes to a new system on the map before having to discharge the buildup into a gravity well. So a ship could leap through two hexes of empty space but has to end in a system.
Knowing the max distance lets you plot your star map with impassable zones and create trade corridors. It also limits the section of space to be explored until a jump 4 engine is developed.
_________________
My Savage Worlds Blog
Get off the Human reservation. Read The Starrunner by C.B. Jones

[AlienMasters]

Neat writeup decalod, and some great responses too! My preference is Option 1.

[Ashavan]

I like the way they did it in the Mass Effect 2 video game. There are mass relays that allow near-instantaneous travel between the major hub worlds (your #2) but if you want to go somewhere off the beaten path, your ship needs to use its own FTL drive (your #1), which is not instantaneous and is very limited in range.

This means the players can zoom around the populated worlds all they want, but if they want to head out into the more remote areas where the adventure happens, it takes longer and creates a more limited set of places that they can get to, which means fewer planets for you to flesh out on the fly.

[Rerun941]

Another thing to consider is the warfare aspect to FTL travel. If you have hyperspace travel an enemy force can simply pop up out of nowhere and start a conflict. Large defense forces would need to stay near valuable systems.

With the Stargate option, there is the possibility that the means of travel (the gate itself) can be destroyed. This could have disasterous consequences depending on how easy it is to build a Stargate or if there are other means of FTL travel. "Oops, some crazy person just blew up the Stargate... we're basically trapped in our little system here... forever."

On the plus side, because the Stargate is a bottleneck, you can concentrate your defensive forces to protect such a valuable piece of infrastructure.

For Option 3, again, you have the bottleneck issue to defend the location and depending on the physics you make up for the wormholes... can they be destabilized/collapsed? ... moved? etc.

PS - I highly, HIGHLY recommend GURPS: Space as a resource for these kinds of questions. The book is well written and is quite useful, even if you never play GURPS.

[Virgobrown72]

[AMonkeyWithAFez]

I'm very detail oriented. My players really aren't. We threw together a scifi campaign using the old Mutant Chronicles (or pieces of the MC) setting. We liked the corporate backgrounds, the brotherhood and the cartel... It was very, very dark Shadowrun with big guns and spaceships... And undead mutants.

So when it came to space travel, I went detail oriented and thought long and hard about type of travel, costs, how it worked, etc... When presented with the process, my group says "how much and how long". Hours of thought and process summed up in 5 words.

What they proceeded to do was just roleplay out some interludes and said ok we're here lets move on.

My lesson learned, my group likes system (game rules) lite, little detail about technology, great story and scenes to role play with each other and shooting space mutant zombies in the face.

It's nice to drop in here and read about the details that burned up in low orbit!

[Jordan Peacock]

[warrenss2]

My issues with Warp Points, Stargates, and what-like, is that it makes the planetary system too easily defend-able in times of interstellar conflicts.

Just drop a huge mine field and post ship at station-keeping around the point-gate and you have the system defended rather too well.

I personally like the Traveller-type jump drives. Jump 2 = 2 light-year jump, etc... up to, maybe a Jump Drive 6.

I concur about making jumping into a gravity-well dangerous. I like the idea of jumping into a system, but still having quite a few hours to planetfall/orbit.
_________________