Tuesday 11 June 2013

What is in your Ship's Locker?

In every Traveller starship is the famous Ship's Locker, a cornucopia of emergency equipment regularly used and abused by players to make up for lack of forethought when purchasing miscellaneous equipment. 

It ought to be there, from a 'simulationist' POV a starship is going to have a room full of emergency gear and from a game POV given the incredible variety of possible challenges a GM can throw at the players at the drop of a hat it seems fair to have some kind of system to cope other than buy one of every single item in the game universe and write it on their character sheet.

Ship's Locker

Any vessel is automatically assumed to have one, no tonnage need be assigned for a crew and passenger total of up to 20, 0.5 ton for 21-40 people and 0.5 ton per 20 people thereafter.

Option 1
Players always have the option of going through in detail and itemising every widget and doodad

Option 2
Assign a budget and take off the cost of each item when it gets rolled up. This budget may be added to the cost of their starship and paid off as part of their installment plan. As a rule of thumb, well equipped starships will have 6000Cr per crewman and 2000Cr per passenger, typical ones have 4000 and 1500, poorly equipped ones 2000 and 500Cr. How often inspectors come round and give the captain a wigging for not having enough tent peg mallets is up to the Evil GM.

Option 3
As above, but 750Cr gets you one roll for one item on one of the tables below. If the price of the gear is under 750Cr then tough, it will cancel out the times you get a good deal, or blame the captain for being a mug and buying a job lot of alleged 'survival gear' out the back of Honest Ernies Tramp Trader without looking in the carrier bags. Minimum spend is 3750 per 100 tons of ship.

Option 4
A combination of the methods above, some detailed by players, a budget to cover the rest and maybe a pot luck of random crap with the spare change.

Numbers of each item

Ship's Lockers are not legally required to cover all of the personnel on a ship. Low passengers are often left out of any calculation as they usually die if the ship gets into any serious power plant trouble and unions might demand owners have enough gear for every crew member but they don't always get. Assign a C and P number to your ships locker depending on how much you are willing to spend.

If you taking option 3 you get one of each item, but have the option of spending other rolls on multiples up to the maximum given – eg Bert has rioting passengers running wild all over B deck and dives into the Ship's Locker looking for a weapon. His vessel has 10 rolls left for the locker. He gets 9 – shock baton and riot shield, just what he wanted... he spends another two rolls so as to have a set of three (his ship has six crew so he could have had up to six) and passes them out to Sid and Jeff. So the whiny bastards thought the profiteroles weren't defrosted properly did they?

Each locker must contain at least one item from each table. Roll 1d8 if the TL of your ship is 9 or below, 1d10 if it is 10-11, 1d12 if it is 12-13. Add your own TL 15 gear, don't have any in my campaign. All gear can be found in Supplement 4: Central Supply Catalogue

Weaponry

Roll

No#
Cr/item
1
Swiss army knives (20% have widget for getting stones out of horses' hooves)
C
5
2
Hatchet
C/2
25
3
Survival Knife (With bayonet fitting for survival rifles)
C
10
4
Machete
C/2
100
5
9mm Autopistol + 2 mags
C
220
6
Survival Rifle + 25 rounds each for rifle and shotgun
C
100
7
Varmint Rifle + 60 rounds
C/2
300
8
Snub Derringer +10 rounds ball, 10 rounds HEAP
C/2
145
9
Shock Baton and riot shield set
C
400
10
Boarding Shields
C/2
150
11
Accelerator Carbine + 5 mags
C/2
800
12
Laser Carbine + power pack
C/2
3500

Clothing and Vacuum Gear

Roll

No#
Cr/item
1
Cold weather clothing
C+P
200
2
Filter Mask and Goggles
C+P
30
3
Environment Mask
C+P
50
4
Environment Suit
C+P
500
5
NBC Suit
C/2
250
6
Desert Suit
C+P
1000
7
Life-Support Mask
C
1000
8
Rescue Ball
C+P
150
9
Vacc Suit Emergency kits
C
500
10
Rescue Bubble
C+P
600
11
Thrust Pistol
C
1000
12
Emergency Softsuit
C+P
2000

Survival kit

Roll

No#
Cr/item
1
Ice Terrain Kit, Snowshoes, Backpack
C
125
2
Desert Kit
C
75
3
Parachute
C+P
250
4
Flare launcher and 20 flares
C/2
125
5
Pressure Tent+2 Sleeping Bags
C/2 + P/2
2000
6
Microturbine, + 100 litres of hyrdocarbon fuel (includes (C+P)/2 camp stoves, lamps etc)
(C+P)/20
1200
7
Reflector Tarps
C+P
400
8
Emergency Beacon (comes with (C+P) number of TL 8 rescue transponders at 50Cr ea.)
(C+P)/50
750
9
Inertial Locator
C/2
1200
10
100m cargo cable, small hand cranked winch
C+P/ 20
1200
11
Grav Parachute
C+P
2500
12
Protein Tap
C+P/5
1000

All ship's lockers will have 1 week of emergency rations per crew and extra at 25Cr per pack each passenger.

Medical and Rescue

1
Medikit (TL8)
C/5
1000
2
Antirad drugs
C/2
1000
3
2x Spray-on Bandage + clotting aid drugs
C/2
300
4
Field surgery kit + instruction book
C/50
1000
5
Imp. Purification tabs x 100
C+P
150
6
Water Distillation kit, 1 month use
(C+P)/4
100
7
Rescue Toolkit
C/10
2000
8
Laser cutting gear and portable airlock
C/20
5000
9
Medikit (TL 10) + Trauma Pack
C/5
3000
10
Emergency Radiation Applicator
C
250
11
Solar Vaporator
(C+P)/4
1250
12
Five dose pack of Fast Drug
C
1000

What Looked Like a Good Idea at the Time, Was Left Unattended at the Starport, or Was Left Behind By Previous Captain

1
Marine Cutlass
C
100
2
Electric Stun Pistol (Taser)
C/2
300
3
Handheld Geiger Counter
C/2
250
4
Oxy-Acetylene Cutting Torch
C/2
500
5
Big box of 50 rolls of duct tape and/or wonderglue
C/5
250
6
Squirrel Suit
C/2
400
7
Spare manual Iris Valve opener
C/5
2000
8
Advanced Climbing Kit
C/2
500
9
Cold Light Lantern
C
20
10
Pressurised Survival Raft with inflater and paddles
C/5
500
11
Motion sensor (in a box marked 'Ppen in case of Aliens)
C/2
1000
12
Biohazard Alarm
C/2
1000



Does it work?

I imagine stocktaking the Ship's Locker to be one of those dull as ditchwater jobs that gets continually put off, and is given to the most junior and/or least liked crewman. We will assume it gets done with routine maintenance. Roll 2d6 per item when used and on a 12+ it is broken, out of date, batteries are flat etc, +1 per month maintenance has been skimped or skipped.  

2 comments:

  1. Before you try to fix a problem that may not even exist. Consider the Cost scale for Spacecraft 1Mcr can pretty much buy one of every reasonable tool in existence. The ships locker is an abstract way to deal with ship repairs, Equipment etc. Do I think a Fusion Cannon is in the ships locker probably not.. Would it include emergency vac suits for the entire crew. absolutely. It should include every "reasonable" piece of equipment that the players will need on a day to day basis and other parts depending on the ships mission. Beyond that that probably should be considered something the players need to purchase.

    so from your list of things that would be automatically included.

    Weaponry probably the first 5 Beyond that is player equipment. Things that are improvised weapons that are also pretty standard tools would most likely be there.


    Clothing and Vac Equipment Everything for everyone is there.
    Medical probably most of it some of it should already be players equipment. ie a doctor will own his own surgery equipment, as do marines have their field dressing kits. Anything that has to deal with radiation should be there from the right protection to medication. Considering Your flying around with a big fusion reaction on your back.

    Your misc gear.
    3,4,5,7,9,10,12 Questionable 2,8

    alot of what is missing is already players gear. ie if you have Vac-suit you have a vac-suit, if your an engineer you have most of the tools, cutters, ect

    The ships itself would contain enough spare parts for almost anything but critical damage as long as it has been keeping up its maintenance account. if you have a gun skill generally you should also have that gun.

    I personally have no intentions of abusing it just using it for generic



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  2. The point of this is to be workable and above all fun. Games go best in my experience with limited resources to enable player creativity to shine, and a modicum of randomness to keep everyone on their toes.

    Space wrecked on a distant world? Ships locker has some knives, insufficient tents for all the crew and passengers, too much cold weather clothing when you got stuck in a desert, and the only survival expert is in the process of karking it because the owners were too tight to pay for antirads, much more fun and challenging than just to say, 'Oh we carry what's 'reasonable'.

    What is reasonable differs widely. Should it always include emergency vacc suits for the whole crew? Yup say the Unions, buy your own say the bosses, pot luck whether there is one there when you go to look. (Unless the players use option 1 and say 'we want emergency vacc suits dammit, here's the dosh!') Maybe your campaign has a big nanny state that says no one flys without them, mine has none.

    Forethought in resourcing is a player skill, a bit of player agency you don't want to take away. Being the guy who plays the medic who does happen to have a field surgery kit when a comrade gets his leg mauled by a spacebear you are a minor star of the session, being the lacksadaisical so-called medic who is forced to rummage through the ships locker hoping to find some proper scalpels, finds penknives (with widget for taking stones out a horses hoof!) and a low tech cutting torch and improvises... bigger star of the session, but not in quite the same way.

    GM saying oh, sure you have a surgery kit - no chance for the player to shine, potentially fun and dramatic situation becomes instantly mundane, players drop into comas, GM dislocates jaw through yawning, universe implodes under sheer weight of mundanity...

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