Design Monologue 11: What to do, what to do

Like EPCOT center, there are many fascinating activities for your party to engage in, such as:

• Transport/Smuggling
• Piracy
• Bounty Hunting
• Ratting
• Retrieval
• Escort

Transport

The bread-and-butter of an independent captain's life, this one is based on the always-interesting idea of flying from point A to point B. The idea is, you find things (or people) that dearly need to get from one place to other, because of the great value discrepancy for said cargo between those two points.

This does lead to some very interesting scenarios. Those who haul cargo for profit find that a larger cargo hold equals larger profit. However, giant freighters, stuffed with valuable goods, are bigger pirate magnets than Jack Sparrow after he died the first time.

Human cargo, or "fares", can bring reliable pay for very little physical demand--i.e. you can shuttle them around in, well, a shuttle. Of course, if you have a giant freighter, you're probably looking for more than a handful of people. Human cargo also has this fun habit of always being much more interesting than they claim.

Of course, there's always the possibility of smuggling, typically in or out of the more civilized corners of the galaxy. Illegal goods (or persons) can bring all manner of trouble, often of the police or military variety, making the service that much more valuable.

Piracy

For those bored of the carebear lifestyle, there's always piracy. See a cargo hauler? Take his cargo. Or maybe his ship! Why not?

Well, for starters, this will get a bounty on your head the size of a comical horror movie tumor, and will have eager-beaver bounty hunters chomping at the bit to take you down. Of course, you then kill those people, take their ships, etc.

But not everybody has to be the good guy all the time. It's an option.

Bounty Hunting

This option typically wins you a lot of respect among the goody-goodies. Having little to no alternative, communities at the mercy of evil pirates, or just plain people who've been scorned, place bounties on those who need a good killing.

The typical method of collecting is to hand over the target, dead or alive, to some representative or other. It's considered good form to have the money available (or even put it in escrow with some powerful third-party, such as a large corporation) when the goods are delivered, for fear of angering the scary men who just killed your worst enemy. As a PC, it's fun to be in that position. Plus, you get to keep all the stuff you took off the guy.

The possibility of a bounty hunters' guild exists; it would certainly provide a convenient way to match bounty with hunter, and would reduce the likelihood of the many undesirable outcomes of a bounty, such as failure to pay, or failure to actually kill the mark.

Ratting

This is just bounty hunting without all that pesky "getting paid" business.

For the truly noble, bloodthirsty, or stupid, there is always the option of righteously opposing the unjust and uncouth of the galaxy. This may sound silly, but it's actually what the more medieval counterparts to the PCs have been putting up with for years. Why execute bounties for rich clients, when you can war with pirates to save a small, poor village?

This is also a slang term for any anti-piracy mission, whether a bounty, or just a general contract job that involves killing people who are mean.

Retrieval

Why do a one-way trip when you can do a two-way trip at the same cost?

Sometimes, people don't need things transported away so much as transported back. Really, this type of mission can be a lot of things. A bunch of colonists might be missing an errant sister ship filled with family members. A corporation might have lost some valuable cargo to pirates. Perhaps a wealthy client wants some precious item "liberated" from its current owner.

This missions can often be the most complicated. They are more likely to involve multiple types of action: travel, ship combat, and ground combat, both stealthy and action-hero-esque.

The advantage is that these missions often pay at a premium, as there is an element of urgency that other missions might not have.

Escort

Ah, the bane of video gamers' existence.

In reality, escort missions are lucrative profit for well-armed independent ship captains, and occasionally good ways to find a mark if you're a pirate in disguise.

Almost as often as such convoys are set upon by pirates, one or more of the contracted escorts will turn on the others in an attempt to betray their employer, and take the valuable cargo for his own. Could even be the PCs.

The game system should have guidelines for missions, where the difficulty corresponds at least loosely with the payout.

This will likely be determined by the dangers one will encounter on the mission. Higher-level PCs might be able to handle a small armada of pirates, but newbies, not so much. Of course, the mission can always change unexpectedly, but even such "random encounters" ought to be governed by some predictable logic.

Besides willingness, standing may also be a requirement to take on certain missions. An individual client would have to build up a certain amount of trust before sending a ship off to deliver precious cargo. Many such missions call for collateral, but collateral can't ensure the client that the PCs can actually handle the dangers involved.

Those PCs employed by a guild or corporation would have the benefit of that organization's standards behind them, for those who respect them. Bounty hunters might have a rank, which expresses their experience and relative ability, allowing discerning clients to restrict their missions to those of a certain rank, and also allowing the best bounty hunters to charge a premium.

Reputation equals better pay and more respect, so all independents would want to bolster theirs. This increases the pressure for such adventuresome folk to sign on with some sort of guild to back up their claims of ability and repute.

Such guilds might include

• The aforementioned bounty hunters' guild
• The Wayfarer's Guild, a general navigation and spaceflight guild, rating captains on their ability to transport goods and human cargo
• Pax Universalis, a charitable organization which recognizes the efforts of those who choose to oppose pirates and unjust rulers

Guilds, corporations, and individuals would award a crew a certain standing, represented by a number of some kind. Individual standing is somewhat easier to come by than corporate or guild, but generally doesn't result in as many opportunities for profit.