Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Crew Tasks: What's My Motivation?

I just had a crazy cool House-Rule / Expansion idea for Five Parsecs From Home.

What if there were twice as many possible Crew Tasks on the list, but which ones any given Crew member was willing and capable of performing were determined by their Background, Motivation, and Class. It would inject a little more roleplay into the Task system.

  • He's motivated by Wealth, so he can Trade.  
  • This guy grew up on a Primitive or Regressed World, so he can Explore but he can't Repair Kit or Upgrade the Ship
  • If you're the Hacker class there's a special new Hack a Corp Mainframe action with a high-risk high-reward table otherwise something along the lines of Explore or Trade.  
  • K'Erin are always happy to Decoy.  

Etc.

  • You would probably want to break out Upgrade The Ship as a separate task
  • Maybe do the same with Invest In Advanced Training
  • The thing where you can look up new worlds in the Travel Step could be promoted to a Task as well: the Navigate A Route task. 
  • And then add another 3 or 5 other Tasks to the master list, some with unique charts or minigames.


Captains would always have one extra Task unlocked: Recruit, so you're never locked out of getting more crew unless the Captain is in the sickbay this turn.  You might need to give Captains access to Find A Patron as well, so that you have the ability to pull a good job to get you out of a slump.

But now you're limited turn-by-turn (and sometimes by sickbay status) to what Tasks you can actually do, and you might actually have a reason for hiring on 8 or more Crew: to unlock some Task that no one on your team can currently do.

With that in mind, we'd want a guideline where you can spend a story point when Recruiting to be able to specify one of Background, Motivation or Class.  I really wanted access to the exclusive "Organize A Protest" action, so I spent a Story Point to Recruit an Agitator. That sort of thing.

I think it would make character backstories and personalities matter a lot more. 

I've been sort of roleplaying this already, having my Wealth-motivated K'Erin character take the Trade action fairly often, even though his racial immunities make him slightly better at the Explore task. It would be neat if the rules supported this and expanded on the Task section.

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