Crunch Friday - Don't Split the Party?
Sparked off by a question asked on the Kickstarter page, this week Oliver gets into team dynamics.
Don’t Split the Party?
Just how much personal freedom can you have in EDRPG? Let’s say there are five players and a GM. Can a player just wander off by themselves and have their own adventure whilst the rest of the team head off in a different direction? What if one player is primarily a trader in their Lakon Type 6 transport, and everyone else has combat fighters like the Diamondback Scout or Viper Mk III? Can such a team ever work together, and when will the Lakon player get time to trade?
First of all let’s look at what the default expectation is in the game. There are many ways to play EDRPG, but the classic route is for a group of pilots to get together every so often to perform a mission which would be too difficult to take on alone. However each of these pilots has a life outside of the group. Lisa might be an explorer in her modified Adder, charting unknown worlds and stars for the monolithic Universal Cartographics corporation. Jack might be a bounty hunter in a fragile but manoeuvrable Eagle Mk II. Mel and Aiden might both be traders, one in a Hauler and the other in the roomy Cobra Mk III he stole from a smuggling gang. They will all work together to rescue that corporate executive’s son, but after the mission they will do a bit of independent work.
This extra-mission activity is covered by the Between Adventures rules. During this time traders will trade, bounty hunters will hunt bounties, asteroid miners will … well, you get the idea. How much money you make, if any, is governed by your relevant skills and the capabilities of your ship. Aiden will need a good Trading skill and lots of cargo racks if he wants to make lots of money trading. Explorers need a decent Navigation skill as well as plenty of high quality exploration equipment such as a good Frame Shift Drive, a decent fuel scoop, planetary scanners – and an SRV (Surface Reconnaissance Vehicle) wouldn’t go amiss.
Not all Between Adventures activities are created equal. For example bounty hunting doesn’t usually make more money than trading – although it can with a very skilled pilot. Likewise asteroid mining, with its highly specialised equipment, tends to have the edge on the kind of safe trading pilots do when they are Between Adventures. Why the difference in earnings?
It has to do with combat. Ships that are geared towards combat often have an easier time of it when the lasers start firing. Having a combat ship in a group mission is often a great advantage, and you can expect rueful glances from fellow players as your Vulture heavy fighter annihilates yet another pirate whilst their transports struggle to get into position. Between Adventures, of course, the reverse becomes true. The Vulture must gamble its life in dangerous criminal zones hunting pirates whilst her friends make more money safely shipping crop harvesters to peaceful agricultural worlds. Rich pilots often own multiple ships, one for combat and one for earning money in, although this division of wealth can sometimes mean you simply own two sub-par ships.
Some pilots attempt to have it all by owning generalist ships like the Cobra Mk III or Python. Neither of these ships is as deadly as their combat counterparts, but they perform decently and can net rich rewards in any Between Adventures activity they care to practice. Others will naturally specialise, happy to be weak in one area to excel in another. You will have to decide in your own mind what balance you want to strike.
So, to go back to the original question. Can players split up during the game? The answer is that whilst they can it will effectively divide the game between two groups of players, only one of whom can be active at a time. There is only one GM, so it takes a little patience on the players’ part if they want to split into tiny or individual groups. However even if you decide that you don’t want players wandering off from the group the Between Adventures rules at least guarantees that your character can pursue their individual career. After all – we all need some alone time every so often.
