Best way to represent Dropship ownership

[Tai Dai Cultist]

Something I was surprised to find was the apparent lack of any accomodation of the ATOW rules to 'have' a vehicle larger than an ASF.

On one hand, I can appreciate the need for a GM to enforce a cost respective to the value gained in having one's own spacecraft.. on the other it seems odd that other things that ALSO require that consideration are statted out (for example, rank trait.  Totally not worth its points to play the one senior sergeant in a campaign populated mostly by civilians..)

So, 'generally speaking', in the most average ATOW campaign imaginable... what would be an appropriate way to pay for having a ride to and from the jump points on tap?

I'm thinking the Property trait would be the most appropriate, but it makes for awkward application.  In practical terms, the trait simply gives you extra income (over and above the Extra Income trait) and if you use liens or negative levels in Extra Income (if you don't outright OWN the dropship) you near approaching a wash on the exercise.. but coming out with a dropship in the process.

Better ideas?

[soshi]

save up and buy one?

[Labyr]

Even the lowly leopard costs about 170 million. For most units that would be a lot of saving.

But if you can get one, you can rake in the credits! Every two jumps will get you the drop ships mission cost (around 50K-150K). So if your unit has a mission 10 jumps away and 10 jumps back your unit pulls in an additional 1.5 million if you get payed 100% for transport. It is going to be hard to balance that with normal AToW rules.

I think the bigger issue is that a dropship isn't really a vehicle a player can have fun with. You can send a Battlemech or an Aerospace fighter into battle, and if you lose it's unfortunate but the unit can go on. Lose the unit's dropship, especially in transit and the unit and the game are probably over. I'd really want the player with the Dropship to also have another vehicle so they get to put something fun down on the map when a battle starts.

So with all that in mind my recommendations are, fluff away most of the potential profit with dropship, make dropship ownership cheap in chargen but have it come with strings attached. On the money end say your Dropship has a loan on it they you pay back while running missions. You can leave it abstract or set a specific figure so that after a while your character may actually own the Dropship outright. As for cost in chargen, I'd keep it low, probably no more than 4 points, but with a lot of strings attached. Like a character has to have a bunch of skills at high level, not just Pilot/Dropship but skills dealing with administration, leadership and negotiation. They would also get extra responsibility and dependents traits without the rebate to represent the responsibility of looking over his/her crew.

[guardiandashi]

a typical combination I could see is a bunch of points in vehicle.
some property and or rank/ to represent ownership of the vessile but I would almost always include dependants (to represent crew) and or negative income /loan if you don't own it outright

[Acolyte]

Property trait combined with the landholding administration rules in AToW Companion. Find the actual budget (usually done by multiplying the income by 20) and use that money to buy the DS. If you need more money, get a loan to cover the rest, if you have more, either cash it out or take the remaining as a lower property trait to reflect a "home base" for the DropShip.

ie. a property of 8 gives you 800,000 c-bills per year. Times by 20 gives 16,000,000 as your budget. The rest is loans, but most DropShip owners will have debt. If you decided that you wanted a home base, you could use 7 TP for the down payment of the DS (works out to 8,000,000) and keep a TP of 1 (small shop or business) as your warehouse.

Extra Income and Property income can be used to offset the loan payments and wealth can be used as a further down payment.

   - Shane

[BirdofPrey]

This discussion came up a couple of years ago, I'll see if I can find it.

Anyways, I just figured use the property trait for ownership of large craft (and space stations) and rank or administration to represent command of the dropship.  THe required TP would be based on the size of the ship.

[Tai Dai Cultist]

I like some form of incorporating the Property trait as 'fluffing' the property as being a Dropship.  Requiring Rank is nice for game balancing how heavily mechwarriors and ASF pilots are influenced to spend on the Vehicle/Owns Vehicle trait.  But the dropship-owning PC may or may not actually be part of the ship's crew. 

"Hey don't look at me to fly the ship, Daddy always had his kilted yachtsmen to helm this thing.."  - young noble PC with more adventurism than space-smarts

Surely the GM can handle a party acquiring a dropship through course of play.

I'm looking for a way to fairly 'pay' for a dropship in the course of character creation.  How many of the 5000 starting XP should you have to reserve for the right to have a dropship.   As mentioned there are ways to represent a mortgage on the vessel, but the property trait provides way more money than the liens require.  Or if you lower the Property's income to low levels, you're essentially getting a dropship for free, XP cost-wise.

[Acolyte]

Are you looking for them to own it outright?

  - Shane

[Tai Dai Cultist]

'Have' it in the same sense a mechwarrior or ASF typically 'has' their respective vehicles.  Not necessarily technically owning it personally, but having control of it.  A successful corporate exec might have a 'company jet' in the same way a noble scion might have the 'keys to daddy's car'.  Owns Vehicle is already treated under the rules and doesn't need to be seperately addressed for a potential dropship 'owner', I wouldn't think.

[Acolyte]

OK, how about some form of the vehicle trait with an added negative Extra Income trait for balance. So each point gives you X tons of DS and an equivalent money owed, reflecting the profits that they are expected to achieve with the vessel or the amount owed to the banks.

   - Shane

[BirdofPrey]

I like some form of incorporating the Property trait as 'fluffing' the property as being a Dropship.  Requiring Rank is nice for game balancing how heavily mechwarriors and ASF pilots are influenced to spend on the Vehicle/Owns Vehicle trait.  But the dropship-owning PC may or may not actually be part of the ship's crew. 

"Hey don't look at me to fly the ship, Daddy always had his kilted yachtsmen to helm this thing.."  - young noble PC with more adventurism than space-smarts

Surely the GM can handle a party acquiring a dropship through course of play.

I'm looking for a way to fairly 'pay' for a dropship in the course of character creation.  How many of the 5000 starting XP should you have to reserve for the right to have a dropship.   As mentioned there are ways to represent a mortgage on the vessel, but the property trait provides way more money than the liens require.  Or if you lower the Property's income to low levels, you're essentially getting a dropship for free, XP cost-wise.

Well Property was to own the ship while rank is the requirement to command the ship.  They are totally separate since the owner and the operator may be different people, though it does have the problem that someone who owns AND commands a mule or an invader aren't going to have much XP left over, but then I also expect they will not be fresh out of flight school either, so if you allow for aging related XP you may be looking at an older, 7000 XP character.  You could possibly waive the rank requirement for the owner.

Unfortunately, I can;t find the discussion, it must have been on the old forums.  I will see if I can recreate the table I had made.

[idea weenie]

If you want to go with having a loan to pay off for the Dropship, the Traveler rules might work.  Essentially, you take the price of the ship, divide it by 240, and pay that amount every month for the next 40 years.  A smart player will take Property to allow them to make that payment without having to scrounge up the funds every month.

For example, the Property of 8 is 800,000 C-Bills per year.  The player wants to know the max cost Dropship they can buy.  The 800,000 is divided into monthly payments of ~66,667 C-Bills, and then multiplied by 240 to get 16 million C-Bills worth of Dropship.  Sighing, the player realizes they need more Property in order to afford even the smallest Dropship's payments.  Perhaps the other players would be willing to put startup XP into Property?  They'll need a total of 10 PCs, each with Property 8 to do so, and will still need to come up with another $10 million C-Bills before interest is calculated in.  Effectively, this will mean the ten of them together have to come up with monthly payments of 41,667 C-Bills (fairly easy to do).

This is in addition to all the maintenance needs of the Dropship, salaries of the crew, fuel/water/food purchases, buying a Jumphip slot so they can travel to another system, etc.  The fun part is that from sarna.net a Leopard only has a crew of 9.  Dropping the PCs down to 9 means the monthly payment rises to 108,334 C-Bills.  This is when you start getting things interesting.  Of course, now I am thinking of a Leopard owned by its crew, trying to make some money, anyhow, anywhere, trying to make it to the next big score to keep the bank off their back.  Named Serenity.

[Labyr]

If you wanted to go with property I think you'd need at least property 8-9. Remember, with property we don't need to know the actual sale price of the property, just the yearly income. If we assume a dropship can keep active roughly half the year it can pull in about 13 times its mission cost (52 weeks, 26 weeks paid, every two weeks in transit one payout). For a Leopard this translates to 780,000 per annum, pretty close to property 8. A Union dropship could be expected to pull in 1.95 million per annum, which is a little over property 9.

The rub is that you'd have to be a Count or a Marquis to be a dropship owner because of how property works. If you allowed a character to use rank instead they would be somewhere around a rear admiral/vice admiral. That's a bit high rank wise. It also means a character would have to sink 16-18 points into buying a dropship.

[BirdofPrey]

I figured for the purposes of spacecraft ownership, the title trait should be waived, since that rule generally represents control of a fiefdom which a ship does not generally qualify as (a space station is iffy in this regard).

[Tai Dai Cultist]

If you wanted to go with property I think you'd need at least property 8-9. Remember, with property we don't need to know the actual sale price of the property, just the yearly income. If we assume a dropship can keep active roughly half the year it can pull in about 13 times its mission cost (52 weeks, 26 weeks paid, every two weeks in transit one payout). For a Leopard this translates to 780,000 per annum, pretty close to property 8. A Union dropship could be expected to pull in 1.95 million per annum, which is a little over property 9.

That leads into the problem I mentioned earlier.. the Property trait gives you Extra Income... on steroids.  If you want to use the framework of regular loan payments being due, they better be HUGE or they're not much of a plot-compelling device as the property income is so massive.  The player would justifiably want to use Administration skill to find savings in his overhead, and possibly end up ending with huge wads of cash in savings dependent on the whim of the dice.

The alternative is to just ignore the gross profit - overhead = net profit approach, and award net profit only.  I mean, it's not like people with Mechs or Fighters have to worry about paying for upkeep... why should dropship operators be treated different?  This would require vastly lower Property Trait values, and in turn getting dropship access for quite a song in XP cost, however.

The approach I'm leaning towards is a new trait entirely, I'd imaginatively call it 'Dropship Operator'.  It allows you to apply any Vehicle ranks towards a dropship, which dovetails nicely with the option to apply Owns Vehicle, Custom Vehicle, and/or liens against the vessel.   The hook is to figure out what's a fair price for my new trait, as well as how much dropship each level of vehicle 'buys' you.

What do you guys think of:
Dropship Operator = 800xp cost
Vehicle = each rank allows up to 2,000 tons of military dropship, or 10,000 tons of civilian dropship.

[Acolyte]

I'd drop the Operator cost to around 300, other than that it looks good.

That leads into the problem I mentioned earlier.. the Property trait gives you Extra Income... on steroids.  If you want to use the framework of regular loan payments being due, they better be HUGE or they're not much of a plot-compelling device as the property income is so massive.  The player would justifiably want to use Administration skill to find savings in his overhead, and possibly end up ending with huge wads of cash in savings dependent on the whim of the dice.

The alternative is to just ignore the gross profit - overhead = net profit approach, and award net profit only.  I mean, it's not like people with Mechs or Fighters have to worry about paying for upkeep... why should dropship operators be treated different?  This would require vastly lower Property Trait values, and in turn getting dropship access for quite a song in XP cost, however.

The approach I'm leaning towards is a new trait entirely, I'd imaginatively call it 'Dropship Operator'.  It allows you to apply any Vehicle ranks towards a dropship, which dovetails nicely with the option to apply Owns Vehicle, Custom Vehicle, and/or liens against the vessel.   The hook is to figure out what's a fair price for my new trait, as well as how much dropship each level of vehicle 'buys' you.

What do you guys think of:
Dropship Operator = 800xp cost
Vehicle = each rank allows up to 2,000 tons of military dropship, or 10,000 tons of civilian dropship.

As an aside, the way that I proposed earlier was meant to use up the property trait in the purchase of the DS. You may need a property trait of 8 or 9, but any TP's that are used for the buying of the DS do not (in and of themselves) give you any income. For that, you've got to hire out the DS.

   - Shane

[BirdofPrey]

If you want to limit the property trait requirement but still keep a high XP cost, requite Vehicle 10+ AND Property.

[bytedruid]

Since a dropship is a massive investment (similar to a college grad looking to buy a mansion) it makes sense to me that these aren't detailed in character creation.  Either the players are part of a larger organization that owns the dropship, or they're lean and hungry and looking to upgrade as soon as possible. 

Unless you're running a high powered campaign from the beginning wouldn't be more fun for the players to figure out how to acquire a dropship through play?   The group I'm running takes great pride in their little Leopard cause they had to pry it out of the cold dead hands of the previous owners,  a mission that involved planning, sacrifice and not a little luck.  Now they are plotting to get a jumpship, which I can't imagine they'll be able to pull off soon.

Given the importance of a dropship, I'd require the character to have a property trait of at least +6 and a decent administration skill if they want to own a dropship at the end of character creation.

[Gray Jaguar]

I tend to just run pre-story game sessions to generate the necessary reason for the players to have a DropShip.  Granted, I have a tendency to also get them some extra XP by running them through their lifepath choices as small side scenes, flashbacks, or as ways to bring the characters together and get them some organically developed depth to the stale choices they made :D

[bytedruid]

Granted, I have a tendency to also get them some extra XP by running them through their lifepath choices as small side scenes, flashbacks, or as ways to bring the characters together and get them some organically developed depth to the stale choices they made

Not a bad idea.  Anything that gets the group to gel into a cohesive unit is waaaay more important than stats and rules.  The fact that they probably feel like they are getting a better than average deal (i.e. free dropship, extra XP) is good for moral as well.

I couldn't do it myself (goes against my curmudgeon gene) but hat tip nonetheless  8).

[Zinmar]

When I did up my character I had a huge number of points in vehicle and could have had a heavy aerospace fighter. That really didn't work out for the group demographic we had. I asked if I could make it a Dropshuttle instead and fortunately it was approved. The party we have has PAL and no mechs. So this option worked out great for us as it allows all of us to play. When we are on planet it is sitting in the garage being serviced while we adventure. The plus side is it can be used as a story hook or just a taxi that has no bearing on anything else. Overall I'm tickled with the arrangement.

[Mohammed As`Zaman Bey]

  A container ship today costs between 10 and 100 million dollars depending on the displacement and additions, such as cranes.
  The owner of such aa vessel is its commader and may overrule its captain. Operating/owning a dropship would be along similar lines.