Motivations

Posted in Rules, Traveller with tags , , , on February 18, 2024 by Anders Backman

rowdy dark Mos Eisley starport bar, Moebius style, volumetric light, beautiful ladies --v 4

Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.
Niccolò Machiavelli

This system is here to help the referee in playing NPCs with different drives and personalities and to regulate how that will affect interacting. This system also help by forcing the referee away from cliches such as the 100% bribeable customs inspectors, the always fearless guards etc, try to accept the results as rolled except when the story need a particular personality.

There are eight different motivations Power, Duty, Wealth, Knowledge, Social, Antisocial, Action and Safety. Each motivation will have a description and then some notes for the referee on how to play them, giving of hints on their motivation can be great fun as the improvised theater aspect of role playing will then merge with the mechanics. “He’s always talking about what everything cost and how much he earns, maybe we should try to bribe him” meaning the players noted that the referee played him talking about prices and wealth indicating he has Wealth as motivation and is thus easier to bribe.

Power

The person is interested in power itself and control over others, the opposite of Duty. This power does not have to be political, it can be power over a company, family, crime syndicate, biker club, military etc. They find rational discussions hard and rarely change their view.

They use the words ”me” and ”I” a lot and makes sure everybody knows their name, they tend to interrupt others and want their plan or idea the one to be used.

Use Influence or Grovel as approach to to improve their reaction, avoid Reason as approach, one could say that Power motivated are always unreasonable.

Duty

The person has sworn to uphold his duty at all time, even if
the risk of getting caught is minimal. Duty can be towards the family, company, nation, army, faith or his sports team etc. They like to go by the book, follow rules and doctrines and dislike common sense or compromises.

They tend to have everything organized and neat, they speak of ”we” and ”us” of the organization and rarely have a sense of humor.

The only approach that work well with Duty is Pull rank but then you need to outrank in the organization they consider themselves dutybound to. Bribery is a particularly bad approach for those with Duty.

Wealth

Interested in getting rich and amassing expensive things, they are also likely to haggle for a better price whenever they can.They like if you are impressed by their things and how expensive they are, have a hard time understanding that things can have more value than money such as life, love, liberty.

Wealth persons always tell you how much they make and what everything costs, they always argue for a better price.

The best approach is Bribe of course but there are no bad approaches really.

Knowledge

Knowledge people are really into something, often science but it could be anything really; flying a ship, the limits of their body’s performance, model railroading etc. They are good at constructive criticism if you know their subject.

They always talk about  their interest and have a hard time grasping that others may not share their enthusiasm.

Approach them with Reason and avoid Grovel at all cost.

Social

Interested in relations, status, fame and worry about what others think of them. They like to gossip about celebrities, relatives and the like and talk a lot about their family and friends. They are generally easy to befriend, more so than any other motivation.

They ask how your partner, kids, family are and they know all their names. They also tend to gossip about celebrities and famous people.

Approach them with Influence or Grovel but there isn’t really any bad approaches.

Antisocial

Strongly relate to their own group and dislike or even hate
everyone else. Tend to think the opposite of the general consensus, often playing the devils advocate just for fun, obstinate. They also have a tendency towards fringe theories. They are generally hard to befriend, less friendly than any other motivation.

They badmouth others all the time and come up with conspiracy theories about everything. Hostile to new acquaintances, hard to befriend.

There are no particularly good approaches, avoid Grovel, you may only use Influence if the real SOC is equal.

Action

Likes physical hardship and danger. Are uninterested in careful planning, wants to go ahead and just do it. Have a hard time waiting, standing still or sitting for a long time. They love to compete at everything and often enjoy gambling.

They always have some wound or scrape they are healing from and like to talk about dangerous situations they have experienced, often in a humorous tone.

Bluff is a good approach as they tend to not think things through, avoid threatening them as their own safety is less important to them.

Safety

They fear strenuous activities, risk of damage or disease. Always wear safety belt, helmet, body armor, have a rescue-ball nearby etc. They have a hard time making a decisions, wants to got through every step again. Dislike competitions and gambling, are often religious in one way or another.

Always talk about how everything is getting worse. They often talk about various ailments they suffer, they are boring to be around.

Threaten is a good approach as they fear pain and danger more than others do. Avoid Bluff as these tend to think things through and carefully examine what you say.

Traveller motivations

Primary and secondary motivations

Each NPC will have two motivations, primary and secondary motivations. If both motivations are the same the NPC should be played as extreme in some way, possibly mad or having an addiction associated with the motivation. If the motivations are different they may conflict in certain situations, especially with pairs like Power and Duty ,Wealth and Knowledge, Social and Antisocial, Action and Safety, the primary motivation will mostly prevail but sometimes the secondary win through, play these as complicated neurotic characters.

Default motivations

Each Traveller race have two default motivations that are used when default 1 and default 2 show up on the random motivations table and also are the ones to use if the referee don’t have time to generate particulars.

  • Solomani or Vilani human Wealth Social
  • Zhodani human Duty Social
  • Vargr (can’t have Duty) Power Action
  • Aslan male (can’t have Wealth) Duty Action
  • Aslan female Wealth Duty
  • Kkree Duty Power
  • Hiver Knowledge Duty

Some examples of motivations

I’ll give you some examples of famous characters, real or fictitious, and my reasoning for why I gave them the motivations I did. You may not agree with me on my assessments but I still feel they may help you understand how motivations work.

Malcolm Reynolds

Malcolm Reynolds – Action, Antisocial

Malcolm Reynolds is a man of action. He dislikes being too cautious and rarely things his actions through. He is also unfazed by threats, including deadly ones.

Mal wants to be the outcast, the rebellious, the devils advocate and always in opposition. In the Serenity movie his stubbornness almost make his crew fall apart. When the operative meet Mal at the companion retreat he neatly sums up his Antisocial motivation “I offer money you play the man of honor and take umbrage, I ask you to do what is right and you play the brigand…”

Inara Serra

Inara Serra – Duty, Social

Friendship and being liked by others is very important to Inara, especially the crew of Serenity and of course in particular captain Malcolm Reynolds whom she loves despite his rude ways and complete inability to express his feelings for her.

Inara is trained as a companion since the age of 12, and she takes great pride in being a member of this guild. Any insults towards the guild is treated as an insult to her and it is quite clear that she would choose the guild of companions over the Serenity if having to make a choice. In fact, in the film Inara has left Serenity as their shenanigans interfered too much with her work, and Malcolm never ever manning up to tell her what he feels probably didn’t help.

Zoe Washburn

Zoe Washburne – Social, Duty

Zoe likes the crew of the Serenity, she loves her husband too, she also have a very strong feeling of duty towards the brown coats of her war days in general and Malcolm Reynolds in particular, her superior during the war one of the few that survived it.

Hoban Washburn

Hoban “Wash” Washburne – Duty, Safety

Wash loves his wife and would do anything for her, Zoe is the boss here, simple as that. Aside from this Wash is the voice of reason in the crew, always arguing for a non violent or less dangerous way of solving things. Eventually he’ll agree to go along only because Zoe agreed to the plan.

Jayne Cobb

Jayne Cobb – Action, Wealth

Well, Jayne love his guns, and knives, and grenades, don’t forget his grenades. He never thinks things through and tend to act in the moment. He also seems to like money a lot, probably to buy some more guns. Here is a revealing discussion between Mal and Jayne:

Mal “Why didn’t you turn on me?”
Jayne “Money wasn’t good enough.”
Mal “What happens when it is?”
Jayne “Well, that will be an interesting day.”.

Kaylee Frye

Kaylee Frye – Social, Knowledge

Kaylee loves flying machines and their engines, being a ships engineer is what she has dreamt about since she was small. But, she loves and cares for the crew of the Serenity even more and is also quite sensitive to what others think of her, especially the upper classes.

Approaches

How to approach the Serenity crew then

Malcolm Reynolds – Action, Antisocial Being a man of action the best way of having Mal do your bidding is to bluff him. He rarely thinks a plan through and likes to go ahead right away. Avoid trying to impress him with your social status and don’t grovel either, he just hates these approaches being antisocial.

Inara Serra – Duty, Social Inara’s sworn duty is towards being a companion. If you are a higher ranking member of the sisterhood you can pull rank to make her do your bidding, if not your best bet would be use higher social class to influence her.

Zoe Washburne – Social, Duty

Two examples of Power as motivation

As none of the Serenity crew had Power as motivations I thought I should give you two very different persons who both had Power as prime motivation, Steve Jobs and Adolf Hitler. Yes, these two people are very different in almost every way but showcasing these two as examples is to teach the referee that motivations contain no judgement, no good vs evil or anything like that, they are merely there to guide the referee in what makes them tick.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs – Power, Knowledge

Steve was a control freak if ever there was one. Every little detail had to be to his spec or you were out. He was however not interested in power for its own sake but to make his vision real, to make the next coolest thing, thinking beyond the box and not bothering with the bottom line. He famously refused a salary when coming back to Apple, he was forced to have one, $1 a year in order to be allowed a parking space supposedly, so he didn’t create iPhones to get rich (he did get fabulously rich though, as the board of directors poured rewards on him for getting shareholders rich).

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler – Power, Antisocial

Adolf Hitler was obsessed with power and control, to the detriment of the war effort some argue, as Hitler clearly wasn’t very good at warfare. Hitler was very charismatic and many in the third reich, and abroad, adored him, yet he didn’t have many actual true friends. His inner circle was constantly jockeying for the position of favorite, a situation that suited Hitler well.

Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.
Nikolai Tesla

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Floater thrust

Posted in Intercept, Science fiction, Traveller, Vector movement on October 10, 2021 by Mr Backman

Belly landers and tail landers

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Floater

Most smaller ships in Traveller are of the belly lander variety which like the term indicate land and take-off on their belly, all of this is accomplished by the floater ability of all grav thrust vehicles great and small. When ships get into space however, the depictions of Traveller ships seem to forget about this gravity negating ability but not here in Intercept.

Belly landers should have their belly towards the planet to negate gravity while tail landers should have their tail towards the planet to negate gravity. Because Intercept is a 2D game with ships seen from their top (or bottom if rolled) we decide that belly landers simply can negate gravity to their left or right, the important thing here is that their floater thrust is 90 degrees of their thrust axis while the tail landers have floater and regular thrust co-axial.

Legal floater directions

Movement phase

Let’s go through a movement phase in Intercept to see if and when we can apply floater thrust. We’ll use a belly lander for the example but a tail lander works similarly except what facing it need to have to perform floater thrust. Note that a ship that uses floater is considered thrusting so there is no +2 DM for attacking or being attacked and the ships Signatures will be for a thrusting ship.

Floater drift after gravity

We will use compass directions in this example, we call the up direction north, down is called south, to right is east and left is west. We strongly suggest you use the same conventions when you play Intercept as left and right can be confusing when two players sit opposite each other each with their own map.

The ship is drifting 3 squares up or north and it was facing north in the last turn. Repeat the last move and mark with a thin cross, then apply gravity based on the position of the last turn and mark with a cross. This is the ships Drift and if the ship doesn’t use any thrust, regular or floater, this is where it will end up for the turn.

Now the pilot Pilot should decide if he wants to and is able to  use Floater to negate the gravity pull. Floaters can only negate gravity so it can only move the drift marker back to the light pre-gravity cross. Whether the ship can do it or not depend on the facing from the last turn.

Floater belly lander float directions

A belly-lander facing north can negate gravity to east or west, gravity was pulling to the east so the floater can only thrust back to west making the course a straight line again. So there, the Drift and gravity phase of movement is over, the ship could now turn and thrust (and also aerobrake if adjacent to the planet). The captain decides to neither turn nor thrust here, but that doesn’t mean that it is drifting, as previously stated using floater is considered thrust.

Floater drift after gravity2

 In this turn the ship is still facing north and still has a vector of 3 squares north. The ships last turn was in the north-west gravity arc which will pull the drift one square south-east as shown. Let’s see if the pilot can use his floater again this turn.

Floater belly lander float directions2

No, the gravity pull of south-east cannot be negated by any the floater thrust arrows, the ship should have turned to face north-east in the last turn if it wanted to use floater this turn. We mark the ship with a ring as it is actually drifting this turn. 

Floater drift after gravity3

Using floater thrust is rarely worth the effort but can be used in certain situations, especially for ships such as the subsidized merchants. Subsidized merchants, the lower left part of the topmost image, uses reaction-mass guzzling fusion thrusters for thrust i space, in atmosphere the fusion rocket switches to air breathing with a considerably lower fuel use. Subsidized merchants have Floater grav drives that can only negate gravity but that can be used to reduce fuel consumption from thrust at the cost of longer times to jump. Thrust away from the planet (costing no fuel if the planet has an atmosphere thanks to air breathing) and then turning to keep the side towards the planet (the belly in reality). Then they’ll simply Drift away from the planet gliding gracefully out to the jump point.

Floater, grav and impulse drives

Floater thrusters is the first gravity technology and it appear at Tech Level 10. They can only negate gravity and will work exactly as if it was a rocket for those inside the vehicle. The subsidized merchant is a prime example but there are also some grav vehicles with Floater to negate gravity and some other propulsion means such as propellers, ducted fans or jet engines. Floaters are rated in in how much mass they can negate gravity of, a 10 ton Floater on a ship massing 10 ton or less will negate 100% gravity regardless of gravity strength (this help the referee a tremendously as she no longer need to design vehicles for each strength of gravity).

Grav thrusters appears at Tech level 11 and create thrust proportional to gravity. These are you regular sci-fi grav vehicles. They can reach orbit and beyond but get more and more sluggish as gravity diminish the farther out they gp. Also note that regular grav vehicles rarely have the instrumentation to actually match something in orbit, see this post on reaching orbit in an air/raft. Grav thrusters have have built in Floaters too.

Impulse drives finally appear at TL 12 and above and can create thrust regardless of local gravity. They are the kind of drives most Traveller ships use, except for the Subsidized merchant mentioned above and some Vargr ships which uses the high thrust ratings of fusion drives to make high G corsairs with limited endurance.

So, now you know how ships and vehicles of scifi manage to hang in midair, just like bricks don’t. That is all folks, until next time…

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Synthetic Intelligence playing Intercept

Posted in Computer games, Intercept, Rules with tags , on October 6, 2021 by Mr Backman

Rumor has it that SI, a Synthetic Intelligence from the Ascent group will be playing Intercept. This has gotten the investors and backers of the game anxious to get get the latest and greatest version online ahead of schedule.

Fear not dear players, this is mostly minor tweaks and don’t worry; the Floater and large scale skimming updates promised in the last post are still on schedule, over and out.

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Gas giant skimming

Posted in Intercept, Rules, Traveller, Vector movement with tags , , on September 29, 2021 by Mr Backman

Dangers of skimming they say, bah!

Sure, there are dangers, plenty of ’em too. Flying inside a gas giant’s vast gravity field isn’t dangerous per se, you can orbit them forever with no danger of being sucked in, the problem is that in order to skim hydrogen we must dip into the atmosphere and have it slow us down. Speed is what keep us from falling into the gas giant and we are intentionally slowing down while being as close to its crushing atmosphere as possible.

So, we dip in as deep as we dare and let the atmosphere slow us while our scoops gulp in as much gas as possible. Then we thrust away building up speed again to avoid the huge planets cold embrace. Some make one high speed approach and hard braking, others make a series of gentler dips instead, spreading out the danger. System Defense Boats and other daredevils sometimes even slow their ships down to zero deep within the atmosphere, hovering using their grav floaters and slowly scooping gas. No matter how you go about it the risks are real and minor damage to the hull is common.

As if the skimming itself wasn’t hard enough, there is also the real risk of pirate scum picking on us when we are the most vulnerable, they are rare but they do exist.

So there should be no surprise when I tell you that we do not skim that often. The time to enter and exit the huge gravity wells of gas giants offset the cost of getting fuel for free, time is money you see, especially as you must also pay for any hull damage inflicted by the skim.

So there you go, the dangers of skimming are real but not what you think!

Gas giant maps

Gas giants are, as is evident by their very moniker, huge. They are so large so they need special maps when used where the planet take up a large chunk of the map and their gravity field cover the rest of the map. Map sheets for small and large gas giants are available in the InterceptBundle here.

There is the possibility to use the Large scale rules on pages 34-35 and use the large planet maps for large gas giants and small planet maps for the small gas giants. This won’t be covered here though, just make sure you take the scale changes into account as outlined by the rules there.

Approach

Let us say we ha a streamlined ship with 1G of thrust, a Size of 8 (100 dTon) and a Pilot skill of 2, the computer is a model 1 giving us just 1D6 dice pool. The Pilot defaults table will give us 3(Miss) for 3 steps of turning every turn and the task result will be treated as a Miss. We will use the Pilot default on our approach flight but for the aerobrake turn we’ll dare an actual Pilot task roll trying to get a better result as the damage roll depends heavily on our Pilot task result.

The ship will fly towards the gas giant ass first, brake-thrusting to keep the speed from becoming too large from gravity – maximum safe speed/drag is 4/2 for airframes and 2/1 for streamlined. Keep those numbers in mind as you approach the gas giant. Try to hit the atmosphere edge on rather than head on when entering the voluntary aerobrake squares (the light grey area bordering the planet), also make sure that your ship face in the direction it will be going to head in the next turn.

The ship in the picture is thrusting to negate gravity (each x show where it would be if it drifted that turn). In the last turn it drifted and let gravity pull it into the voluntary aerobrake zone and speed it up to a speed of 4 (4.5rounded down). The circle around the ship show that it is drifting

The next turn we’ll go through aerobrake skimming step-by-step so please pay attention. This is a good moment to tell your crew over the intercom to buckle up, things can get bumpy.

Aerobrake skimming

Aerobrake steps

We’ll follow the steps from page 25 of the rulebook in some detail here, don’t worry though as it is much easier in practice. Print out a mapsheet and doodle away.

Decide drag and determine Pilot task result

Decide drag, then roll Pilot or use Pilot default to determine the level of success and the amount of turning available this crucial turn. Rolling the Pilot task will give you a better result on the average but with the Pilot default table you know what you get. We are moving at a speed of 4 and have decided to use 2 drag to stay in the 5-6 column of the Aerobrake DAM table, more on that later.

After deciding drag we will determine our Pilot task result. Pilot default has given us 3(Miss) for all of the turns of our approach but we will try to roll the Pilot task for the aerobrake hoping to get at least a Fair result, aerobrake damage depend heavily on the Pilot task result and a Miss is just not good enough we think. Rolling may give us worse than Miss of course but we bet that fortune smiles upon us. The ship is Size 8 and our Pilot skill is 2 with 1D6 dice pool so we roll 3D6 and pick the two highest and add 2.

Pilot task is rolled against the ships Size of 8 so we roll 1, 3 and 3 and use the two 3s for a die roll of 6 with 2 added, 8 – we just barely managed to roll a Fair result! This will give us 4 steps of turning but more importantly our damage roll will be based on a Fair result instead of a Miss, more on that later.

Drift and gravity (including Floater)

Gravity will take us back into the voluntary aerobrake zone again and our speed is still 4. Let’s zoon in a bit so we can see clearer.

Turn and thrust (or Initial Split-movement)

Typically you’ll only turn here, to face in your drift direction but nothing stops you from thrusting too, you may even do the first half of Split-movement here, go crazy but don’t forget that if you hit the planet you are dead. Our facing and vector are actually perfect so we’ll leave the ship as is here.

Pop-in and Forced facing

Now the ship pop in its surface fixtures which means that Visual, IR and Radar cannot Scan later in the turn, you do get to keep your Tracked targets and any launched missiles. We’ll pop in and hope that no coward pirate sneak up on us, for new targets we’ll be completely blind this turn.

Our ship is facing in the direction of our vector so there will be no Forced facing. Try to avoid this forced facing adjustment as it will increase the risk of damage quite a lot (your ships hull will be treated as one degree worse if adjusted here.

Aerobrake (first drag and then maneuver)

We decided on a drag of 2 two so let’s do them. We will simply move the drift two squares, one at a time. In our case there are no choices but sometimes there will be two options (zag-zig or zig-zag) and the Pilot can decide which one that is preferable as long as each step moves the drift closer (and thus reducing speed).

The ship has no wings and we didn’t adjust facing so there is no Maneuver to do. If we had some maneuver to use it would still be limited by the drag used (in this case 2), so maneuver could move the drift after aerobrake up to 2 in any direction. We have zero maneuver but if not we could maneuver to any square that wasn’t greyed out in the picture. Note that brake Gs are determined by counting the squares from our position before the aerobrake to the position after drag and maneuver.

Adjust facing

Our ship is still facing in the direction of our vector so no final facing adjustment is needed, this is mostly happening when a ship also uses Maneuver. This final adjustment of facing does not affect damage, it simply turns the ship to face the direction of travel.

Roll aerobrake damage

Aerobrake damage

We came in with a speed of 4 and our aerobrake took us 2 squares from that so our brake is 2. We’ll use the 5-6 column as 4 + 2 = 6. Our ship was Streamlined so our aerobrake DAM is 3. Now it’s time to roll the actual damage.

Aerobrake damage roll

Our Pilot task roll was Fair from the Decide drag and Pilot task step and the table tell us a Fair result will be rolled using 2D6 and picking the lowest and that the location of any damage is Hull.

We roll a 2 and a 5 and use the lowest one so 2 it is. Add 2 to the 3 we got from the aerobrake DAM table, 5 on the damage table is (Scratch), one point shy of Light damage. Some scorched paint and scratches is all we got from the aerobrake, let’s get out of here!

Skimming fuel

  • Skimming will net speed x brake x 5% of its hull per 15 min
  • Hovering will net 1.25% of its hull volume per 15 min

The ship did an aerobrake of  speed 4 and drag 2 which give us 4 x 2 x 5% = 40% of the ships hull volume skimmed. This is probably far more than the actual tankage we got so we leave the gas giant with full tanks and some scratches on the hull for our efforts.

Hover skimming

Hover skimming using Floater will be dealt with in a future post, stay tuned!

Large scale maps

Skimming can also be done using the 100 000 km per square, 1 hour per turn scale. In this scale large gas giants use the large planet maps and small gas giants use small planet maps. This will also be dealt with in a future post so stay tuned for that too!

So, to finish off my diatribe about the dangers of skimming by saying that the subs, the subsidized merchant crews are the bravest and here’s why:
A fully loaded sub has enough fuel for 4 hours of continuous 1G thrust! You normally use less than half of that to get to the jump point, which means that you have a bit more than half to maneuver towards the gas giant. What is even worse is that when fully loaded a sub’s Floater is only capable of negating about 60% of gravity, yeah, that is why they have those wings; to assist in takeoff when the Floater alone cannot do the job, and these guys sure need to turn every dime as their sponsors take half of what they earn.

I dare you to find a single subs skipper that has ever skimmed a gas giant fully loaded!

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