Playing – Mothership (Revisited)

So I’ve managed to get Mothership to a few different tables since 2023 and it’s had some love and some hate. First off, a big shout out to the pamphlet So You’ve Been Chump Dumped for being an excellent one shot intro to the game with the PCs having only their bare essentials and no way out without engaging the adventure. Like most of the pamphlet modules out there, it’s pretty bare bones but has enough to get you started and build up from.

There are some great things to the game if you enjoy those bare bone mechanics of roll against a skill and go. It encourages players to use the stat that best fits the challenge (Combat, Strength, Speed, and Intelligence) plus an appropriate skill, so letting off a quick burst of from an SMG before the xenomorph eats your face could be a Speed+Military Training roll instead of the usual Combat (fighting for your life) stat. The TOMBS horror model boils the horror-suspense plot to the essentials and the prompts for presenting clues would be an excellent reference for any investigation-mystery game. And it is hard not to love a character sheet that also leads the player step by step through character creation (there’s a great little version out there that makes this into a little double sided booklet that adds in the nine core mechanics and space for notes). The randomly rolled trinkets and patches add a surprising amount of flavour to your character, building a hook and character trait from something so simple as a ball cap reading “Front Towards Enemy” and a DNR tag on a chain. Finally, the stress mechanic beautifully captures the feel of the survival horror genre where failure and freaking out go hand in hand.

That being said, based on three different groups that I’ve played with, I’ve got a few things I’m looking to modify in future games.

Money = Improvement

This is a big gripe of mine in almost every cyberpunk game out there. Earn enough credits and you can buy your way to kicking butt through better weapons and gear. Even improvements to stats and saves is regulated through what quality of space station you can take some downtime relaxing on. Ditto for available medical treatments as per the core books.

Of course when a PC survives an invisible stalker that eats brains, they are inclined to get a flamethrower and whatever heavy ordinance they can afford, even if they can’t use one very effectively. The salary paid out is based on how many skills they have and at what tier, creating a further imbalance between the four character types (marines, teamsters, androids, and scientists) as each start with a slightly different number of skills. The earned salary as per the rules, covers a job even when 90% of it has been spent in cryosleep so that might be three to six months worth of pay coming in at once.

The primary check and balance is the expense of everything, including medical treatment. On the positive, the game designers do recognize that a character that’s been running a bunch of jobs too boring to play out will only save so much over the long run.

Improvement

After narrowly escaping a lamprey infested submarine, you’ve built up a bunch of stress but you know that whatever didn’t kill you still made you better. Once a job is done and you’ve paid your credits, you make a sanity save and based on the result and the quality of the space dock you’ve made it to, you might wind up with lots of points to spend on your stats and saves or end up still stressed out and no more skilled than you started.

This I do not like.

Players just pushed their PC to the edge and their experience points through stress might just slip through their fingers due to an unlucky roll. Even on a good roll, if they can’t afford the top quality spaceports with thousands of credits, they might only be able to convert 1-5 stress into improvements to their stats and saves. I’m not saying I disagree with a slow progression but the potential for no improvement except through spending their job salary rubs me wrong.

To gain more skills requires the character to take months at a time off from being active. There are some options presented including gaining skills after surviving a certain number of danagerous jobs a.k.a. ones interesting enough to be a scenario and not just a glorified space courrier. I’m working with this option currently as I do enjoy having character arcs and some improvements marking their progress.

I’m still experimenting with the stress converting into improvement rates, as I thinik that’s a cool mechanic that encourages players to risk higher stress for a greater payoff in the end, walking a dangerous balance akin to the new options for Blades in the Dark recently. I don’t want it to be strictly regulated by spending cash as a control valve, suggesting only the best paid can afford to improve but it feels like there ought to be some advantage for resting in a deluxe spaceport instead of a grime encrusted casino on a backwater military base on the frontier, like making the sanity roll at advantage.

In the end, I do want even the failed rolls to still allow some degree of progress. My temporary playtest solution is currently:

• convert up to 10 stress into improvements on a successful sanity roll (twice that on a critical)
• convert up to 2d6 stress on a failed sanity roll (only 2 on a critical failure)

To me, this seems like enough of a carrot to dangle and non punishing on a bad sanity roll. I’m considering maybe allowing players to save up those improvements to buy training in skills, like 10 for trained and 15 for skilled and 20 for expert, but would that be unreasonable amounts of advancement? Also, as written, spending those points directly into something like combat would automatically raise the score to be rolled under as well so there’s little incentive to pay for new skills with this house rule.

That which does not kill me …

Healing falls a bit into this as well. There’s been a few blogs and third party material released to suggest alternatives to how a marine that just carved open their leg to pull out a parasite might recover that wound without having to pay six grand for a week in a bacta tank. If it’s just health has been lost, some medical care and time will eventually bring that back. In a gaming environment like several editions of D&D and various video games that teaches us a supparating gut wound can be sealed up easily with a quick med pack or healing potion, it’s a major mental rebalance to accept that those wounds aren’t going to get healed overnight.

I believe I’ve mashed together enough house rules and blog posts to come up with something that seems appropriate. Basically over downtime, make a body save (modified by at advantage with successful medical treatment available or at disadvantage if just letting it heal on it’s own without proper rest) to regain that wound. Working in something about an old war injury reopening was proving too mechanical for an abstract thing like this and the majority of the Mothership rule sensibility skews to keeping it simple.

If that works out, I’ll start looking at something similar for dealing with those mental conditions caused by panic checks.

Finally …

I do still enjoy the game, though I have found players who don’t care for it. I do intend to keep running it as a quick one shot or even a short episodic filler when we don’t have a quorum for the regularly planned game. But I do also intend to keep fiddling with it until I can find some solutions for these things that I’m not content with, just like any other game.

What are some house rules you’ve brought to your tables to make a game more enjoyable playable?