I have a question about gigs.
So the player rolls for his gigs, gets a 10+ and gets paid on at least one of his gigs. Cool.
Next time he rolls poorly and we start play at the point things fell apart. We play to see what happens from here. As MC I sort of assume that since resolving this could take a little while, and I don’t want everyone else to be sitting around watching just one guy deal with a blown mission that everyone will be involved in some way to pull the character with the blown gig bacon out of the fire. Or maybe they were in on it the whole time.
So let’s say even though things with bad with it, they still managed to pull off whatever the gig was for. Who gets paid? The whole group that was involved or just the guy who had the gig move?
For example let’s say that the gig is ‘murder’ and while things go sideways, they still kill the person or people they are supposed to, so the murder happened. Seems like that’s a gig that should pay out, even if it didn’t go smoothly.
Maybe the guy who ordered the murder wants all evidence gone, including you.
Mostly to sub. My play would be “if you do it, do it” — that both narration and the dice help resolve the outcomes, such that if they get paid is depending on how it went south.
The person with Gigs gets paid. Its their Gig, they get paid — how they handle splitting that with anyone who helps them out is a matter to be handled by the characters in play. Money is a solid motivator for drama.
And, I think I mentioned this before but it may not be helpful since everyone in your game wants to be mercenaries: AW, and by extension SWW, assume the characters are allies but have their own lives going on. In an ideal world, when one PC’s gig has gone sideways and the sky is falling, you can and should cut to your other PCs to look at what is going on in their corner of space/the apocalypse. Giving everyone their own things to be doing, and picking up plot threads from previous sessions that you can hand off to characters without gigs is a great way to balance spotlight.
Bad rolls always mean bad outcomes rather than incompetence, so if the narrative suggests things go smoothly then it’s an external thing (destroying the evidence, as Alex Prinz suggested, for example, or maybe having the crew come to the attention of the victim’s allies).
I always forget that failed rolls aren’t necessarilly failed actions. I hate games where heroes get critical fumbles in combat. The mechanics here totally allow you to have your kick ass hero demonstrate their incredible prowess, only to have a Hard Move tip the odds against them suddenly. Like Hans Solo chasing a couple of stormtroopers… into a room full of stormtroopers. Or pretty much every other scene of every Indiana Jones film. Let’s call it the Harrison Effect. 🙂
I believe they all will be allied, since they will have connections with Hx and generally they do work together pretty well in games. I had not considered the guy with the gig doing it all on his own, and not actually having everyone in on it, and the only time we really went in to details was when a gig went wrong. I was sort of thinking that one of the main vectors for adventure for them would be bad gig rolls and ignored obligations.
The issue with the guy doing the gigs splitting up the credits after is that with gigs paying out 1 cred, and I do not have any smaller division of currency since I am going with the same sort of money abstraction that we have with barter.
One thing I was thinking about doing, since they will have a good number of ships and followers, the players tend to pool resources, and I wanted the hunger for credits to be a motivating factor for a group of vagabond mercs, was to have some sort of at the end of the session roll where each major group/gang/ship/holding gave them a minus 1, and they could spend credits to give themselves plus 1’s on the roll. If they rolled badly it might advance some threats from their own people being disgruntled from a lack of pay, or a ship developing a flaw that springs forth at the worst time. If I did something like that (and I would love to hear some feedback on that idea) I bet they would want to play it as any time they have to bail someone out of a busted gig, that any creds they earn on it goes towards the group fund.
I have not really made up my mind on the group thing however, since I want to see how things go and how they interact with each other.
I had always assumed that it was the operator who got paid, esp. when I found this line under the Barter section: “1-barter will also cover your crew’s cut of a couple three four profitable gigs.”
Ahh I missed that
I’m curious to see how the Operator goes for your game. I played one recently, and I think I grok the playbook now, but it would be cool to hear about how it worked and how it didn’t in yours.