Faster Than Light – The Needs of the Game

For an RPG where the action is largely based on traveling to the stars, how that is accomplished has a huge impact on what the PC will be doing, and who and what they encounter there. In books, movies, and TV, the details can be glossed over. In a game, players are going to want to know the rules of Faster Than Light (FTL) travel, so they can exploit them. Adventure hooks and possible PC plans can hang on the capabilities and limitations of your star-drive.

I’ll start with my objectives for the game, and work back from there to create an FTL that gives me the outcomes I’m looking for. Starting with what Robin Laws calls the ‘core activity’ of the game is a good practice. The usual way to express that is something like: “The PCs are X who do Y,” I don’t have a very specific idea for the core activity yet, so I’ll keep it broad. In my game, the PCs are competent spacers who travel the stars solving problems they encounter. As I build the setting, and especially once players start to express their preferences for the kinds of characters they want to play, I’ll have to develop a campaign frame that explains why and how they do that.

Given that core activity, what do I want the known universe of my game to look like? 

1. A few human ‘core worlds’ that have large populations and are highly developed. This could be just in the Solar System, with Earth, a well-established lunar colony with domed cities and underground warrens, and a partially terraformed Mars; or it could include one or two hospitable exo-planets that were discovered in humanity’s early interstellar exploration and have grown to become major population centers. 
2. Many smaller, less developed colonies, settlements, and outposts.
3. A big, unexplored frontier, about which little to nothing is known. 
4. Travel times between the core and the frontier should be make it possible, but perhaps not commonplace, to move between them in a timeframe that makes it possible for PCs to have adventures that move between the two. Perhaps between a month and six months of travel (potentially providing game down-time). Travel from one point on the frontier, to the other side of human-occupied space would be about double that time.
5. Transport should be quick and inexpensive enough that there is some regular interchange between star systems, whether for trade, migration, or some other reason. For the purposes of a game setting, having at least some starships that comparatively cost about as much as a small tramp steamer ship or Grumman Goose island-hopper aircraft hits a sweet spot where a small group can own their own ship, but owning one is not as common as a family car.
6. Something that creates borders, areas of influence, and trade routes, rather than being able to go from anywhere directly to anywhere else. 2300 AD achieved this with a 7.7 light year limit before their stutterwarp drive had to be discharged in a significant gravity well. Linking stars that are 7.7 light years apart or less in a ‘subway map’ created arms of exploration at trade. Traveller achieved a similar effect to a lesser extent by requiring ships to refuel between jumps, and making longer-distance jump drives more expensive. In either case, most of the time you can’t bypass a star system to get to one that’s farther away. You need to stop at it and spend some time either refueling, discharging, or doing something else.

For me, the trick of combining 2, 3 and 4 is that settlement and development would happen at a slower pace than exploration if travel is quick and cheap. My petty objection to the 2300 AD setting was that Alpha Centauri had been settled for over a hundred years, starships had speeds measured in light years per day, and no one had any idea what was beyond 50 light years from Earth. In all that time, no one had spent a few weeks exploring beyond the 50 LY range, or if they did, they didn’t share what they found. (The 7.7 LY range limit also felt arbitrary and very ‘coincidentally’ created the star map without too many connections, so there were trade routes, but enough so they didn’t dead-end.) 

2300 AD Star Map

If you can get from the core to the farthest settlement in a month or two, in the time it took to get even a small settlement established, exploratory missions and expeditions of discovery should have reached out well beyond that, pushing the ‘unknown’ to more than a year’s travel away.

Possible solutions to this include:

1. Very recent discovery of much faster travel, allowing new ships to leapfrog past previously explored space. This has some advantages from a gaming perspective. It could create a band of lightly explored territory between settled space and the vast unknown. Conflicts can arise as far-flung settlements and outposts used to doing things their own way now have more contact with and greater supervision from the core than before. There could be a ‘land rush’ to discover and claim new planets and resources. There might even be ‘lost expeditions’ that were assumed dead but were just stranded and unable to communicate across the vast distance. All of these provide adventure hooks. The disadvantage is that it isn’t a stable, ongoing situation — it could last long enough for the span of a campaign, but maybe not a very long-term campaign.
2. The sphere of settlement has grown large enough that the border with the unknown is vast. Distance isn’t the limiting factor of exploration, but manpower and other resources. Many expeditions have ventured out a year’s travel, but there are still many other paths or areas of exploration that have not been followed as far, because there just aren’t enough ships and crews. On the plus side, this might be realistic. Planets easily habitable by humans are likely few and far between in the galaxy. This implies very fast FTL and perhaps somewhat sparse settlement with great distances between inhabited system. Otherwise, there would be more resources for exploration. The downside is fast, far travel makes securable borders and constrained trade routes harder to justify.
3. The speed of reaching a new system is significantly slower than travel once it has been reached. This is one I’ve given thought to before. In a situation where the FTL needs some sort of receiver at the end of the trip, spreading the reach of exploration would be limited to STL travel. Once the receiver was in place, travel would be at whatever speed makes sense for the game. If a light-sail like the Starwisp or Breakthrough Starshot concept were used, the sphere of possible exploration would expand at about 20% of lightspeed. 
   
   The big expense for this would be the construction of the powerful lasers that drive the sail, so sending out relatively inexpensive probes with whatever super-science FTL receiver they carry to any system that might be interesting for exploration or exploitation would make sense. Hundreds of years later, close in systems could be well established, and the probes furthest out would be just reaching systems perhaps 50 light years from Sol, with new systems being opened to exploration on a regular basis. This could create a ‘land rush’ situation similar to the first solution.

One of these options, or some combination of them, along with either a hard or soft range limit, like those in 2300 AD or Traveller, could provide the set-up that I’m looking for. I’ll dig more into details of the technology I’ve been trying to work out based on Solution 3 in my next post.