In V33#14 Steve Higginbotham says:
How do any GM's who feel like commenting deal with the tendency of
people with expensive, new ships to want to keep their ship in a safe,
money-making situation? That is, how do you get the guys who just
bought a merchant ship on Rhylanor to leave the Rhylanor-Porozlo run,
which is arguably the safest and most profitable place to stay? How do
you convince your players to go out into the frontiers where money is
hard to come by, and foreclosure is all too close? Notice that GDW,
Have you tried the Lunion-Ianic run? That's the first jump my players
made with their many-years-to-pay Far Trader, and they did in fact
make a profit on it. They were fairly lucky...Ianic has a bureaucracy
like you wouldn't believe, and it took a lot of bribery to get by the
import tariffs (which would have made the run a severe loss) and to
bribe the customs officers who searched the ship (fortunately they had
yet to build the fermentation vats and the still)...and then the
ship's doctor asked for a map to the city, and after being shuffled
around the various bureaus for about four hours discovered it was a
state secret and was deported at gunpoint. The Lunion-Ianic run
doesn't look at all attractive now...
Basically the mix of characters is sufficiently diverse that
sitting on one safe route is anathema to them. The merchant himself
wouldn't mind it, but the scouts would object, as would the ex-Navy
folks, all of whom are needed to run the new ship they "found." Now
they're fully caught up in doing the job of that ship's previous
owners and are two sectors to spinward of the Spinward Marches, and I
don't think they're going to find many safe routes there.
If enough non-merchants are on the ship, as is (I believe) likely
with yer average player-character merchant (ex-Navy guys are a dime a
dozen, and don't interfere with how you run your commerce), character
motivation should drive them from the safe and easy. After all, it
wouldn't be Traveller if they didn't Travel, would it?
Martyn
- -------------sasmjw@unx.sas.com----(Martyn J. Wheeler)----DoD #293------------
SAS Institute, Inc: [phone removed] H: [phone removed] (Raleigh, NC)
"I'm going to float up into the air and see who's shooting at us"
- Grand Admiral Sir Bridgehead, Retd. (and recovering nicely)