why mothership
I wanted to make this a video for our youtube, but time is fleeting for such an endeavor, and and the little devil procrastination will win me over yet again if I don’t just write it. Just write the damned words and be done with it. Devil begone.
I made this using Midjourney, an AI Art Generator.
“But what is ‘this’”? - you may be asking yourself.
“This” is my explanation as to why we chose the Mothership RPG system for our second season and why I enjoy playing it – and why you might enjoy playing it too. And “This” may even be more than that. Maybe a transcendental treatise on gaming philosophy… but I doubt it. Fighting the procrastination devil leaves only so much time for such follies.
“You’re stalling!”
“You’re right. Devil be gone.”
I started playing Mothership a few years ago. I think I had seen it or a module for it in one of Ben Milton’s videos at his channel Questing Beast. It had that retro-futurist vibe, which I love. I’m a child of the 80’s and 90’s so anything that punches that nostalgia button immediately gets my interest. Sometimes I’m a simple animal. It’s also a horror game, which is the greatest of all genres - and up until that point I hadn’t played a ton of horror RPGs. My experience with the hobby was in its infancy at this point.
I ordered a copy of it from a great online store called Exalted Funeral(which has cool shit like… this game) and really fell in love with just how simple it was. The element that jumped out at me the most was the character sheet which really explains nearly everything about the game on one page.
Most of the people I’ve played Role Playing Games with have never played an RPG before. When I started roping friends in to play I was having to teach them Dungeons & Dragons 5e. Teaching games repeatedly to new players with different levels of understanding really helped me develop an appreciation for how a game is designed. I learned how to distill a couple hundred pages of a Player’s Handbook down to the information necessary for a player to go from “wait what the hell am I doing” to “We’re slaying a fucking dragon!” as quickly as possible. And it wasn’t enough to just give them pre-generated characters and tell them to just do what was on the sheet. I wanted them to know how the story of the game was reflected in the mechanics so they understood why we roll the dice.
Mothership’s character sheet does so much of this work for me ON THE SHEET. I can hand it to players and we can walk through it step by step, with a flow chart that explains to the players why they’re doing what they’re doing and what the numbers represent. You don’t even have to reference the book. Most of the game is just on this one piece of paper.
The main mechanic of Mothership is rolling a percentile dice. That means you can a roll a range of numbers from 00 – 99. The numbers on the character sheet are your odds of succeeding. So if you have a strength score of 40, you’ve got a 4 in 10 chance of succeeding any time you roll. The rest of the sheet are ways you can specialize your character to have better chances at succeeding at specific types of tasks.
A marine is going to be better at fighting.
A scientist is going to be better at, I dunno, math or whatever. You tell me, doc.
That’s mostly what I have to explain to folks when I teach them how to play Mothership. Everything else is just playing a game of make believe.
Most of the players I’ve run Mothership for, have never even seen the rule book. It’s that easy to understand.
Another Midjourney experiment.
I love games where I don’t have to give my players a book to read. If I can succinctly explain it to them in normal human terms how to play a game without opening a book, then it is a great game.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a little bit of mechanical crunch from time to time, but with new players I just want to establish a shared grammar as quickly as possible. This is particularly important for our podcast, because I didn’t want to get bogged down in referencing the rules - for our show, telling the story is the important part.
One of the first skills you learn in acting is memorizing your lines. The faster you learn the words you need to say, frontwards and backwards, the quicker you can start playing with the other actors. If you’re in your head trying to remember what your lines are then you aren’t present and creativity stops happening. That’s how I approach Role Playing Games and rules. This doesn’t mean I expect my players to memorize the whole book of whatever game we’re playing - I just want to limit how much space they take up in our head when we’re trying to tell a story.
This simplicity really shines whenever the players have an encounter the revolves around combat, which is generally the most complicated aspect of any game. It makes sense that when characters’ lives are on the line, the game needs to slow down as we negotiate violence with our choices and actions. In many games it feels like combat situations are their own separate game. It’s as though a cage comes down from the ceiling with a loudspeaker telling you “Roll for initiative this is Combat Now.” I want to limit that feeling as much as possible because I feel like it narrows a player’s creativity. I want violent encounters to feel like another puzzle that can be solved, perhaps without any violence at all.
One of the main design philosophies in Mothership is that violence is deadly and should represent an important moment in the characters life. Characters aren’t getting hit with fireballs and going on about their business. So I want to avoid forcing my players into thinking they have to punch an alien because it’s “Combat Time”. Players are more free to create their own solutions instead of feeling limited to the mechanical options on their character sheet. With a system like Dungeons & Dragons your character gets an ability called “multi-attack” which allows you to attack multiple times in a turn because the game is ostensibly about attacking shit in your way. So the game provides you with many ways to achieve that.
In Mothership, the game is mostly about surviving. In fact there’s a specific concept that the game’s designers often push: As a player, your goal is some combination of save, solve, or survive, but you can’t do all three.
How you do that is up to you and your own creativity. The skills you can gain from character creation are broad in purpose and apply to wild variety of fields of expertise. You can be a military character with skills in explosives OR you can be the android capable of hacking computer systems. OR a scientist specializing in agriculture. Etc. Etc.
This allows for a lot more fluidity when it comes to game style. Mothership can be both Ridley Scott’s ALIEN or James Cameron’s ALIENS depending on your mood and who you’re playing with. In, Analysis Complete I my players are a mix of both types, and it’s led to some entertaining situations. Like a marine who keeps giving weapons to other characters who have no idea how to use them, which almost resulted in our android accidentally blowing their face off with a shotgun.
At least I think it’s entertaining… but you don’t have to take my word for it. * cue Reading Rainbow music *
See that’s me trying to get you to listen to our show. Shameless.
Mothership really shifted my thinking when it came to running games. With less emphasis on complex rules, it shifted more responsibility on me to make more rulings at the table that were both fair and and fun for my particular set of players. Before Mothership I was just kind of doing whatever the books said, rules-as-written, and if it sucked it was the game’s fault.
Taking on this responsibility didn’t just empowered me but everyone at my table to shape our experience to what we wanted. That’s what made it an obvious choice for our show, and why it will continue to be a game I bring to the table, whether at conventions or at home, for many years to come.
Okay I think we staved off the little devil long enough to complete a blog post. Way to go me!
You must be very pleased with yourself.
That’s none of your business, but sometimes, yeah.
- Jae