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I played Another Bug Hunt, “the official introductory adventure for Mothership” with my friends Moose, Danni, and Cameron. Moose ran the game for us and they talk about it in this post. Danni and Cameron talked about their experiences as players on the Ranged Touch February Patreon podcast.
Moose did a great job giving us the Mothership Experience! Reading the rules and then playing the game, I didn’t feel like anything was missing. I want to say up front: despite these criticisms of the system, I had a great time playing this adventure with my friends. Isn’t that all that matters? No! I’m critiquing Mothership as written. I would never run this game as-is.
I played Rose Mountain, an android. Moose provided these character notes:
Her job is to settle disputes with as little conflict as possible, whether internal to the crew or originating externally. She likes people who also profess to desire peaceful resolutions.
These notes informed the character almost as much as the evocative skill names on the sheet. The skill names definitely convey the genre, and we quickly fell into our respective Aliens characters.
Rose seemed like more of a corporate mediator, and so I tried to use the Psychology skill whenever I could. This was also my most powerful skill, so I was incentivized to use it and gain the +15% bonus. I did not ever use any of the base skills for the android class: Linguistics, Computers, or Mathematics.
Mothership feels flimsy to me. Task resolution boils down to a binary pass/fail result. The skills convey genre well, but they compress their subjects to equal size. Is Athletics, in a science fiction context, of equal granularity to Military Training? Is Piloting as complex as Asteroid Mining? Here is the full text for the Psychology skill:
Psychology: The study of behavior and the human mind.
The player is responsible for fleshing out what this can do. Because this is so open-ended, I was always trying to contort myself or the situation in order to use this skill, because it was the one with the largest bonus. I am reminded of the time I played a one-shot of FATE at a local game store. In that game, one player allocated the maximum skill bonus to a loosely-defined skill he called “demon magic” and then proceeded to steamroll the game by making every roll using this skill.
There are two knobs that can be turned by the warden during a skill check. Advantage or disadvantage can be awarded, or the roll can be omitted entirely. This is not a lot of nuance, therefore the actual stakes in the world do not matter much. If you have already achieved advantage, why do more roleplaying?
The game offers no guidance about the boundaries of narration. By session two I really started angling and just saying what I wanted to accomplish with my Psychology skill instead of roleplaying my psychological manipulation. Because the dice will tell me how I do, I felt disincentivized towards roleplaying. It was faster to say “I want to convince this person of X” and just get to the percentage chance roll.
Failure in this game is interesting, since it increases stress and ties into the panic system. At the end of this series of four sessions, I had 14 stress and had gained two panic conditions, which felt like a good amount to reach in a single adventure. These conditions are pretty specific, and unfortunately the effects never triggered. Looking at the conditions themselves, they feel too grounded in mechanics than in the fictional world. I had the “Deflated” panic result:
DEFLATED. Gain a new Condition: Whenever a Close crewmember fails a Save, gain 1 Stress.
There’s a mismatch between the name of the condition and the effect - this strikes me as more type A rage than checking out. All of the mechanical effects are adjectives with no fictional description. It feels like design-by-spreadsheet: a list of panic conditions was created, either name-first or mechanics-first, and then the other half of the equation was filled in by rote.
These kinds of effects work better in video games where the labor is offloaded onto the software. Darkest Dungeon has similar conditions which result from stress. In that game, the system can take over a character, compelling a “selfish” character to interact with what may be a trapped chest out of a greedy impulse. Denying the player agency, or at least asking the player to behave in a certain way can be very interesting - see above where I was given character notes for Rose Mountain.
The “a bunch of mechanics” school of design is developed further in the Mothership spinoff Cloud Empress. In that game, there’s a set of magic items called Crests, each of which has an interesting effect. But the name of each crest is just “Major/Minor Crest of Thing It Does.” This is a missed opportunity to give the item a unique name and physical description and decide more about what kinds of objects are in the world.
Designing a big list of minor mechanical effects like the panic table is an easy, empty exercise for a game designer, I am sorry to say. If you are doing this, you are eating candy for every meal and no vegetables. It is far more difficult to tie these mechanics into the fictional world. This effort seems to be offloaded to Mothership adventures. Another Bug Hunt has table of changes a character undergoes as they transform into a crab monster, and also a list of crab monster traits. Gradient Descent, another Mothership adventure, has a complete subsystem for experiencing delusions called The Bends, independent of panic and stress. Much of the positive buzz around Mothership comes from the deep bench of nice-looking adventure material. It seems like an elegant way to tie this all together would be:
If Mothership did this, and a character survived multiple adventures, they would be marked by lingering effects of the horrific situations they endured. I think players and the warden would then be forced to contend with the “normative violence” of working for The Company. Now you have a crab claw as a result of the events on Samsa IV - are you allowed back on the job or are they going to lock you in an observation chamber?
This design approach the reason Troika is so popular and well-supported. The Troika formula is easy to understand and replicate: you write 36 flavorful character archetypes which populate your world. The core rules even tell you how to design them.
Looking at the sheet, it is hard to see how a skill like Asteroid Mining would work. Are we to believe that a character will mine an entire asteroid in this game? Are there adventures where this activity is a tentpole? This seems like a complex process requiring a lot of specialist workers and equipment
When you put this skill in a game where task resolution is a binary pass/fail with a single roll against a fixed number, you lose all of the nuance and depth of Asteroid Mining. The game cannot be said to be “about” asteroid mining, you’ve pretty much removed it at that point!
I’m pretty down on any roleplaying game where agency is mediated by a list of skills. I’m interested in Pendragon since you’re trying to wrangle your little guy and they literally have a mind of their own — this is in contrast to Mothership where you’re just trying to press the goodest button on your character sheet.
I agree with Warden’s Operation Manual guidance about the need to establish stakes in this game. Before every action in the game, the warden decides if a roll is triggered or the action happens automatically. The problem is that Mothership does not help you establish those stakes other than telling you to do it. Failing a roll kicks off Mothership’s stress and panic system. This system is important, interesting, and flavorful - you want it to activate, all the more reason for more structure around triggering a roll. Mothership asks the following questions for each skill check:
The player doesn’t have much say here, other than changing their approach entirely. The warden also doesn’t have much say over difficulty because all the numbers are predetermined.
Compare this to any game where the referee is forced into negotiation with players by determining task difficulty on the fly. I understand the appeal of offloading this effort onto a number on a character sheet. As a referee, negotiating with players is a big source of personal friction in these games. Players are incentivized scrape together every little bonus or to rethink their actions over and over, trying to gain the most advantage. With the wrong player, this can be profoundly annoying.
What games do this well? Unfortunately, it’s D&D Fifth Edition, a game I will never play again. The referee sets the target number, and in my experience I was usually choosing between the easy, medium and hard difficulties. This choice can swing a check’s chance of success by up to 50%, which absolutely dwarfs the skill bonus that the player brings to the table. Choosing a target number is a Mysterious Process to the players: they can change tactics but they won’t typically argue with the target number. To preserve the mystery there is a clever bit of misdirection: the players are told that the way to affect this roll is to negotiate with the referee to gain advantage, rolling extra dice and taking the best one. There are also many ways to get advantage without involving the referee. But getting advantage only increases the chance of success by about 16%, which is still dwarfed by the referee’s target number choice.
The questions that are asked here:
These minor changes give both sides more agency.
Jared Sinclair’s Vanilla Game bases this choice on diegetic matters:
If you have neither the necessary skill nor proper tools for the task, you cannot succeed.
If you have either the necessary skill or proper tools, roll 1d20. If the result is equal to or less than your most appropriate Attribute, you succeed.
If you have both the necessary skill and the proper tools, you automatically succeed.
In this game, a character typically has two skills, one related to their character class (either Fighter or Magic-user) and one for a mundane job (like Merchant). This is great because you have three questions to haggle over:
Player inventory is limited to 10 items, but they can create items on the fly to fit the situation. The player has a ton of agency around what they’re carrying.
The “is a roll required?” is a function of the second and third questions. If you are a lumberjack carrying a grappling hook, you as a player decide whether or not you are over a castle wall, and the referee really can’t do anything about it.
I am far afield of Mothership at this point. Suffice it to say, there are not a lot of knobs for a player to turn in task resolution, and I don’t care for that. As Cameron pointed out on the podcast, Mothership is so bare bones you could run the adventures in another system and it would work fine with minimal effort. You can also hack Mothership, but at that point you aren’t playing Mothership. If I wanted to run a Mothership adventure, I would probably port the classes and skills over to The Vanilla Game.
A couple great resources for thinking about who gets to decide and how things are decided are: