Paul Beakely explains the success of Mothership despite, not because of its rules.
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I agree, the mechanics are good enough. That’s quite the compliment. It means they don’t stand out and make you think about them. They do their job. Meh, is just about right.
Two other thoughts come to mind reading this piece:
- In Mothership, what scares me most are the scenarios. Android children who will turn violent if I don’t have a gift for each, or leave without assuaging their fear of abandonment, scared me more than panic.
- A little tongue in cheek, wine is as good as the company you drink it with. The community around the game really enjoy hanging and being involved. A group with that attitude is infectious.
Bonus thought, I’ve also been terrified in a regular OSR dungeons by degrading encounters where I know I need to solve, fight, or flee before shit hits the fan. The tension in that dynamic palpably raises my stress and fear as a player.
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I suppose that a lot of rules-light, OSR-type games ruleset can be described as “good enough” in the sense that they are simple, intuitive and get out of the way fast. That’s how I like it, at least most of the times (having more “gamey” aspects can be fun, too). At its core, Mothership is doing that pretty well.
But I must say that GMing (Wardening?) Mothership was a frustrating experience for me, even if everyone at the (virtual) table had fun (yes, me included). A big part of my difficulties were the adventure’s fault (Another Bug Hunt has many problems), but at least some of them were tied to the ruleset itself, so I would not say it’s “good enough”. It feels like it cannot decide whether it it wants to support narrative genre emulation or impartial refereeing, and ends up leaving it up to GM fiat.
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That’s interesting. I haven’t run the game, just played some scenarios. If I may, what bumps did you hit?
In Another Bug Hunt? It’s been a while, so I can’t remember all the details. I dug a bit and found a Reddit post that is pretty thorough and echoed my impressions very well. I made some comment, but you can read the OP and you’ll get a good idea of my thoughts.
But big picture:
- The timeline does not make sense. I read the adventure thoroughly beforehand and made changes, but was still stumped during play.
- The way Carcinids are presented is not coherent. In the first scenario, a single one is basically unkillable. In the 4th, it is assumed that you hold your position against waves of them.
- In many scenes, I honestly did not know what to do: Carcinids clearly could and should kill the PCs, but that would be a pretty boring game night.
- The 4th scenario is unplayable as is. It’s a concept more than an actual adventure. I handwaved it, using it as a template to describe the evacuation.
I felt like the adventure is meant to be run much more like a series of scenes with some big set pieces, using “cinematic logic” instead of verisimilitude to maintain a desired vibe.
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I just happened to read this on Bluesky, and I liked the text. I really agree with it. There are many great things about Mothership, but perhaps the best is its community. There are many brilliant people writing there, many of them friends I deeply admire who have written very interesting modules/adventures. However, what I feel—and this is just my two cents—is that it’s more of a science fiction action game, a very good one in fact, and not a science fiction horror game as it claims to be. That’s where I agree with the text, because the stress-panic system leaves a lot to be desired.
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Panic table in Mothership I found much more satisfying than the table in the Alien RPG. In the Alien RPG I found the results repetitive and stale.
I love seeing a Mothership module with a custom panic table. I have players roll often in Mothership 1e, IMO if we’re not stressed then what’s the draw of the game?
Rolling 1d5 each time you take stress is interesting, but the biggest change I like moving from 0e to 1e is that you take a stress when you fail a roll. So elegant and straightforward.
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Great writeup! Reminds me I need to get back to writing up my own experiences about running Mothership.
I ran Another Bug Hunt (ABH) from start to finish - I think it took us four or five sessions to get through. As a scenario it was really interesting. It sets up a lot of dramatic and compelling scenes that fit the Alien-motif, but there are a lot of holes in the story and how everything fits together. It required more work from me as a GM than I would have anticipated from an introductory adventure.
Mechanically, I largely enjoyed how Mothership played at the table. The stress mechanic wasn’t a problem for us, since ABH doesn’t really the opportunity for characters to take downtime and recover stress. By the third session, most of my characters were above 10 stress and panic checks were a real threat.
I thought that the “don’t roll” maxim combined with the “roll to gain stress” mechanic was going to conflict, but the “don’t roll” maxim bears a little closer examination. It’s really “don’t roll when nothing is at stake.” Page 32 of the Warden’s Guide indicates that you should roll when the stakes are high, when the outcome is uncertain, when the PCs don’t have the right tools, when their plan is bad, or when the players want to. In ABH, the stakes were often high and uncertain, so I had the players rolling quite a lot unless they had very good plans.
If I had any complaint about the stress mechanics, it’s that fear saves don’t really do anything besides make you take a point of stress. I don’t like requiring players to play their characters a different way (i.e., afraid), so other than taking a point of stress, a failed fear save didn’t really do anything in the game.
The other area I think the mechanics are vague and unclear is with regards to combat. I wound up running combat in a more narrative fashion and it worked once I established the procedure myself, but I think the rules leave this too open to interpretation. For example, the rulebook remains unclear on whether the GM should roll for monster attacks or whether monsters just hit.
Our favorite mechanic was certainly the Death Save. This made for some extremely fun, tense moments. I’d love to see this idea incorporated into other games.
Overall, our group really enjoyed Mothership and the streamlined mechanics helped to ensure the pace kept moving quickly and the tension remained high. While there are some areas I feel like the rules could using shoring up or clarification, overall I think the mechanics do serve to evoke the feel of sci-fi/horror.
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This is a really good review of the issues (I rewrote the timeline, too, when I ran it), and the central foe is in multiple places at once, as written, which is especially problematic considering the players might have recovered his tracker. I suspect some of the problems came from having four different authors write the four parts separately.
My players liked, but didn’t love it (they finished two of the four scenarios and fled the planet), and, hilariously to me and the other players
SPOILER
one of them suicide-bombed the irritating corporate managing official at the end, without realizing the official had been infected.
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My players left Greta Base really fast, as soon as they found the commander: they explored maybe 25% of it and heard but never actually encountered the Carc there. If I did not modify the scenario to make sure there was no ship to go back, they would have gone back. They completed the 2/3 of the 2nd scenario, as it is meant to be run (lab and then reactor before everything goes to hell). Then, they decided to get out by reactivating the satellite (which is the last 3rd of the 2nd scenario). They never even entertained the idea of following Hinton, and as I said, I handwaved the evacuation (which is the 4th scenario). Ii took us 4 sessions, too, if I remember correctly.
Beyond the many inconsistencies of the module, what was very tiring for me as a GM was to “frame” everything to basically dial the difficulty, more like a director than a referee. But when I GM, I like being an impartial referee. As written, the Carcinids are a huge threat and they don’t really have a reason not to kill the PCs, while the PCs are really fragile; an impartial referee would simply kill everyone. There are many scenes where the PCs will be in grave and immediate danger against agressive Carcinids. It’s basically up to the GM to make it terrifying without killing everyone. As I said, we had fun, but I was running this thing on vibes by pure fiat and it was exhausting.
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