Mothership: Engine Malfunction

This is a review of Mothership, the popular and widely-acclaimed sci-fi horror RPG by Sean McCoy and the folks at Tuesday Knight Games.

It is a pretty negative review.

Yeah, I'm as surprised as you are.

Background

If you somehow don't know, Mothership first hit the scene in 2018 and almost immediately exploded. It quickly established itself as the sci-fi horror game, or even just the best all-purpose OSR sci-fi game on the market these days. A big community grew around it, with tons of adventures, supplements, zines, fan content, and so on proliferating rapidly. It's not hard to find positive reviews.

The 2018 version has recently been retroactively rebranded as the "0th edition," as a shiny new "1st edition" has just come out and rocket-boosted the game's hype to seemingly impossible levels. There's a core set and a deluxe set, both of which come in a fancy box with lots of bonus material. If you want to take a look, the PDF of the core rulebook is also available to download for free.

For the sake of this review's discussion, I'm going to quickly explain some of the basics that you'll find in that book. The game is fairly rules-lite, but the specifics of the rules will be a focus of this review.

• The core mechanic is a d100, roll-under system. Characters have four stats (Strength, Speed, Intellect, and Combat) and three saving throws (Sanity, Fear, and Body). When the GM calls for a stat check or saving throw, you roll 1d100 and need to get lower than your number to succeed.
• The other biggest system is stress and panic. Characters begin with 2 stress and accumulate more points of stress as they play. The most common source is that every time you fail a stat check or saving throw, you gain 1 stress. Then, when you experience something really horrible, you might be told to roll a panic check. You roll 1d20, failing if the result is equal to or less than your stress total. On a failure, refer to the panic table and suffer the result corresponding with the number you rolled on the d20.
• Plenty of other miscellaneous stuff. Characters can roll with advantage or disadvantage. Any time you roll doubles (00, 11, 22, 33, etc.), that's a crit. If it would have succeeded, it's a critical success, but if it would have failed, it's a critical failure (automatically triggering a panic check). Characters have skills which can increase their range of success on a d100 roll if they can convince the GM that it would be applicable to the check/save.

I'm going to embed an image of the character sheet here which I recommend you refer to throughout this review if you're unfamiliar with the system. Saves me from having to write out lots of details.

Why Everyone Wants Into the MoSh Pit

I have never before been more excited for an RPG than this one. I've been wanting to try it ever since it first came out, waiting years for the right opportunity to get in on the action. And lo and behold, I finally got to run my first session on the very same week that the new edition dropped.

What made me so excited about this game? Let me highlight some of the main things that appealed to me:

• The stress and panic system is a really strong core for a horror game. I've never been a big fan of the sanity system from Call of Cthulhu, but this seems like a genius evolution of that. Watching your stress total build up higher and higher induces genuine dread, and reading through the results on the panic table would make any GM positively giddy.
• The classes are perfect: Marine, Android, Scientist, and Teamster. Plenty of fans have created additional options, but these are really the perfect set of character archetypes for the genre of this game. They are exactly the kinds of protagonists I want to see in these scenarios.
• The skill system is enticing. I'm not actually a fan of skill systems, and this one is even more complex than most, but it actually kind of speaks to me. It's really long and organizes the options into a 3-tiered tree, but it's not hard to wrap your head around. More importantly, I just really dig the skills themselves. Just imagining the kind of game where players have to rely on linguistics, zero-G, hacking, pathology, even xeno-esotericism. I want to play a game where these sorts of things matter.
• The equipment is tantalizing. You've got chunky and clunky hard sci-fi weapons and armor, but you're also equally expected to be fighting with industrial equipment and other regular objects. There's tons of resources you can imagine being useful in a hostile outer space environment, starting gear is organized into really well-made "class loadouts," and everyone gets to start with one funny patch sewn onto their clothing just for flavor.
• The trauma response mechanic is brilliant. Especially for a horror game, I love the idea of differentiating classes by how they fail instead of just how they succeed. It reminds us that different types of people respond to pressure in different ways, and each one of the responses makes perfect sense.
• Death and dismemberment babeeee. When a character reaches 0 health, they suffer 1 wound and have to roll on a d10 table corresponding with the type of damage inflicted. And boy oh boy, that wound table is juicy. Every result is graphic and grindhouse-y, but each one also has a different mechanical effect that'll impact the rest of combat.

These things light my brain on fire and make me want to play right now. I want to play a hard sci-fi game where all of these tropes are relevant, where all of these mechanics work together to help my friends and I recreate Alien or The Thing or Event Horizon but with our own characters in our own story.

What I Played

So far I've run three separate one-shots with three separate groups of players. Here's a quick summary:

1. The first was with my "primary" RPG group who I've played with weekly for 7 years. We played a short scenario called The Haunting of Ypsilon 14, which is frequently recommended as a perfect starting point. There were 4 players, one for each class.
2. The second was with a couple people from my Traveller group I've played with for about a year. I ran Ypsilon 14 again but with some important changes. There were 2 players, but I granted each of them 2 characters, so they also had one of each class.
3. The third was with a group of friends and family from back home, most of whom I've played with in all sorts of various one-shots. I ran The Screaming on the Alexis, adapted to be a standalone scenario. There were 5 players, one for each class plus one extra teamster.

I hope that's enough experience with the system to satisfy anyone who questions whether or not I gave it a fair shake. My first session seemed like it could have been a fluke, but both other times I got pretty much the same results. The main conclusions I've drawn have remained true regardless of who I'm playing with, how much experience they have, how big the group is, or what scenario we're playing. For some other conclusions, I'll refer to "session 1," "session 2," and "session 3" accordingly.

I'll refrain from reviewing either of these two adventure scenarios. I have my criticisms and my praises for sure, but it's also not very difficult to identify which parts of our experience were rooted in the game's design versus which parts were rooted in the level design. And after these three trials, I am pretty confident that I can explain what I think about the rules system itself, independent of the scenario it's being applied to.

Lastly, I should note here that all three sessions were fun. The players all reported having a good time, there was much laughter and thrills, most players said they'd totally play again. But also, y'know, that's almost always the case when you play an RPG with friends whose company you enjoy. If "did people have a good evening?" were the only metric for a game's quality, then there'd be no such thing as a bad game. It takes a closer reading of exactly what went into a session to determine how much credit is owed to the game itself rather than the people, the scenario, the music, the snacks, etc. So what have I concluded about Mothership as a system?

Nothing Works!

Okay maybe not nothing. But it's pretty damn close. I have a lot of problems to point out, but most of them revolve around this:

Almost every mechanic branches from the basic dice roll (i.e. a stat check or saving throw). But you almost never make basic dice rolls, so you almost never see any of the rest of the system in use.

In session 1, there were less than 10 dice rolls. For session 2, I tweaked Ypsilon 14 to be more perilous. As a result, there were maybe between 10 and 15 dice rolls.

Does that sound wrong? It shouldn't. This is an old-school game, designed around the old-school playstyle. It explicitly discourages the GM from calling for dice rolls too often. It instructs you to follow a pretty strict criteria for when a dice roll would be called for. And even if it didn't, that's how I run games anyway. I've been playing according to an old-school philosophy for many years. I often go entire sessions without anyone rolling a single check, so the fact that my first Mothership session had less than 10 is absolutely within expected bounds.

But then the game breaks.

Most miscellaneous rules didn't really work. Nobody ever rolled a single crit during those first two sessions. By extension, nobody triggered a panic check from a crit fail. Nobody's trauma response ever came up in the first two sessions, except for one teamster who used his freebie advantage and it didn't save him anyway. Nobody in all three sessions ever once used the Strength stat.

Skills didn't really work. They almost never get used. Not because the subject matter was irrelevant to the scenarios, mind you. But because every time a skill would be relevant, there wasn't any pressure that would justify a dice roll.

I would say something like:

"There's a computer module in the cargo bay."

"Hey, I'm skilled at hacking. Can I roll to hack it?"

"Uhhhh no roll needed, you can just use it."

Or maybe something like:

"There's a dead body in the laboratory."

"I'm a doctor! Can I use my field medicine skill or my surgery skill or something to see how they died?"

"Um, no, you don't need to use the skill. You can just inspect the body."

Or even just:

"You find the archeologist's notes and drawings describing a bizarre alien artifact, which seems to have inspired some kind of religious behavior among the crew."

"Ooh ooh I'm skilled at xeno-esotericism. Would you say that's relevant here?"

"Yeah this is literally exactly what that sort of thing is for. Textbook case."

"So what stat should I roll with it?"

"Roll? Oh, none. You can just read the notes and draw conclusions."

Almost every die roll that happened was during combat, and those were almost always combat checks and speed checks, obviously. There's a very good chance that your skills simply won't matter.

EDIT: a bunch of people misunderstood what I was trying to explain about our experience with the skill system so evidently I need to clarify. My bad, I hope this does a better job.

The examples I gave were not instances of me forgoing a stat roll and granting the player an auto-success simply for having the skill. I mean, that sounds like a fine mechanic and all, but it's not how skills work in this game, and the whole point is that I'm trying to evaluate the game RAW.

When I said "anytime a skill was relevant, there was no roll," I mean that there was no roll because the situation in that moment just didn't have enough pressure to justify a roll. Like, unrelated to whether or not the player character would have had a bonus or penalty or whatever, the skill doesn't get used because there's no hacking involved in just looking at a computer screen. There's no terrible immediate consequence if you "fail" to interpret the wounds on a dead body. If I had a player roll Intellect+Xeno-esotericism when reading the archeologist's notes and then they failed the check, what's the horrible consequence they suffer in that moment? These just aren't situations that call for checks to begin with.

Some have misinterpreted me as saying that I was calling skills, like, too good. That they nullify opportunities to roll dice. Quite the opposite. If anything, I actually think the bonuses are a little too small for my taste, but the point is that the natural circumstances of most situations during the adventure nullify opportunities to maybe roll dice, and therefore nullify the chance to benefit from the skills.

Stress doesn't really work. Because dice rolls were so rare, that breaks the stress system. Everyone begins the game with 2 stress already, but the main way they gain more is by failing on dice rolls, and it's not like you're going to fail every dice roll you make. So if you, as an individual character, only make about 2-4 dice rolls all session, then you'll only gain about 1-2 stress from what is ostensibly the primary source of stress. And if stress levels stay low, then you don't get to see anyone panic.

However, I should now concede that I made a huge GMing mistake during session 1: I kept thoughtlessly giving players stress automatically when I should have been calling for fear saves instead. It was my first time running the game, I was bound to get a rule wrong, and this was it. In nearly every situation where it would have made sense to roll a fear save, I instead just said "you gain 1 point of stress." I was giving it out like candy. The players in session 1 probably accumulated at least twice as much stress as the players in session 2.

And yet that still wasn't enough. In all three sessions, I only had one player accumulate more than 10 stress. And it wasn't in session 1, either. It was in session 3, because the monster in The Screaming on the Alexis has a special ability to inflict big chunks of stress on you instead of just one at a time. Which, I should point out, is a facet of the adventure scenario and not part of the rules system. Maybe if that sort of thing were found in every single scenario you play then it would fix the issue, but the baseline rules aren't going to get you there at all.

Panic doesn't really work. This is easily the worst thing of all. There are a bunch of panic triggers, but they're all pretty rare. "Encountering a strange and horrifying entity for the first time" is a good start, but I decided to step it up a notch and call for a panic check every time the players encountered a strange entity. And yet even then, there were only a handful of panic checks in each session, which nearly every player succeeded nearly every time anyway. And the few times they failed?

It didn't fucking matter at all.

Earlier I said that the panic table looked very scary. But in practice, I realize now that it's surprisingly limp. Most of the results, especially the ones on the lower half (i.e. the ones you're actually possibly maybe occasionally going to see happen ever), inflict a penalty that is usually kind of negligible. Here's the ones that have been rolled so far:

• NERVOUS. Gain 1 Stress.
• COWARD. Gain a new Condition: You must make a Fear Save to engage in violence, otherwise you flee.
• DOOMED. Gain a new Condition: You feel cursed and unlucky. All Critical Successes are instead Critical Failures.
• SUSPICIOUS. For the next week, whenever someone joins the crew (even if they only left for a short period of time), make a Fear Save or gain 1 Stress.
• OVERWHELMED. Disadvantage on all rolls for the next 1d10 minutes. Increase Minimum Stress by 1.

"Nervous" is just turning the rare instance of an actually-failed panic check into the same thing as a failed anything-else check. It's delaying the consequence, likely ensuring that the consequence is never suffered at all because the session will have ended before you fail another panic check. Both "Nervous" and "Coward" didn't even matter because the only times a player is at meaningful risk of failing a panic check is near the end of the session anyway, after they've finally accumulated a decent stress total. "Doomed" didn't matter because, again, you almost never make dice rolls anyway, which means you almost never get crits. "Suspicious" might be relevant if you're playing a campaign instead of a one-shot, but also I'm pretty sure that taking off a week or longer in between adventures is pretty standard anyway.

Only "Overwhelmed" actually had an impact, because it happened to a player in the middle of a fight. It was cool. But if it had happened outside of a fight, it wouldn't have meant anything. And the rest of them? Could not possibly have mattered less. For a game with such a reputation for being brutal and unforgiving, I was shocked to see how much it actually pulls its punches.

I ran session 3 a little differently. I changed my personal criteria for dice rolls. Normally I would only ask for a stat check or saving throw if 1) there's a non-trivial chance of failure, and 2) there's a meaningful consequence of failure. But this time, I tried to justify any and every opportunity for a dice roll that I could. When a player wanted to use their skills to do mundane tasks under no pressure at all, I still had them roll anyway and just came up with some bullshit ridiculous consequence if they failed. In the end, there were probably closer to 30 dice rolls made all session. Waaaaaaay more. Between that and the monster that doled out big chunks of stress, we finally got to see a little bit more of the mechanics in action.

… And I was still really let down by them. It still takes forever for players to accumulate stress. Even if you do make a panic check and you fail, it's not actually going to be a consequence worth caring about. Even if you have a relevant skill for a check, the bonuses are actually pretty small. The trauma responses were finally used, but... well, again, they just tie into the stress and panic system anyway, which doesn't matter, and therefore the trauma responses also don't matter.

Combat often doesn't work, either. Whether or not you'll see any consequences from violence really depends on the circumstances in a way that isn't promising for an allegedly deadly, old-school game. Ypsilon 14 has a weak-ish zombie. It was trivial to kill. Late in the session, I said "fuckit" and threw in one more. It was also trivial to kill, despite getting a surprise round in. And when I tweaked the scenario for session 2, I added a ton more zombies. I thought that would add a lot of danger, force the players to be more cautious. Classic OSR method.

Nope, that's when I discovered that Mothership is actually an extremely action-oriented hack n' slash game. Seriously, those players didn't hesitate whatsoever to just start mowing through zombie after zombie and they were completed rewarded for it. Cautious and clever tactics weren't needed at all. It was everything the OSR tells you combat shouldn't be, everything that Mothership itself tells you that combat shouldn't be.

Okay, but both scenarios also each have a big, chonky, powerful monster as well, right? Can you hack n' slash through those? Maybe! In all three sessions, at least one player died to the big scary strong monster, which sounds about right. But only in session 3 did my players overcome it with a little bit of cunning. In sessions 1 and 2, the players mostly just did straight attacks for round after round, dealing a ton of damage while also effectively outmaneuvering it. Total brute force method. And all this action-heavy gameplay also revealed something else that was disappointing...

The wound system also didn't work. Counterintuitively, even though I do prefer a deadly game, I was disappointed with how much death there was instead of, y'know, a more interesting consequence that could have been inflicted under the same circumstances. The mechanics for damage actually render the wound table almost completely irrelevant. Every single time someone took enough damage to suffer a wound, it also instantly killed them anyway.

No seriously, that's exactly how it works. I've seen the wound table rolled on 5 times now. Two of those times, the resulting wound was "instant death," so no actual wound effect. The other three times actually resulted in a "bleeding" effect, but the effect was never used because the target was also instantly killed from the remaining damage of the very same attack which inflicted that wound. The wound system simply has way more granularity than it needs. Why even have it at all? It's functionally the same as standard OSR "instant death at 0 HP."

The design seems at odds with the playstyle. All of the math seems to assume that the players will be rolling constantly, even though you're instructed not to. If you'll indulge me, I'd like to crunch some numbers real quick.

You begin the session with 2 stress. That translates to a 1-in-10 chance of failing a panic check. Not very high. What would we consider a significant amount? I would say a 1-in-3 chance of failure is high enough to begin worrying about, so let's aim for that. That's about 7 stress.

In order to get your total to 7, you'll need to acquire 5 stress during the adventure. That's 5 failed checks or saving throws. Keep in mind that you also succeed about half the checks or saving throws you make*, so you'll probably need to attempt around 10.

*The common wisdom is that characters in Mothership are expected to fail the majority of their checks and saves, but I don't think that's quite accurate. Yes, your baseline percentage chance is usually below 50%. However, when you roll with advantage, with a skill bonus, or both, the percentage usually goes above 50%. And players usually try to play to their strengths. They aren't as likely to even attempt tasks they're likely to fail. So in my experience, and for the sake of simplicity, I'm saying the average rate of success is about 50/50.

So you first have to make around 10 checks / saves just to have failed enough times to accumulate a total of about 7 stress, meaning you now have a 1/3 chance of failing a panic check. Which itself means that you can expect to make about 3 panic checks before you fail one. All of this in a game where, in a whole adventure, you probably won't roll 5 checks or saves (let alone 10) and probably won't roll 3 panic checks.

And then, when you actually do fail a panic check, it probably won't do anything at all except maybe make you marginally more likely to fail the next one, which itself probably won't do anything except maybe make you marginally more likely to fail the next one, and so on.

So why should the players be afraid to take risks? Why shouldn't they act like reckless idiots? Even if they're actively trying to roll dice as often as possible, and even if they're failing constantly, their chances of suffering the consequences remain extremely slim. Let's take another look at the panic table. Here's a result that catches my eye which seems like it would actually be a serious "oh fuck" moment to see in play:

DEATH WISH. For the next 24 hours, whenever encountering a stranger or known enemy, make a Sanity Save or immediately attack them.

Except that it's number 13 on the chart, meaning that you'd need to roll a 13 on your failed panic check, meaning that you'd need to have a stress total of at least 13 when you made the panic check. What would that take? Well, probably at least 11 failed checks and saves up to that point, or about 20+ attempted checks and saves. And remember that we're just talking about one individual member of the party!

See what I mean when I say that the math seems designed with the assumption that you'll be rolling, like, a lot? I guess if you were playing a campaign and you never ever ever attempted to lower your stress between adventures, then maybe by the fourth or fifth adventure things could start to get serious. But that's an awful lot of time you're free to spend carelessly gallivanting around like a bonehead before the rules punish you for it.

As a matter of fact, the Warden's Operation Manual has a table called "Difficulty Settings," which really got my hopes up. It lists a whole bunch of suggestions for houserules you could adopt. But for some reason, most of them are for making the game easier. Are you kidding me?

I have previously written about how much there is to learn from actually playing a game rather than just reading it. It's a very weird blind spot that I think people underestimate. I mean, I first read the rules for Mothership years ago. I probably could have seen this coming. But so many things can slip past you while reading a ruleset because it looks like it works on paper. It makes perfect sense when you read it and you know exactly how it works... yet when you put the thing into action and see the results first hand, they might surprise you.

Good God Dwiz, What's Your Problem?

All of these complaints may strike you as nonsensical. A game where almost no dice are rolled and the players almost never relied on mechanics may sound like the ideal OSR experience. Why would I be dissatisfied with that? Well to answer that, I need to explain to you my critical lens.

You see, since the dawn of time, there has always been a significant segment of gamers that eventually arrive at this belief: "rules should get out of the way."

The basic sentiment is that rules are a necessary evil, an unwelcome disruption to the flow of the game that are best minimized however possible. The perfect session is one in which nobody ever pulls out the rulebook and everyone just plays pure pretend straight from the imagination. Rules are strictly to be consulted to resolve uncertainties that arise, to answer questions that the GM either doesn't know off-hand or they can't answer impartially. "How deadly was that fall?" "How much does partial cover affect my chances of being hit?" "How much time does it take to search a room?" If we could play the game without any rules at all, we eagerly would. But alas, it's impossible to run an RPG without some amount of crunch, so we must grit our teeth and get it over with.

What a depressingly utilitarian view of game design.

Don't get me wrong, I fully understand how people arrive at this belief. Anyone who's played a shitty and frustrating system with too much crunch has thought to themselves, "God, do we really need all this? Can't we just go on a damn adventure?" And thankfully, that means there's always been a thriving market for rules-lite gaming.

But my own personal view of the "role of rules" is almost exactly the opposite. That:

1. Rules are not necessary at all. They're a completely optional part of RPGs and can easily be removed.
   

   AND

2. I still usually choose to include them anyway because I want to use them!

It is so bizarre to me how often I hear people casually repeat the claim that "rules are a necessary evil" as though it's an obvious given. Just in case you're reading this and you're unaware, I'm going to let you in on a secret: tons and tons of people run totally freeform games. It's called FKR. I've run countless FKR games for years. I've played in countless FKR games. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours worth. I know how to run an imaginary roleplay scenario without any dice, any cards, any resources or tokens, any rulers or grids, any numbers. This isn't a superpower. You can learn to do it too. Hell, this is how nearly all children roleplay just instinctively.

So why oh why would I choose to bind myself to the terrible prison of crunch if I possess this gift? Because game design can do cool things! I'm not saying that system always matters, but I prefer it when it does matter. I mean for Pete's sake, if I really had no interest at all in the ways that rules can shape a gaming experience, then I'd never play board games!

jay Dragon has argued in favor of rules because a lot of people actually like being put into a cage. Limitations can be exciting because they provide challenge. I couldn't agree more. This is why I like having restrictive equipment space and breakable weapons and armor and spellcasting that can backfire and tracking time consumption in a dungeoncrawl and all those sorts of things. I like the struggle.

And personally, I'd go even further. When I choose to play using a fleshed-out set of rules rather than purely from our imaginations, it's because of a belief that following those rules will produce a more interesting experience than we otherwise would have had. I'm placing my faith in the idea that, if everyone at the table plays according to this agreed-upon set of constraints, it'll lead us somewhere we might not have found on our own. Not even necessarily something difficult, just something different and distinct.

Sure, I could just say, "alright yeah the monster swiped its claw at you and kicked your ass. You're out." But what if we roll on this death and dismemberment table?

Sure, I could just handwave all the commerce parts of your trade caravan campaign and focus only on the people and creatures you meet as you travel. But what if we also use these simple rules for trade goods, market research, and bartering so that you have some light finance-management gameplay layered on top?

Sure, I could just let you all drive your racecar as you describe. But what if we use this risky hidden information mechanic that makes teamwork tricky to coordinate instead?

Sure, I could just let you all take whatever actions in whatever order makes sense. But what if we use this hilarious bluffing-based initiative system where everyone's turn keeps getting interrupted and people play cards to use dumb gimmick powers?

Game designers put a lot of work and thought into the mechanics, the guidelines, the options they offer, etc. What is all of that for if not to sculpt the act of play towards a specific shape they have in mind? I'm excited to experience what their crunch is designed to make me experience. So what did I want from the rules of Mothership, you ask?

I wanted my players to feel like the excitement of picking their skills from the skill tree would pay off. They spent a good amount of time weighing their options, deciding between what they thought would be optimal or what they thought would be fun... but it turned out their choices didn't matter.

I wanted to see the trauma responses mechanically reinforce the different ways in which these characters respond to extreme circumstances, reinforce roleplaying behavior with consequences. I can imagine how each one could generate new complications to raise the stakes of the situation... but it turns out they won't be triggered.

I wanted the different wound effects to add a bit of tactical complexity to combat. Each wound can hinder you in different ways, complicating the situation beyond a simple back-and-forth trading of blows... but it turns out that you'll be dead at that point anyway, so in reality you'll never see a fight more complicated than a boring slugfest.

I wanted the panic mechanic to do... literally anything at all, ever.

If you prefer a game where the rules are only ever a rare interruption, then don't you want them to be a worthwhile interruption?

Of course, jay also makes the point that rules can also shape gameplay even when they aren't being used. Ram has also talked about this, writing about the value of engaging with the "negative space" of the rules. I agree with this as well. It's a crucial principle of minimalist design. Many people I've talked to have claimed that, as a punishing OSR game, it incentivizes you to avoid engaging with mechanics, thereby training you to play in the OSR style!

But like, I'm sorry, I have a really hard time imagining that happening with this game. I know exactly the phenomenon being described. I've seen that very process take place during Knave, during Dungeon Crawl Classics, during Traveller, during Mausritter, etc. But I never saw any evidence that this was going on during Mothership. If anything, you should welcome the opportunity for your character to lose their marbles.

I Want Every Piece to Matter

Earlier I said that all three sessions were pretty fun, and I've also claimed that "system matters," yet I still don't credit the system for providing much of the fun. How does that make any sense? Well, because even if I think that system does matter, I also equally believe that other things matter, too.

Can we get a movement started for "adventure matters" or "setting matters" or just "level design matters"? Because I feel like people really underestimate just how much of their enjoyment of a gaming session comes from that part.

After each of my three sessions, I asked the players what they thought, and most of them said they liked it. Some even specifically said that they liked the system. But when I asked for details, everyone just listed aspects of the adventure scenarios we played. The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 has these really immersive audio file "handouts," plus a fan made a website that simulates the scenario's computer terminal for even more immersion. Gimmicky, for sure. But also really fucking cool, right? The Screaming on the Alexis is just a solid dungeoncrawl, starting from the rock-solid premise that "derelict ships are the sci-fi equivalent of fantasy dungeons" and executing on it superlatively. My friend Mr. Wasteland recently wrote of a Mothership session he played at Gen Con. He had nice things to say, but what specifically did he praise?

1. There was a real-life ticking clock for the ship's life support system.
2. The players gained one stress for each new room we entered, justified by the fact that it was scorching hot in the ship, and it was stressing everyone out.

Both of which come from the scenario, not the game.

And you know what I love about players? They're so good at roleplaying.

Credit to my players, because they did their best to fulfill the expectations that the mechanics wouldn't. Each of them tried to do things that it seemed like their class should do, tried to do things based on what their skillset would make sense for. Thus, we can say that the classes and skills did indeed function as a roleplaying prompt... but nothing more than that. We could have achieved the same thing by playing an FKR sci-fi game where character creation consisted entirely of, "alright, what's the basic gist of who your character is and what sort of stuff they do?" and then used that as a jumping off point.

In other words, we could have had the same experience or even better by just playing the same adventures with the same character ideas but using the rules of Traveller or Into the Odd or Lasers and Feelings or even just FKR. In fact, those first two sessions were almost functionally indistinguishable from if I ran the scenario using no rules at all. Literally just play pretend sci-fi horror like we were kids. The third session saw more mechanics get used, but only because I forced it, and all they really did was get in the way.

When the android was android-y, it came from the player in spite of the rules. When the scientist was scientist-y, it was in spite of the rules. When the topics described in the skill tree were relevant, it was entirely unrelated to the actual rules for skills. When players expressed fear or acted cautiously, it was in spite of the stress and panic results. And when time came for violence, the outcome depended entirely on the specific stats of the monster being fought and not at all on the rules.

The Good Parts

I don't entirely dissent with the consensus opinion. Let it not be carved into stone that "Dwiz hates Mothership." It would be both untrue and, more importantly to me, would destroy my reputation.

This game has gold standard layout and visual information design. It has excellent packaging, generously boxing tons of components together and dividing the rules and advice into slim and focused booklets optimized for use-at-the-table. It has literally the best character sheet ever made, which also functions as an extremely convenient walkthrough for quick character creation. It has excellent artwork and delicious sci-fi worldbuilding. It has a creator who seems like a pretty cool guy, plus a dedicated community of fan creators. And it has a huuuge collection of tight and polished adventure scenarios you could just run forever.

Which is to say, most of the things that people praise about this game, I agree with. Most of what draws people to it are indeed very awesome. I just dislike, y'know, the main event itself.

One Last Extremely Specific Piece of Criticism

I know this review is already long and it managed to stay pretty focused on a strong thesis up until this point, but I'm throwing this in as well. I think the rulebook really needs to have a page offering some more details of what an android is and how it works. I understand the intention behind keeping it vague and flexible, but the specific answers mattered all the goddamn time.

Do they need to eat or breathe or sleep? Can they record visual or audio data? Do they bleed as a man bleeds? Can they be mistaken for a human? Do scanners detect them when looking for life signs? It's not hard to come up with your own answers, of course. But you will have to nail them down, and you'll have to do it almost immediately, and you might make the wrong call. The consequences of these rulings kind of matter a lot. Whether androids are more like Ash from Alien, a replicant from Blade Runner, or C-3PO from Star Wars, or anything in between makes an enormous difference in so many situations, and every player comes to the table with different expectations.

I'm really happy that android is one of the four main character options. It's awesome. Every android player character I had was eager to lean in on robot tropes, and they were always the most entertaining character in each group. But while I was happy to say yes to their robot-y ideas, I was also pretty nervous to commit to things like "no, you don't need to breathe" in a scenario where vacuum environments were a major obstacle. Trust me, I'm normally a big "rulings over rules" kind of guy. But if you find yourself making half a dozen rulings on the same subject every time you play a game, then maybe that's exactly the sort of thing the game's rulebook should take the time to cover. The rules don't need to be complex, they just need to be codified.

Conclusion

I like Mothership the product. It sets an example for the industry which all other RPGs should follow. More games should be putting this kind of effort into their layout, their editing, their packaging, their creativity, and their artwork. More games should come in boxed sets with everything needed to play. I support Mothership the product and want to see it succeed.

But Mothership the game? As something that you actually play? It fell completely flat. I would still probably play a lot of these adventure scenarios, but I doubt I would play them using this ruleset.

I would still probably recommend it to most people, just for the sheer fact that they're not very likely to share my own mindset regarding rules systems. As previously mentioned, most of my players did enjoy it, after all. Maybe they know better than me. But my time spent playing Mothership has given me a lot of insights into what a game system can actually offer, and more importantly, how it can succeed or fail to deliver on that offer.

-Dwiz