Interesting situation.

The group consists of:

Technician / Slicer (No Piloting or Astrogation skills, but has Mechanic and Computer)

Colonist / Politico (Has Charm and Negotiation)

Hired Gun / Mercenary Soldier (Has Gunnery)

Smuggler / Pilot (Has the Debt Obligation)

Under the circumstances the YT-1300 was said to owned by the Smuggler. However, how much does he have to pay the others as crew or how much do they have to pay him as passengers? None of this seems to be in the books. Making the others co-owners was going to stretch the games credibility as the Pilot was the only character with the back-story to suggest he owned the ship. All the other PC's have skills that make them useful to the ship in one way or other however, so they can be used as crew.

Any help here would be appreciated.

We run our group as an unofficial company. The ship is one of the company's assets, so we all own a share of it.

Unfortunately the player's back-stories made trying to use that idea more or less impossible. What I am trying to find is the costs of paying crew or what passengers pay the owner. Also some regular cargo costs per encumbrance would be really useful.

I can't help you much with paying the crew; for simplicity's sake I'd say it just so happens to be exactly the same amount as the owner charges for food, a cabin and the air they breathe.

Here are some quick house rules I whipped up for shipping cargo for when the players just want to make some money without it being an integral part of the adventure:

If the PCs are rolling to find a cargo for themselves, use a Negotiation check. The base roll provides them with 30% of their cargo capacity’s worth of cargo. For every s beyond the first they get +10%, and for every f they lose 10%.

Then, calculate price. The base price is typically 20 credits per encumbrance. For every a this goes up by 2 credits, and for every t it decreases by 2 credits.

The PCs are given B and b dice according to their general reputation. Being reliable shippers typically nets them a B, while having a history of failed shipments gives one or more b. If their Obligation is 70 or higher they get one b, and if it’s 30 or lower they receive a B.

When buying and selling their own cargo, use the table below to determine the price of the cargo by type.

Low tech: 44 credits/Enc.

Mid tech: 52 credits/Enc.

High tech: 60 credits/Enc.

Metals: 48 credits/Enc.

Minerals: 40 credits/Enc.

Foodstuff: 48 credits/Enc.

Medicine: 56 credits/Enc.

If the pilot views the other members as useful, there's no reason why he can't just be like, "You do your part and we split the profits."

If you really want to divide it up differently, I wouldn't go with set credit amounts to pay the crew. Instead, I'd go with a percentage of whatever they make from the job they happen to be doing based on how useful that crewmember's skills are in realation to that job.

I would think payment would come from the jobs they take in the form of some percentage, much like other edge groups. Unless they work for some galactic corporation and draw a paycheck.

Smuggler / Pilot (Has the Debt Obligation)

Just an observation, but technically couldn't the Debt Obligation holder own the ship? Just sayin...

On a more serious Note, Mouthy Merc is probably on a good track. The net profits from each run would probably be divided into shares and the shares distributed to the crew based on seniority and job.

So for example just pulling some numbers outta my motivator... Captain gets 3 shares, firstmate/copilot 2, crew chief/loadmaster/engineer 1.5, crew 1, rookie/trainee/greenhorn .5.

So say you make a run with a ship that has a crew of a captain, a firstmate, a load master and an engineer, three crewers and a rookie. You take the profits, take out the repair/replenishment costs and a percentage to cover ship upgrades, incidentals, company assets, licensing, ect and you are left with 15,000 credits. You your crew total comes out to 11.5 total shares. Soooo 15,000/11.5= 1,304. So Captain gets 3,912, the 1st mate 2608, the load master and engie 1956 each, the crewers 1,304 each, and the n00b gets 652 and a feeling of accomplishment.

Now among your players who gets how many shares is up to them...

The ship is owned by an outside Obligation, and the ship gets 1 equal share of any loot the players plunder in their endeavors.

The ship generally gets first crack at any moneys for repairs... which is frequent, and considerable. Upgrades have generally come out of the player's pockets.

Other than that I haven't dwelt on the details.

The human does.

The human does.

That's species-ist, core world scum!

The human does.

That's species-ist, core world scum!

This coming from some sort of bird...

"Squawk! That's species-ist! That's species-ist! Squawk!"

I would remind you that The Empire has brought peace and prosperity to the galaxy. And we have done so in the most humane way possible. The last thing The Empire needs is advice from some Egg Laying Nerf Herder!

Lets leave the brain work to those with the brains, shall we?

That is all true, I suppose. And yes, I would love a cracker.

A single session of PvP play can give 90% of the answer to this question. Hopefully the "owner" can operate the ship.

SOmeone needs a captains license and technically he would be the "owner"

UHF had a good idea, having the smuggler "own" the ship due to a debt obligation that he'll need to pay back. If the others help him with the obligation, they can become part owners of the ship.

You could also give the smuggler a junker ship and have him give partial ownership to the crew if they help him fix it up and maintain it.

End results the same, with the group owning the ship.

I wouldn't assume that the pilot always owns the ship. They could be hired on to fly just as easily as a mechanic is for maintenance. The backstories should determine who (if anyone) holds the pink slip. (There's a Malcom Reynolds comment in here somewhere)

In our group, it's the Doctor. He won it off a guy in a Sabacc game. He usually is the least useful person in either flying or maintaining the ship, but he's the owner.

We've got a Gand Gadgeteer, Twi'lek Scoundrel, Wookie Marauder, Bothan Thief, and Droid Assassin.

The Gand entered the captains' cabin when we first acquired the ship, flooded it with highly concentrated amonia gas. The droid can come and go as it pleases but has no dreams of grandeur, no one else bought Rebreathers, so I'd say the guy who made the captain's cabin uninhabitable to everyone else owns the ship.

Just something to consider .

I'd say it's entirely up to the group as to who the proper owner of the ship would be in any given campaign.

In an EotE one-shot that I played in back during the Beta, the ship belonged to the Smuggler/Pilot, with the rest of the group "coming together" for a job that likely got us into some hot water with both the local crime syndicate and the Imperials.

For a one-shot adventure that I ran (was supposed to be the launch point for a campaign, but never got past that initial session), the group ship (a second-hand L19 freighter) was mostly owned by the Explorer/Fringer, a Twi'lek free trader that was determined to make her fortune in the space lanes rather than shaking her goods in a skimpy costume for leering spacers, with a doughty Wookiee grease monkey (Tech/Mechanic) as her first mate and having a partial stake in the ship (due to his having done a lot of the repair work).

In the EotE Skype game I was playing in, the group ship was effectively "on loan" from a Mid Rim university as part of doing a recon of a remote Outer Rim site for a possible excavation (turned out we were able to glean most of what there was to glean on our recon trip). We were allowed to keep the ship in exchange for performing future jobs of that nature, and while my PC was the pilot, he certainly didn't pretend to have any claim to ownership of our beat-up YT-1300.

We took the Krayt Fang after we killed the previous owner. It's registered under my character's false name due to me being a human, but I don't have any claim to it honestly. We all are equal owners to it.

We took the Krayt Fang after we killed the previous owner. It's registered under my character's false name due to me being a human, but I don't have any claim to it honestly. We all are equal owners to it.

Did you keep the Wookie furs on the floor?

We took the Krayt Fang after we killed the previous owner. It's registered under my character's false name due to me being a human, but I don't have any claim to it honestly. We all are equal owners to it.

Did you keep the Wookie furs on the floor?

Nah our wookie flipped **** and killed the owner when he saw that haha. It was pretty epic.

We took the Krayt Fang after we killed the previous owner. It's registered under my character's false name due to me being a human, but I don't have any claim to it honestly. We all are equal owners to it.

Did you keep the Wookie furs on the floor?

Nah our wookie flipped **** and killed the owner when he saw that haha. It was pretty epic.

He must be really happy that you got to use the floor plan. Personally, I'd be like moving my mini on top of that spot on the map. "Yep, just cleaning my shoes. That's what this run is good for."

I asked him if they were a relative haha.

Bloodtooh,

In regards to your specific situation, I'd say take a page from the source material.

How much did Han Solo (owner and captain of the Millennium Falcon) charge Leia to ferry her away from Hoth? Or to let Lando fly the Falcon during the second Death Star battle? In the EU, what rates does Han charge Luke or Leia or Lando to have the Falcon fly them from one point to the next?

Simple answer is: that he doesn't. He only charged Ben and Luke for the trip to Alderaan in ANH because he needed the money and these two were complete strangers. At that point, he figured he'd drop them off, get paid, and probably never see them again. Once he got tied up in the Rebel Alliance, he certainly wasn't charging for his time (apart from getting Alliance techs to help with the occasional repairs and restocking the Falcon's consumables).

In the case of your group, while the Smuggler might own the ship, he really shouldn't be charging fares from the rest of the party, particularly if they are truly working as a group.

Just have a round table discussion to discuss it. If you stole the ship than having a legitimate seeming face is preferable to "Your registration does not match any known owner. Prepare to be boarded."

Your payment to the pilot could be to maintain the ship before giving him an equal cut. That way he technically gets more because it's "his" ship but he has to keep you around because he can't fund its maintenance on his own or solo pilot very well. The rest of the party gets a fair amount based on the quality of the jobs - for my crew, amongst 8 of us - this typically meant about 300 credits per job on average, the rest going into the party pool to fund larger expenditures (and our face character's freaking robot dog). The pilot owns the ship but the rest of us pretty much have the contacts to get the jobs and more unconventional needs (my connection to the Bothan spynet got an imperial mark removed).

The way my game is run:

The pilot clearly owns the ship, but isn't the leader of the company.

Reward is earned.

Maintenance taken out of total reward for the ship/crew needs before disbursement.

Remainder assessed, even amount given to all crew.

Leftovers from that placed in group fund.

The group fund is the real kicker, since it is typically many times the size of our individual wallets we negotiate with each other on spending it (except for our face player who bought a robot dog last time - we're going to resolve that at some point). Typically we use it to "top off" purchases we can just barely not afford individually, and when we have enough we upgrade the ship, speeders, skiff, etc. The whole system technically keeps us dependent on each other, although at times we've been split up and decided to keep windfalls between the ones that did the job (basically when people don't show for the game). This money strategy has been very useful at keeping our characters from getting too rich and just equipping our way out of having to use good tactics - we can't afford massive repairs and such so we've actually talked our way out of 2/3rds of our potential confrontations in space.

Ironically since we're playing Firefly style, and given that our pilot is great at flying but seems to suck at astrogation, every time we exit hyperspace something goes wrong with the ship and we end up spending more on repairs.

Great solution for that, just replace the robot dog's brain with an astromech's and bingo! Instant let's-not-fly-into-a-star ability. Actually it sounds like you have a great roleplaying group, everybody has their own goals and agendas and something to keep them all strapped for cash.