Mothership is a fantastic RPG, focused on horror science fiction. It comes with a starting adventure module called Another Bughunt that is more or less the movie Aliens. Most games are low-tech sci fi like Alien/Aliens, and characters are at constant risk of death. And while games like 5e make character death feel… bad… Mothership does it right.

The reason this works so well in Mothership is that character creation takes like, 2 minutes:

• choose an archetype (Marine, Scientist, Android, Teamster)
• roll 7 stats in order
• archetype tweaks your stats, gives you a panic response
• choose a handful of skills (from a short list, with a super clear layout on the sheet)
• choose a trinket and patch (like the kind on your jacket)

That’s it. It’s fast. It’s over in minutes. It creates equally death-prone but interesting characters quickly.

So when your character dies… you haven’t invested like, 5 hours in optimizing the feat+subclass+prestige class+pun pun bullshit and now you feel like the only reasonable thing to do is throw a fucking tantrum because your shiny toy got broken at the playground.

No, you get to get back into the action fast.

And Mothership does this without sacrificing idiosyncracy.

Character investment is usually inversely correlated with time spent creating them

Obvi this isn’t always true, but generally the more time the mechanics make you spend on part of the game, the more you invest in it. That’s just how human attention works.

Which is basically the same as saying it feels shitty when your 5e character dies. Of course you feel shitty. You just spent a quarter of your fucking day creating them.

Mothership rescues this crap with trinkets and patches

The d100 tables for trinkets and patches for Mothership are amazing.

Because now instead of just some random Scientist, I have…

Lyra, the ex-pirate surgeon with a penchant for linquistics.

The ex-pirate thing came about because I rolled trinket: bone knife and patch: jolly roger, and bam, she went from being some random scientist, to a girl who was kidnapped young by pirates, had her education paid for by them, so she could be their ship surgeon, but her life was totally controlled, until she ran away.

This was a character for a one shot, so most of that backstory will never come up.

But fuck me if that isn’t a fucking rich character, which is especially impressive given that all came from the two d100 rolls for the trinket and patch.

tldr

If you’re gonna make a deadly game, character creation has to be cheap. If you want me to drive the character like a stolen car, make it as fast as hotwiring the car to create her.

But that doesn’t have to come at the cost of depth or interesting things.

Fuck yea mothership