Space Bastards: Amorality and Consequences, or Why You Need a Campaign

I played a one-shot of an Into the Odd variant my good friend and fellow podcast is creating, called Into the Oort, yesterday. It was a lot of fun and worked very well. It did remind me, however, that while one shots can be enjoyable, it is very hard to imbue them with any meaning. In short, PCs in a one shot have free reign to be absolute, utter sociopaths, because long-term consequences for their actions do not really exist. And while this is fun, there is something superficial about it: one shots are a recipe for, basically, being evil. Or, in this case, Space Bastards.

Into the Oort is a quasi-hard SF setting: the Oort Cloud has been colonised by human beings who have lost contact with the rest of the Solar System, and you travel around it trading, adventuring, and getting into general Traveller-style derring-do. I was Gamble Pohl, pig-faced captain of The Statistical Violation; the other player was Verbal Creed, my "Number One". Together we did lots of bad things. From the Referee's AP:

Gamble Pohl and Verbal Creed are adventurers in the Oort Cloud, with Gamble being the de facto captain of a decommissioned warship called the Statistical Violation, a spaceship with a skeleton crew but two profitable cargoes. 

They set off to deliver the first cargo, a shipment of guns to an isolationist community. The ship is stopped and boarded on the way by a border patrol from an asteroid, but our "heroes" turn the tables on the border patrol, and a few days later leave them adrift in a shuttlecraft a long way from home or rescue. Delivering the guns to the isolationists, they set off on a long journey to deliver their remaining cargo - four bodies in suspension pods that are being sold to an organ-harvester.
En route they detect several ships landed or crashed on a small asteroid, and a scan reveals some kind of base under the surface. After a small amount of exploration and antique-finding, they destroy some automated guard drones and confuse a weird skeleton-in-a-mechsuit. Following a blood trail they find a party of frightened explorers who have barricaded themselves in to a storage room. They reassure them that they will help...

...then go to the surface of the asteroid and proceed to steal their ships. 

Now in charge of a fleet of three ships, the new Admiral Gamble Pohl and Captain Verbal Creed proceed to the organ-harvester, selling the four bodies they originally had, and another twenty-four colonists that were in suspension on one of the other ships. 

Organ-harvester: "These are children and families."Gamble Pohl: "We're willing to consider a bulk rate." 

Having secured a hefty payment for the totally innocent and unsuspecting colonists' organs, they set off to look for somewhere to upgrade their spaceship... 

Technically they didn't kill anyone in the several in-game months that passed, but I can't help but feel that they earned the nickname that one of them started using: Space Bastards.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not doing any hand-wringing about Bad Things Happening in Games here. It's more that, in a one-shot, there's no particular reason to worry about negative consequences, and hence things end up feeling, ultimately, shorn of impact. The people on the asteroid and the 24 colonists in suspended animation were even less real than ordinary NPCs, because they only existed for the single session in which we were playing. They didn't have any friends or relatives to mourn them or come after us for revenge, and there wasn't any authority which could arrest and punish us for dicking them over, because the timeline was finite and nothing would exist the next day. So everything became ephemeral, and it is very easy to act in an amoral way when things are ephemeral: people who aren't going to exist in a few hours time don't really feel like people; bad things done in a reality which will disappear by the next day don't really feel like bad things; crimes committed without threat of retaliation or punishment don't feel like crimes. We, as players, were free to satisfy our ids without conscience or fear.

I liked the session a lot, and we had a very good time, but one-shots are simply no replacement for a proper long-term campaign of indefinite length.