Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

I’ve always liked the extra skills that were introduced for Car Wars in ADQ issues 4/2, 7/1, and in the Compendium 2e.  The thing was, though, that we never bought very many of them for our characters.  If you knew you were going to be dueling very much, you maxed out your character points on Driver and Gunner skills– and that was it!  Previously, I suggested using “General” skill point awards from duels and adventures to improve non-combat skills, but after playing Traveller I see there’s a less heavy handed approach to accomplishing the same thing– at least in the case of former Boy Scout Commandoes.

Not everyone can claim to have been a Boy Scout Commando– this is only at the referee’s discretion.  Players using these character generation rules have to use them in sight of their fellow players if they intend to use their characters in a game: you can’t just roll up a hundred characters until you get what you want.  (Go play GURPS if you already know exactly what type of character you want to play!)

To determine your character’s background, first roll up the standard Traveller attributes for your character.  These consist of 6 2d6 rolls applied consecutively to Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, and Social.  Don’t worry if you don’t know when, where, and how to adapt these values to your adventures: a consensus has never really emerged even among Traveller fans.  You could even throw them out altogether when you start playing your character: in a high tech future, skills are going to be a lot more important than attributes.  If they do impact a skill roll, they should never improve a roll 2d6 skill check by more than +1 or +2.

Scouts begin the character generation process at age 12.  Each year they will make rolls to determine if they survive, advance, and if they persevere.  The survival roll is required because like in the corps is dangerous: that really cool character with nifty skills and attributes is likely to improve each year he stays in the corps… but you just might lose him.  Not everyone advances and not everyone stays involved with their troop; rolls for both of those are required each time as well.

To become a scout, roll your Soc attribute or less on 2d6.

To Survive, roll 6 or more on 2D6.  (Add one to your roll if your Dex is 8 or higher.  Add two to your roll if your End is 10 or higher.)

To Advance, roll 9 or more on 2D6.  (Add one to your roll if your Int is 7 or higher.  Add two to your roll if your Edu is 9 or higher.)

To Perservere, roll 7 or more on 2D6.  (Add one if your Str is 9 or higher.)

Each time you advance, you gain a new skill at base level.  When you advance to Tenderfoot, you gain the Handgunner skill.  First Class scouts receive Paramedic skill.  Star scouts gain Driver skill… and Death scouts pick up Gunner skill.  If a scout fails his survival roll, he’s dead.  When you finally get a character to survive the process, you can use the dead ones as fellow scouts from your character’s patrol that all died on a particularly gruesome mission.  If you fail a perseverance roll, then your character quit scouting for some reason and the process ends there; you do pick up your skills for that year, however.

Each year your character remains in scouting, he gets to roll on a skill table.  If he doesn’t have the skill he rolls, then he receives it at base level.  If he already has the skill, then he gains a level in it.  Low ranking scouts roll on the Skill Awards Table.  Star and Death scouts roll on the Merit Badges Table.  Scouts gain these skills in addition to the ones they pick up for advancement.

Skill Awards
1) Survival
2) Stealth
3) Scrounging
4) Handgunner
5) Runner
6) Climber

Merit Badges
1) Driver
2) Gunner
3) Mechanic
4) Explosives
5) Paramedic
6) Martial Arts

The only new skill in the above list is Scrounging– use that to help determine if your character can find supplies, ammo, and/or spare parts for jury-rigging equipment.

Once you survive your 6th year of scouting, fail a perseverance roll, or drop out, add up your character’s total skill levels in Driver and Gunner (including your base levels.)  If you have less than 3 total skill levels there, then round out your character by adding the difference in new skills or skill levels.  For instance, if your character was Driver-1, you could pick up Gunner-0 at this point.  If your character had no skill levels at all in Driver or Gunner, you might pick Mechanic-2 or even Politics-2.

The first character I rolled up with these rules had 9,9,5,7,10, and 3 for attributes and was Handgunner-1, Stealth-0, Scrounging-0, Paramedic-1, Driver-1, Gunner-0, Mechanic-0.  (Yeah, he actually did make his Soc roll to join the troop!)

Note that Car Wars skills are much more effective than their Traveller “level zero” counterparts.  But these rules can be used in either game, because most of the additional skills the Car Wars character receives will be in non-combat disciplines.  In Traveller, adding a few level zero skills to a character will probably not imbalance the game– in fact many referees do so already– but referees should be aware that this system can yield level 1 skills or even level 2 skills as well.  While characters should technically be able to join a standard military service after 4-6 years in the BSC, referees might want to limit this generation process to only those characters that are from a violent post-apocalyptic world– a world whose citizens might not have access to the usual Imperial careers!

In a recent post I remarked that in judging the elegance of a game “it is important to understand the design differences forced upon a game by its [designer's] choice of scope and granularity.”  Chris Warren has similarly concluded that when he attempts to make his game designs elegant, he’s “actually trying to make the game as un-complex as possible… for the amount… of emergence” that he’s trying to foster.  He defines emergence as being patterns that occur during play “that are not directly defined by the rules of the system.”

Under this measure, Conway’s Game of Life does very well.  Chess has many more than its fair share of openings, combinations, and killer tactics for a game with such few rules.  But interactive fiction’s hardwired emphasis on one-shot puzzles cause it to come up short here.  Computer Role Playing Games might, as a class, fair a bit better if the design is good enough: their model world construction might develop an emergent ecology of sorts in the course of play.  But the Role Playing Games from which the CRPGs originally sprang are an entirely different can of worms.

Role Playing Games seem to be so dominated by the requirements of an adaptive and coherent narrative that most rules tend to get thrown out the window in the heat of the game.  Take Traveller as an example: it didn’t take long for players to realize that excessive space combat lead to a depressing amount of character generation.  Sophisticated modern referees such as Karl Gallagher nearly eschew combat altogether– ultra-violence is reserved for orcs in other settings.  The throws that I require in the course of the game are mostly improvised according to each situation.  In terms of hard and fast rules that actually get used, I’d say that about 90% of them come from the character and world generation.  But those rules are only used to prepare for play.  What gets used during a game is probably only a page or two of charts and core rules.

I wish that modern play-tests for RPGs were more like… well… play-tests.  What usually happens is that the rules get tinkered with, proofread, checked for various flame war inducing factors, and so forth.  You rarely hear about, “when I ran a session with this new rule-set, this is what happened.”  You certainly don’t see transcripts of actual sessions!

I wish there were similar tools for RPG testing like what we have for software development.  I’d like to give a new game to five or ten different groups to play with for a few sessions… and I’d like to not only have a full transcript of the games, but I’d like to have each group’s rulebook automatically highlighted for each rules section that actually got used.  I’d especially like to have sections that were flatly contradicted or house-ruled highlighted in red.  That would give the designers some real information to work with, but I’m not sure that many designers care.  Sometimes I wonder if we’ve really come that far since the seventies.

But back to Warren’s remarks….  How can RPG rules be designed to maximize elegance and emergence?  Are there any good examples of this?  I mostly play the old stuff, so I wonder if I’m missing out on any major improvements….

We got together last night for the second installment of our Spinward Marches: 1111 campaign.  Last time we had travelled from Bowman to Flexos.  The players had helped a Darrian merchant out of a little scrape and so were offered positions helping to crew his far trader.  On Flexos, a small adventure seed spun out of control as the players ventured into the unknown.  Tensions ran high as they were sure they were all going to die for nearly every moment.

Going into the second session, I was perhaps a bit overconfident: things had gone well the first time mainly because I was lucky.  I made several mistakes this time around– or at the very least, several sub-optimal choices.  The overall narrative was forwarded somewhat, I learned a few things, and we did have our moments, so it wasn’t a total loss by any stretch.  A weekly Traveller game session is actually pretty demanding, though.

I have a lot of conflicting goals as a referee.  I want the players to have significant choices and I want the narrative to remain coherent.  I want every stat on the character sheets and world listings to impact the game.  I want failure to have real consequences… and yet I don’t want to ruin an adventure just because of a die roll.  I want to emphasize travel across many star systems as the backdrop, but I also want each world to be individualized and recognizable.  I want to balance all of these factors, but I also want everything to flow naturally with a sense of inevitability.  I want to run a good game, but I want the players to be able to take center stage.

Walston and Datrillion were very similar worlds.  The players had two brief stops on both of them and I even got them mixed up myself during the heat of the game.  I need to have a better cheat sheet next time….  One thing that threw me was that a bit part I had planned for Walston was thrown when the medic failed the roll to revive an NPC from Low Berth.  If Doc had only been Medic-2….

Another thing that hampered the session was that I was using Kenneth Bearden’s T4 task system with CT generated characters.  It was all rigged up for people with skill levels between 2 and 5 or so, I think.  Using it with the CT characters left the 2d6 “Average” task rolls too easy and the 3d6 “Difficult” task rolls too hard.  After a valiant effort, I gradually slipped back into roll-your-attribute-or-less on two dice with healthy modifers based on the situation.  I really have to come up with a better system for the next time.  What I really want is to have several possible outcomes with a single roll and  I want to avoid using multiple die rolls to determine a contest or to figure out how long it takes to accomplish something.

Another thing that seemed to drag was that the players would get to a world and then they wouldn’t really know what to do.  On Walston, my planned adventure seed just didn’t seem to fit the narrative when we got there.  On Datrillion, I felt like I set up the seed too overtly.  On both worlds I wanted to show several of the world details instead of just reciting the facts, but I just didn’t seem to pull this off.

Next time, I want to have some sort of play aid that shows a few options for them when they arrive.  This might be somewhat like the map of the town from Ultima I.  The players can decide to go to the bar, find out about tours, look for odd jobs, etc.  The options should vary from world to world, of course, and I should have some NPC’s or scenes worked out the communicate something of the culture of the world.  I want to try to use the old rumor technique to allow the players to investigate what interests them so that I don’t always have to bonk them over the head with an obvious crisis or cliché.

Let’s see what we can come up with for next time….

HERO fans are now set to get their own official rendition of the classic Traveller sci-fi setting, though the “launch” has left a few fans a bit confused.  The “core book” containing the HERO stats of Traveller equipment, classes, ships, etc. is in fact not out yet, though it may turn up this summer.  The official setting for Traveller HERO will be 1248, so the two core 1248 books are currently being listed as part of the launch even though the books are systemless– but the line will not be restricted to 1248 mileux alone.  The two new items for the launch consist of Michael Taylor’s previously released Golden Age starship books converted to HERO stats with bonus computer files for tinkering with them with existing HERO software.

Unsurprisingly, there is a bit of grousing among the faithful, but I don’t really see this as a troubling issue.  I have no idea how big a following the HERO system has, but it can’t be a bad thing for Avenger Enterprises to have at least one modernized rpg system on their plate– especially now that they can’t do T20 anymore.  As long as Avenger puts out two versions of each of their PDF’s (one with Classic Traveller stats and one with HERO stats) things won’t really change that much.  1248 would have existed with or without HERO, and Avenger’s products have tended towards being fairly system agnostic anyway.

While the announcement of the new launch will trigger much rejoicing only among a small slice of an already small slice of Traveller fans, the celebration sale of 20% off should have at least somewhat broader appeal.  If you’ve been putting off purchasing Golden Age Spinward Marches PDFs, or if you’ve wanted to see what 1248 was all about, now’s your chance to see why so many referees are praising Avenger’s products.  The sale lasts until this Friday, so don’t wait too late!

Devin Parker has posted about getting fed up with GURPS Vehicles in his recent attempt to design a space ship for his GURPS Firefly campaign.  He struggles on with it because he’s “sure that all of this data will be useful down the line,” but I just can’t see it.  Ship combat in science fiction falls into just a handful of archetypes– and most of the ship combat systems don’t come close to addressing them.  As far as your actual campaign is concerned, once you’ve got your deck plan, you’re done.  Everything else is driven by the demands of the narrative.

Think about it.  The dramatic action is always focused on a few key heroes.  If the characters are hopelessly outgunned, straight up tactical ship combat will not be the solution: everything will hinge on a clever trick or deus ex machina.  Characters will feverishly work to buy time as crewmen die and systems explode.  The really tough opponents will require the heroic sacrifice of the “fan favorite”– or at least a new non player-character that was introduced for the purpose.

Ship Combat, like any other in-game crisis, will be tailored to the assets and abilities of the heroes.  Rarely will they face a threat that does not require them to all work together.  Individual failure should be possible, but it should also be possible for the team to compensate in some cases.  In the case of a major failure, there might be still one last opportunity to save the innocent, but the players will pay a heavy price and the campaign will necessitate a new tone and direction.  Survivors should be shown the consequences of their decisions in later adventures and should be given an opportunity to set things right only if they weren’t flagrantly reckless or foolhardy.  Players that achieve a reputation for being complete morons should be forced to choose between a life outside of the primary society or perhaps a spot on a suicide squad instead.

But referees will never simply eliminate a group of players just because of a single lucky roll in a tactical ship combat system.  That’s crazy.  Narratives simply do not work that way.  Oh and the repairs and revenues are the same: The players are always going to be struggling from one job to the next– and even if they make it big, they’ll soon have to use their gains to overcome the next obstacle.  If the players are all big-time agents, then they won’t have to track expenses at all.  Do you think money was ever an issue for James Bond??

Players’ abilities will be the focus in any action.  The ship is generally hardwired into the setting and just determines the tone and style of the events.  The players’ choices and sacrifices will have to matter… and at the same time, the plot will have to be adaptable to a great many outcomes.  This is an art, not a science, and hence these techniques are not amenable to hard and fast tactical rule systems.  This makes the stats and figures in your ship designs largely irrelevant to a real game.

You know its got to be bad if Scoble stops blogging….  When the little feed that occasionally pops up through out the day on my system tray began to be noticeably light on tech news, I had to wonder if maybe a nuclear bomb had gone off that I hadn’t heard about.  This was only a short while after he’d pronounced newspapers dead; maybe the media cabal had conspired to silence him….

It turns out that he’s stopped blogging for a week as an act of solidarity with a fellow a-list tech blogger that’s received several disturbing threats on her blog and elsewhere on the web.  (They’re pretty disturbing; don’t look unless you want to be grossed out.)  That’s shouldn’t be that surprising– but what really makes it scary is that the wacked out stuff is coming from, apparently, other well known tech bloggers….  Perhaps what’s most surprising about all of this is that it is in fact… uh…  surprising.  If we’d just paid attention to Clay Shirky, though, we’d have known all along that A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.

(It amazes me that Shirky had written this as far back as 2003.  His speech is the only thing that makes sense out of the 25 years of technological development that I’ve witnessed first hand.  This is definitely one of those cases where reality is stranger than science fiction.)

Folding this in with my Traveller gaming, I’m going to play blogging in the far future as being one of those forbidden technologies that are outlawed and restricted the same way that robotics and psi research are.  It’s not that nanotech and blogging can’t exist… it’s just that any culture that goes too far with this stuff just mysteriously annihilates itself.  Whether the technologies are that inherently volatile or whether there are mysterious forces that want to guide civilisation along certain predetermined “tech trees,” it is not known.  But the information technology of the Third Imperium is strictly organized along the Encyclopedia Galactica approach.

I ran a Traveller game last night set in District 268 in the year 1111.  This gritty no-man’s-land is the perfect locale for pulse pounding pulpy adventure, so I knew I wouldn’t have any trouble getting the players into sticky situations.

We had one new player and one that had played some during the early eighties.  The old timer brought his character with him: an old army guy with lots of combat skills and a useless title.  (He also had original copies of the hardback Traveller Book and some classic Supplements.  Cool!) 

The new guy was forced to roll up a new one from scratch with no idea of the other guy’s skills, which was vaguely amusing: he couldn’t attempt to cover contrasting abilities in order to round out the team!  In rolling up attributes, he rolled a 2 for endurance.  This is one of those cases where getting killed in character generation is a good thing.  He went into the Scout Service and after his second term rolled another 2 for reenlistment.  Heh heh.  No death for you!

I noticed that the original classic Traveller skills are all either combat, vehicle, management, or shipboard-professional.  These do not cover thief/spy/investigation type skills in much resolution.  In practice, and especially given the narrativistic approach I was using, I ended up calling for a lot of “attribute checks” during the game based on off-the-cuff characterizations of a character’s career and background.  Skills only became relevant in a couple of instances– and if I thought a plan was particularly good, or if it was role played well, then I wouldn’t ask for a roll at all.  One technique I noticed emerging was skill rolls being called for even when a task was mostly certain in order to give one character or another the chance to make a decision.  I didn’t have anyone hogging the game or anything, but it seemed to me to effectively break things up and keep things moving.

I opened the game in the Bowman system at a grungy spacer-bar.  Much grungier than the one on your keyboard….  (Sorry.)  We actually had to spend about ten or fifteen minutes covering the core premises of the Traveller setting: jump drive, the Imperium, multiple human races, surrounding alien empires, the 5th Frontier War, outlawed psi, restricted robotics, no weird tech, no near-c rocks….  There was ample opportunity to geek out here.  After that we spent another ten minutes or so doing armchair theorizations about what the Bowman system was really like based on its Universal World Profile.

The guy that had played Traveller before actually got really into this, throwing lots of facts around.  I was worried at first that I’d have trouble with a player that knows more than me, but in most cases I could work everything he said into my plans with only minimal corrections/nudges.  We’re all grown up enough to separate characters’ opinions from facts, so I really don’t see this as a problem: in fact, I want to encourage my players to help create background and setting specific “color” as much as possible.

The opening vignette was a simple TV-show style opener.  The characters meet a Darrian merchant and try to convince him to hire them to help crew his ship.  He brushes them off… and one of the PC’s notice some goons trailing him as he leaves.  The players follow and intervene in an awkward scene being played out in a back ally.  They rescue the Darrian, dispatch the thugs, and quickly find themselves on the ship heading out system.  Not quite as elegant as Joss Whedon, buy hey– might as well start with a bang.

As the characters traveled to Flexos, we engaged in another round of setting description.  As we picked apart the UWP, I was surprised at just how much the players wanted to know.  Just about everything: climate, flora, fauna, politics, and even history.  The information from the Flexos System Guide was essential, but I also found myself throwing out bits of things I’d remembered from Alien Races II and III.  I did feel a bit compelled as an armchair sci-fi story teller to “show it not tell it.”  But on the other hand, the players did not seem to see a fifteen minute discussion of all of this background as being ‘just’ for setting things up.  The questions and answers and theories all seemed to be as much a part of playing the game as rolling dice in combat or role playing an exchange.

My players went crazy when they saw the map, though.  (It really is beautifully done.)  They asked about locations of things I’d mentioned in passing and made plan for exploring an area as I gradually introduced an adventure seed taken from the Flexos book.  It surprised me.  I had no location maps or skill check data or anything, but just one little specific fact pulled from the System Guide could give the players 5 minutes or more of time spent discussing, planning, and worrying.  All of the facts that I needed were very concise and easily transferred to a game situation.  My role as a referee was simply to synthesize the facts as I knew them with the actions of the players.  Of course, I did have to improvise a lot of details– and the players would obsess over these things the most!– but it was easy to do so with the setting and background so clearly laid out.

There is easily enough material in the Flexos book to keep my players busy for several game sessions.  I can keep them there for an entire campaign or introduce something new every time they pass through.  For years I’ve stressed out about the daunting task of taking up the reigns of a Traveller campaign, but material such as that in the Avenger System Guides and Cluster Books really make it easy.  Most importantly, I think these materials demonstrate a best practice for fleshing out an area in Traveller– that way as I begin working on my own material I have a very practical model to work by. 

A secret cache of files over on the BITS site has granted me much enlightenment in regards to T4 ship design and combat.  (Thanks to Hans Rancke-Madsen for pointing these out to me.)  Not all of my questions are answered, but there is a glimmer of hope that I can succeed in making this thing work!

It looks like the sandcaster you buy in T4 is a single sandcaster in a small turret with a “rating” of one.  It appears that each one requires its own gunner.  (It’s still not clear whether or not a single gunner can fire several of these at a single laser or missile swarm without penalties.)  The power plants in the core T4 rulebook did not seem to vary much, but the QSDS 1.5 PDF from BITS addressess this problem.  On the other hand, the new hull definition for the 400 dton needle style airframe has a Maximum G of 3– which forces me to cut the maneuver drive back on my patrol cruiser design.  I also don’t have an official design for the small craft, so I just use the Classic Traveller designs for now.

The MayDay 4.1 PDF from BITS contains valuable rules for converting the abstract system to a hex based approach.  It also includes a new version of the sensor rules, but appears to require the T4 edition of Fuel Fire Fusion & Steel.  Oh well… we’ll take what we can get at this point.  It looks like we’re more or less at the everything but sensor rules and missile munitions now.

For my Patrol Cruiser design, I added in an additional small laser battery for point defense.  I also added several extra MFD’s to allow the gunners to control two full waves of missiles.  I couldn’t stand to just shoot 8 missiles… wait for a hit… then shoot another 8 4 turns later.  This way, the cruiser can get 20 missiles on the map at once.  Viva la barbette!  There’s not a lot of cargo space after that, so things are pretty tight on this ship, but it should be a pretty fun ship to play in a fight.

War Patrol Cruiser (QSDS 1.5)
Tons: 400
Volume: 376.2 m^3 ?
Cost: 364.48 MCr
Crew: 32
Cargo: 8
Std Controls: Std Mil (Bridge) 
TL: 12
3 Jump Drive (6 Std/Pc Fuel)
3 Maneuver (Thrust Plate, 22 Mw)
8 Size
680 Power Plant (3x 200Mw, 4x 20Mw)
A10 P4 J10 Sensors

2x Laser Battery(2) 4/3-2-0-0           
1x Laser Battery (1) 4/2-0-0-0 
2 Battery Missile Barb 5 (4)
3 Sandcasters (30×3 Cans)
Ext. Grapple (30 dton Ship’s Boat)     
10 Armor, 12 Structure

Crew Detail: 2 Engineers, 1 Electronics, 2 Maneuver, 11 Gunners, 3 Screens,
2 AuxCraft Crew, 8 Troops/Marines, 4 Command, 1 Steward, 1 Medical

Software: Predict 2 (x3), Gunner (x11), Evade-4, Anti-Hijack, Library (+33.4 MCr)

(Cost includes an additional MCr 16 for Ship’s Boat.)

***

Some remaining minor questions:

“Missile launchers do not have to be crewed when operating as part of a missile battery under the control of a Master Fire Director, but if assigned, a crewmember may launch missiles under local control from the weapon mount.”

Question: If a crewmember is launching missiles from the battery, how many can he control?

Guess: None.  Only unguided missiles can be launched without the benefits of a Master Fire Director.

***

“USD Bonus - The USD bonus for missile batteries using this equipment.”

Question: The QSDS 1.5 rules on bits introduce a “USD Bonus” in regards to Master Fire Directors.  Is this the same thing as the number of missiles that it can control or is it some new bonus for to-hit rolls?

Guess: Uh… just use it as the number of missiles it can control.

***

Question: Does carrying a small craft on an external grapple increase the amount of fuel it takes to make a jump?

Guess: Uh… no?

***

Question: Does Predict software improve to-hit rolls using Missiles or Sand?

Guess: Uh… no.  (According to robject.)

***

[Note: I'm not sure at this point why I continue to fiddle with such an outdated system riddled with errors and ommissions that Traveller players have long since abandoned, but here we go anyway.  I guess I partly want to be able to judge the rumored T5 edition from the standpoint of what Marc was trying to accomplish with the T4 ruleset.  Also, there are some neat features in it for those of us that haven't gotten around to buying every single edition of the game.]

Update:  Here’s the spreadsheet detailing my Patrol Cruiser design.

I love maps.  Star maps are especially neat, but the restrained retro-cool look of a Traveller map is even better.  Combined with the austere UWP code that defines each world’s primary characteristics you have unlimited adventure potential.  But you also have a huge referee headache: how do you plan an adventure when your players can go just about anywhere?  You could spend days detailing a single world only to see the PC’s traipse off into a completely different subsector. 

This problem has led GURPS Traveller author Hans Rancke-Madsen to argue that Traveller campaigns– especially beginner campaigns– should start on a single world.  He’s criticized old-school Traveller adventures as being run from one cardboard cut-out starport to another.  I’m sure his recent JTAS articles detailing Regina’s starport at an unprecedented level of detail are up to his usual standards, but I feel he’s missing the whole point of the game.  I mean… it’s called Traveller, after all.  Travelling the stars is, uh, sort of the core premise of the game.

The classic approach to dealing with this problem was to introduce a patron.  Even as far back as the original Book 3 Worlds and Adventures, the patron was the “most important NPC” and “the key to adventure in Traveller.”  Avenger’s Special Supplement 3: Patron Encounters provides 34 such opportunities.  Each includes up to 6 variations to allow you to determine the complications of the situation randomly or to give you ideas on how to play it out.  They tend to be much meatier than the typical GURPS style half-paragraph adventure seed.  You get a detailed encounter or situation, usually a job or objective, and often a few supporting props and proper names.  Many of them are sufficiently well crafted to give you a premise sufficient to launch the rpg equivalent of a one-hour tv episode.  Sometimes its pretty easy to imagine the “big reveals,” the setbacks, and the turn-arounds.

Being Traveller, some of these might be a bit dry.  There’s no bizarre alien encounters or mind-numbing artifacts.  Just a lot of Firefly style material appropiate for a small band of spacers that are just trying to make ends meet.  If you want to get crazy, you’ve got to go check out the latest from long time GURPS Space author, Stefan Jones.  His MacGuffin Alphabet takes a completely different tact.

MacGuffins are artifacts whose qualities have a way of drawing their possessors into deep mysteries, unceasing action, and unstoppable chases.  If you’re not sure how to use such a thing in a game, then check out S. John Ross’s notes on using a “Dingus” in an rpg plot.  The implied setting of the MacGuffin collection is sort of a Alan Dean Foster meets Douglas Adams affair with nanotech and veiled Monty Python references thrown in.  His writing is clean and entertaining.  This is a very classy collection of ideas that would have to be reworked a bit in places in order fit into a Traveller campaign, but make no mistake: this PDF will inspire your awe with its unabashed weirdness.  While these are much more fleshed out, again, than the typical Adventure Seed, they still require some work on the part of the referee to work them into his game.  Quite a bit is left to the imagination… but there’s still quite a bit to fire the imagination as well.

Hopefully these two supplements will go a long way towards helping you stock your universe with adventure goodness… regardless of where the players decide to go.

The T4 ship design system is not bad, at a first glance.  Unlike previous versions of Traveller that limited you  to a set number of “hardpoints” based on ship size, T4 assigns a Surface Area requirement for each component.  You can load up as many weapons as you want as long as you can fit them in both the internal space and external surface area.  (Obviously, the shape of your starship will have an impact on the volume and surface area.)  Note that, instead of the usual “generic” critical hit table, you can probably use these figures to come up with a more suitable custom table for each ship.

Each component is rated with power and crew requirement.  Once you’ve got the bulk of your ship designed, you then choose a power plant.  The excess power of 14.3 in the design below is calling out to be relevant in a combat scenario, but alas, it doesn’t appear to matter much in the T4 combat rules.  Determining your crew requirments is a bit more tricky: it’s not just a simple matter of checking your running tally.  Engineering crew is determined with one part of the numbers, command crew based on your total crew size….  Then you have to figure out who gets the nice diggs.  Due to the weird rounding rules in this step, you can’t breeze through this part.  With both these steps, it’s a little strange having to design most of your ship before picking these: you might not have enough space to do what you need, so you may be forced to go back and revise things.

One unusual decision on the part of the designers was to specify armor values within the standard hull tables.  You don’t have the option to vary them.  If you want to increase the defensive capability of a ship you need to add in sandcasters.  A high sandcaster rating can be useful in deflecting laser and missile hits.  (Note that the ranges for the sandcaster table in the combat section are incorrect– they should be VS, S, M, and L.)  But when you buy a sandcaster the rules do not specify what you are getting.  Is it a turret that requires a gunner with a sandcaster rating of 1?  That’s pretty useless.  Is it a turret that requires a gunner with a sandcaster rating of 3?  That’s not so bad.  Can a gunner fire more than one sandcaster per turn?  I see nothing in the rules to help with this question, and once again I’m forced to pick over previous rules editions to try to ascertain what the designer was thinking.  In the ship below I purchased three of the sandcaster items, but I have no idea what I bought or if I can use them!  They take up nearly as much space as the laser, so I will guess that they are good enough to block one and merit a total rating of three and also require a single gunner to operate.  I have no idea if this is right, though.

The computer software section has been cut down quite a bit since the old days, but there still appears to be a remant there that ought to have been excised.  The “Return Fire” has no obvious use in the T4 rules.  Also, the table used to determine the required size of the Jump was ommited from the rulebook.  Looking through the errata, I see that the small ship designs are completely bogus… and that the patrol cruiser was completely mangled.  And missiles seem to be given short shrift: I see no information concerning the cost and space requirments of the standard and nuclear types, nor any information on guided or unguided.  What a mess!

I’ve spent several hours messing with T4 ship combat at this point, and to get any use out of it I still need to continue a comparative analysis between it and the other editions, design a slew of ships, and come up with a good half dozen house rules.  I have doubts that many people ever used these rules….

If you’re interested in the gory details, here’s a complete breakdown of the Patrol Cruiser design I slogged through.