NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8097638" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here are some quotes from the 1977 rules (Book 2, p 36; Book 3, pp 8, 19, 20):When a ship enters a star system, there is a chance that any one of a variety of ships will be encountered. The ship encounter table is used to determine the specific type of vessel which is met. This result may, and should, be superceded by the referee in specific situations, especially if a newly entered system is in military or civil turmoil, or involves other circumstance. [T]he referee should always feel free to impose worlds which have been deliberately (rather than randomly) generated. Often such planets will be devised specifically to reward or torment players. Some random encounters are mandated by the referee. . . . The referee is always free to impose encounters to further the cause of the adventure being played; in many cases, he actually has a responsibility to do so. Once the patron and the adventurers have met, the responsibility falls on the referee to determine the nature of the task the patron desires . . .To my mind, these passages invite the referee to play an active role in framing (not dictating the resolution of) situations.And when the players generate their PCs, there will be implied backstory (like the example in Book 1, or my example upthread of the "diplomat" spy, or the noble and his ship that he won gambling). It doesn't take a lot to make this a bit more explicit at the table - in our first session, it emerged as the PCs were generated and then in maybe 10 or 15 minutes of discussion afterwards.These two things together - PC backstories, plus referee influence over framing - are what permit the game to have more direction than just 'space waifs' who trade and kill.My own approach, which has worked so far, is to mostly use random generation (because otherwise it wouldn't be Traveller!) but to interpret those elements in a way that "furthers the cause of the adventure being played". So the patrons that the PCs meet up with are connected to their backstories and the unfolding ingame events; the randomly encountered vessels also connect in various ways, or create possibilities for action that fit the current situation; randomly encountered NPCs provide opportunities for the players to drive their goals forward; etc.This is the sort of thing I have in mind when, upthread, I referred to "a bit more use of contemporary techniques". In general I don't think of this as "hacking" the system, given the passages I've quoted and the example of PC generation. But it is pushing the system a bit more firmly in a particular direction.Besides a few rules variants, especially in the skill list and PC gen process, the only actual "hack" I have made is in relation to star map generation: rather than rolling up a sub-sector in advance I started with a stock of pre-generated worlds but dropped them in as seemed appropriate, gradually building up the star map in that way. As part of this, instead of rolling a die for each hex, I have a chart for rolling the number of adjacent worlds (with columns for system density that lead to outcomes roughly the same as what you would get for a 3+, 4+ or 5+ roll required for a system to be present in a hex).</blockquote>

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