D&D General Story Now, Skilled Play, and Elephants

[pemerton]

the REAL Imperial navy ships mass up in the 100k ton and up category, sport terawatt energy weapons, 1000's of turrets, bay weapons, etc.

I tend to ignore that High Guard-ish stuff. In my game I've statted up, and the PCs have seen in the distance, a 5,000 ton Imperial Dreadnaught and a 5,000 ton Imperial Carrier with abut 90 fighters on board. (Both of those are of my own design. I also worked out my own rules for bay weapons and spinal mounts, broadly inspired by High Guard but roughly balanced with the Book 2 turret-mounted weapons.)

I used bits of the High Guard rules to design a tens-of-thousands of tons space station, but don't think those big warships add much to the game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I tend to ignore that High Guard-ish stuff. In my game I've statted up, and the PCs have seen in the distance, a 5,000 ton Imperial Dreadnaught and a 5,000 ton Imperial Carrier with abut 90 fighters on board. (Both of those are of my own design. I also worked out my own rules for bay weapons and spinal mounts, broadly inspired by High Guard but roughly balanced with the Book 2 turret-mounted weapons.)

I used bits of the High Guard rules to design a tens-of-thousands of tons space station, but don't think those big warships add much to the game.

Yeah, they don't really mesh well with the rules for 'human scaled' ships that PCs are likely to care about. OTOH they kind of make sense from the "We are the Imperium and we're running a million system empire" perspective. I never was much on that milieu though. I just invented a much smaller scaled kind of empire where something like your 5000 tonners would work well. You can still build them using HG, though exact stats are pretty much moot, unless you want to play Fleet Admiral of the Rebellion or something, which is kind of outside what Traveller envisages.

Frankly I always thought MM should have spent more time on broadening the range of play and maybe adding a few more elements to the milieu to make it a bit more exciting, but that's just me...

 

[clearstream]

Yeah, they don't really mesh well with the rules for 'human scaled' ships that PCs are likely to care about. OTOH they kind of make sense from the "We are the Imperium and we're running a million system empire" perspective. I never was much on that milieu though. I just invented a much smaller scaled kind of empire where something like your 5000 tonners would work well. You can still build them using HG, though exact stats are pretty much moot, unless you want to play Fleet Admiral of the Rebellion or something, which is kind of outside what Traveller envisages.

Frankly I always thought MM should have spent more time on broadening the range of play and maybe adding a few more elements to the milieu to make it a bit more exciting, but that's just me...

Do you recall Snapshot? We used the Azhanti High Lightning as inspiration and setting for some Traveller RPG.

We ran a Trillion Credit Squadron campaign, but never connected that with our RPG although I think you could have used one as an overarching political backdrop and that might have worked well.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Do you recall Snapshot? We used the Azhanti High Lightning as inspiration and setting for some Traveller RPG.

We ran a Trillion Credit Squadron campaign, but never connected that with our RPG although I think you could have used one as an overarching political backdrop and that might have worked well.

Right, there were some tactical gamelets and IIRC the Azhanti High Lightning was an adventure, wasn't it? Certainly it was a good setting for one, very detailed. I think the rules for it actually were sort of eyeballed though, High Guard came out later, so at the time it was sort of beyond what the 3 LBBs could build. Then oddly enough High Guard turns that 'battle cruiser' into a tiny escort ship by comparison to the REAL battle cruisers. TCS, IIRC, was just a contest to build a fleet for 1 Trillion Credits and then I guess you were supposed to mail it in someplace and someone somewhere would run them all through some battles and decide which was the most kick-ass, right?

You could definitely use TCS as a sort of model of "here's what a 3rd Imperium Main Battle Fleet looks like." I remember at one point I got a copy of the Spinward Marches wargame. It certainly seemed geared towards being used as the backdrop/meta-plot to an actual Traveller campaign. I guess you could reverse engineer some of the ships via High Guard into game stats, too. Maybe even fold in some PCs by making them fleet admirals or militarizing their ships, etc.

 

[clearstream]

Right, there were some tactical gamelets and IIRC the Azhanti High Lightning was an adventure, wasn't it? Certainly it was a good setting for one, very detailed. I think the rules for it actually were sort of eyeballed though, High Guard came out later, so at the time it was sort of beyond what the 3 LBBs could build. Then oddly enough High Guard turns that 'battle cruiser' into a tiny escort ship by comparison to the REAL battle cruisers. TCS, IIRC, was just a contest to build a fleet for 1 Trillion Credits and then I guess you were supposed to mail it in someplace and someone somewhere would run them all through some battles and decide which was the most kick-ass, right?

You could definitely use TCS as a sort of model of "here's what a 3rd Imperium Main Battle Fleet looks like." I remember at one point I got a copy of the Spinward Marches wargame. It certainly seemed geared towards being used as the backdrop/meta-plot to an actual Traveller campaign. I guess you could reverse engineer some of the ships via High Guard into game stats, too. Maybe even fold in some PCs by making them fleet admirals or militarizing their ships, etc.

In TCS we have a cluster of systems, political tensions, budgets and TLs. Players design their ships and fleets, and send them here and there, resolving battles using High Guard. At the RPG level, the characters are involved in the political tensions, or they are smugglers or whatever. Fleet battles and system assaults are hammers that fall where they may, and you don't want to be under one.

 

[clearstream]

In my OSE game, I add a Dfudge to D20 rolls, to indicate magnitude of criticals/botches, if maneuvers (deeds ala DCCRPG) are performed well in combat, casting spells, complications, drawbacks, boons and the like

I was assessing different approaches in another thread, and yours stands out. I took a step back and thought about some features of dice resolution methods.

• Number of cognitive steps
• Avatar input into success rate
• Environment (including foes) input into success rate
• Understandable probabilities
• Pleasing feel

There is an unavoidable overhead for drawbacks but on my assessment rolling a die on the side feels like a very efficient way to manage it. Nothing is lost in input range or understanding probabilities, and additional cognitive steps are minimised. I probably want the chance of boons to be lower than the chance of complications, so for me maybe not a dFudge. Overall though, thanks for sharing the approach.

 

[pemerton]

This thread has prompted me to re-read Bushido. (I've had a copy since some time in the 1990s, but have never played it.)

The PC build rules are extremely complex, as one would expect of a FGU game of its era. I haven't done all the maths, but my impression is that starting PCs will have relatively low success-chances.

I haven't read the task rules yet, and so don't have a sense of how workable there are. There is an implicit concept of the scene as a fundamental unit of play in the rules for Ki powers (1061.3, p 22):

Once a Ki power has been successfully invoked, it will remain active until the action sequence in progress has ended: a fight, an attempt to use a Skill, escape from some trap or peril. . . . It is quite legitimate for a Ki power to remain activit during a pursuit, if it is designed to aid in ecape or capture, but a Ki power invoked to aid in combat when entering a place of danger would not last past that combat, although danger still surrounds the character.

Likewise, Ki can be invoked to aid some extemporaneous use of a Skill, for a limited time, possibly only for a single use, but could not be used for a long term project: composition or research for example.​

 

[Thomas Shey]

This thread has prompted me to re-read Bushido. (I've had a copy since some time in the 1990s, but have never played it.)

The PC build rules are extremely complex, as one would expect of a FGU game of its era. I haven't done all the maths, but my impression is that starting PCs will have relatively low success-chances.

As I recall from generating some back in the day, if you properly placed attributes you'd be decent in your class specializations. Outside of that you might well be pretty poor, though. The big thing was paying attention to your Deftness for most combat skills.

(I only remember this because, though less severely so, it was true in Aftermath too, which was a descendant of the Bushido system, and which I know much better.)

 

[Numidius]

I was assessing different approaches in another thread, and yours stands out. I took a step back and thought about some features of dice resolution methods.

• Number of cognitive steps
• Avatar input into success rate
• Environment (including foes) input into success rate
• Understandable probabilities
• Pleasing feel

There is an unavoidable overhead for drawbacks but on my assessment rolling a die on the side feels like a very efficient way to manage it. Nothing is lost in input range or understanding probabilities, and additional cognitive steps are minimised. I probably want the chance of boons to be lower than the chance of complications, so for me maybe not a dFudge. Overall though, thanks for sharing the approach.

Yeah. Keep in mind that it can be all optional. I mean, with maneuvers and criticals it does its job. Boons/drawbacks: only when Gm/player feel like it and if fiction allows it.

We started at level 6 B/X where everyone has a +2 to hit, so I went for the extra fudge die to roll for basically everything instead of the flat bonus: minus is +1, blank +2, plus +3.
So, for my game, an additional layer.

 

[clearstream]

This thread has prompted me to re-read Bushido. (I've had a copy since some time in the 1990s, but have never played it.)

The PC build rules are extremely complex, as one would expect of a FGU game of its era. I haven't done all the maths, but my impression is that starting PCs will have relatively low success-chances.

I haven't read the task rules yet, and so don't have a sense of how workable there are. There is an implicit concept of the scene as a fundamental unit of play in the rules for Ki powers (1061.3, p 22):

Once a Ki power has been successfully invoked, it will remain active until the action sequence in progress has ended: a fight, an attempt to use a Skill, escape from some trap or peril. . . . It is quite legitimate for a Ki power to remain activit during a pursuit, if it is designed to aid in ecape or capture, but a Ki power invoked to aid in combat when entering a place of danger would not last past that combat, although danger still surrounds the character.​

​

Likewise, Ki can be invoked to aid some extemporaneous use of a Skill, for a limited time, possibly only for a single use, but could not be used for a long term project: composition or research for example.​

One thing I found striking in our Bushido games was that we cared about skills like tea ceremony and flower arrangement.

The war system was also decent, capturing something of the feel of a Kurosawa large battle scene. (IIRC we wandered the battlefield having random encounters, with our results influencing the outcome.)