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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8415780" data-attributes="member: 42582">What sort of game are you playing? Exploration/puzzle-oriented? Is there much conflict resolution?<a href="https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2016/05/21/traveller-out-of-the-box-notes-on-the-personal-combat-system/" target="_blank">In his blog</a>, Christopher Kubasik points to some "free kriegssspiel" aspects of Classic Traveller combat resolution:Following up on Omer Joel’s excellent post about Complexity Creep, Modifier Creep, and Scale Creep, I had some thoughts about Classic Traveller’s very (very) abstract personal combat system and its place in roleplaying game design at the time of its release in 1977. . . . As with the 1981 edition, it has range bands. What you might not know  is in the 1977 edition doesn’t translate the range bands into meters. That is, it’s really abstract. For RPG play, the very abstract nature of the combat system allowed the game to keep going quickly and allowed the Referee and Players to make up details and bits of tactical business on the fly if desired. The text of the 1977 edition makes it clear that the Range Bands themselves preclude any kind of tactical concerns… which is true as far as goes. But in retrospect I see how tactical details can be introduced without building a full miniatures game. The Referee put very much in the position of a Referee from a Free Kriegspiel. The original Kriegspiel rules put off many officers who trained with it because of all the page flipping through the rules and the mock combats took so much longer than an actual combat. (I’m using the term “Free Kriegspiel” loosely here, to illustrate the spectrum of play and rules from “The rules have everything” to “The Referee handles a lot.” Admittedly, the Traveller Referee handles a lot. . . . Rather than sorting out every detail of a particular terrain, every detail of building, and having a rule for every kind of situation, Traveller was originally written for a much more fluid play style. Modifiers and more, based on circumstance, actions, and results are adjudicated on the fly by the Referee. Admittedly, the Referee has to have the real spirit of an impartial Referee to make this work — just as in Kriegspiel. The Players are trusting him to provide challenges, risk, and practical rewards for good thinking — even while adjudicating the environment, tactics, and enemy combatants. During combat the Players come up with clever ideas, and the Referee adjudicates the actions of the PCs, creates DMs for Throws, checks to see if NPCs fall for the PCs’ plans with Throws he makes up on the spot. All of this, I postulate, should be done in the style of Free Kriegsspiel play, with the Referee not bound to a specific list of DMs and actions, but creating a conversation with the Players, back and forth, creating clever, fun details, tension over the results of attacks, and so on. My own view is that this style of play can work gangbusters if everyone is onboard. It can create a really loose, fun, imaginative “theater of the mind” combat, with the Referee and Players building on details as they get introduced. This isn’t to say maps can’t be used. If someone has deck plans and there’s a fight aboard the ship, use them to get a better sense of relative position. For a larger scale environment,  a sheet of paper, a white board, or an erasable mat can be used to quickly sketch out terrain details. Not to scale, mind you–there’d be no need to get that precise. But a rough sketch, with players marking where their characters are, erasing them or crossing them off as they move through the terrain would be enough to add an desired clarity. In all these cases, there’s be no need for miniatures. In the spirit of the original rules, one could use markers of some kind (small squares cut from paper), or, as mentioned, marking and erasing as combat rounds ensued. Of course, not everyone is onboard with this style of play. Nor should everyone be onboard with it. It’s fast, loose and interpretive, built to move on to other aspects of play (exploration, puzzle solving, and more). Original Traveller is so far toward Free Kriegspiel-like style of play that the pendulum had to swing back the other way. So in a reverse move from Kriegspiel moving to Free Kriegspiel, the abstracted Classic Traveller system  moves toward Snapshot, AHL, and Striker over time to make the combats more specifically rules driven.One thing that Kubasik doesn't mention here is that Classic Traveller has an action economy: move + attack, double move, or evade. And there are rules for how much movement it takes to change range bands, which are defined in terms of distance (but the number of moves required to changes bands doesn't correlate to any particular movement rate).And independently of that, as an example of FKR this is pretty different from the GM decides what happens. It's about no miniatures (in my case, the only game I've ever used tokens in is 4e D&D - not in B/X, not in AD&D, not in RM, not in any indie game I've played), and GM-adjudicated modifiers. This is pretty different from the vibe I get from FKRers.</blockquote>

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