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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8226291" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not really following your posts. [USER=6999616]@John Dallman[/USER] posted about a GURPS game. I have never played GURPS but I have a general sense of how it works as a system. I think it's similar enough to Classic Traveller in how it handles action resolution that I can extrapolate from my experience with Traveller to think about GURPS play. That is reinforced by John Dallman's description, upthread, of how the problem of acceleration and fuel across two spaceships was resolved. A similar sort of thing could happen in Traveller.I don't see how Fate's Golden and Silver Rules shed any light on this, or on the role that GM prep notes play in John Dallman's game.Suppose the players come up with the copper wire solution that you haven't anticipated. And you haven't got anything in your notes about copper wire. How do you handle the ensuing action declarations?In my Traveller game the PCs have come into possession of a second starship, which powers its jump drives by means of a large solar panel that generates energy that is stored in capacitors that then power the jump drive. The PCs wanted to jump that ship but didn't have time for the charging to take place (multiple weeks). So they refuelled their other ship with an ordinary drive (fusion, we assume, though the game rules never quite come out and say it), burned the fuel to power up its jump drive, and then transferred the power from their standard ship to the capacitors on the solar-powered ship.This required a seriously heavy-duty cable to link the drives of the two ships. Hence the players declared, as an action, that they were acquiring such a cable. I can't remember now exactly how we resolved that, but I know that my notes established that the world in the orbit of which this was happening was tech level 8 (so mostly above current earth), non-industrial but with a population of a bit over 100,000 people and an Imperial Navy base forming part of a high quality starport with repair facilities as well as the ability to construct non-starships. And play had already established that the PCs were on good terms with the commander of the naval base. So I don't think I even called for a check to confirm the availability of the cable the PCs wanted; I just allowed the players to establish that they acquired it and used it (there was no doubting the PC group had the necessary jury-rigging skills to pull off a jump drive jump start).That would be an example of my notes shaping, though not fully determining, the solution space to the problem that the players had posed themselves (ie how to jump their new ship without engaging in solar recharging?).</blockquote>

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