We shifted to thinking about things in weeks rather than days, at least for this session. We might change things later. Things felt a little loose in the timeline in regards to the time taken for various tasks, which was not bad, but felt a little odd given the premise of technical things. More notes on expected time frame for those tasks might be useful: potentially can work on a few small things instead of one big one?
This is not an exhaustive listing of all the types of science fiction, but some hopefully focused rambling on what considerations one might have in a science fiction setting. It is focused mostly on thinking about things in terms of tabletop role playing games, but probably applies more broadly to fiction as well.
One possible approach is to look at large setting elements (things like aliens, spacecraft, space travel, cybernetics/transhumanism) and decide how you want to deal with them. This has nothing to do with the rules one is using, at least not directly: if you wish to make a SF-flavoured Dungeons and Dragons, it is extremely doable. So we will talk in generalities about some options for some of the big questions, and how they might be addressed. If one wants a whole book, with worked (instead of illustrative) examples, check out GURPS Space.
Fairly straightforward session. The troubles that keep building triggered a few times: We needed to deal with an intensification of the Cold War (the USAF and some Soviet soldiers arguing over a weapon test in no-man’s land between bases), we had an issue with one of the vehicles, and a personal Trouble. This all worked quite nicely, and having the players make the choice of which one of a few gives control over pacing, or lets more appropriate things happen.
Recently Sammy, of Scattered Amusement Machine/TrashedTabletop fame, has been running an Orbital Cold War campaign, using an early but complete enough version of Freefallers.
I missed the first session, but joined the second one.
My PC is Jean-Jacques Desjardins, a CanadianQuebecois mission specialist at Unity Base.
Chargen was pretty painless: assign some attributes, assign some skills based on the role (mission specialist, security officer, lunar scientist, that sort of thing), choose a trouble and a couple of things like that.
No hassles here if you are comfortable with RPGs in general.
Much of this is adapted from the ATV rules in Across the Bright Face.
Mechs are a type of vehicle and use the Vehicle (Mech) cascade skill. While a variety of designs exist, most are about 10 tons in weight and about 4-5m tall. They can travel at about 80km/hr consistently, with only extremely rough terrain slowing them down. They normally have only a single pilot.
Mechs are generally a little complicated and finnicky. They require maintenance once a week or after any combat in which a hit is taken. Maintenance is a mechanics throw; failing (or not doing maintenance) penalises any DMs by 1 per missed maintenance window.
oldhawkeyes put together a great post about combat styles in Classic Traveller. When it was first posted, I threatened to make some of my own, so here here we are. Some of my fighting styles use special abilities from oldhawkeyes’ post, because CT is generally fairly breezy, and needing to remember a squillion special attacks is just a pain, even if they are player-facing, so adding too many should be avoided.
It bears repeating.
One of the cheapest ways to build depth in a TTRPG setting is to reuse things. Need to introduce a NPC? It was the one that the PCs ran into a few sessions ago. Need a temple? Use the one that they went to get healing from before. Want to reinforce a theme of some kind, say oppressiveness? Have them get stopped by the guards. Again.
That is it, really. The rest of this post is some examples and expanded thoughts, because I can not leave well enough alone, and so I need to over-beat the egg with more words.
Many Traveller adventures (and in similar systems/settings) are geared towards the PCs being fresh out of a career, with ‘assets’ amounting to massive debt, a half-collapsing rust bucket of a ship, and someone who can give them a job that might not kill them. Sometimes they do not even have the ship (but common advice is to get one fairly quickly: the game is titled “Traveller” after all). Incidentally, a similar thing happens in the various OSR scenes: there are squillions of starter dungeons and one-page adventures and so on, but very few published adventures aimed at sustained high level play (and even fewer good ones).
There have been a few people who have asked about starting Traveller. This needs something to be asked of them before answering properly: do they mean Traveller-the-setting or Traveller-the-rules.
Traveller-the-setting is something that is dealt with in the mainline Traveller editions, starting from a loosely sketched out one in 1977’s Little Black Books and running through to Mongoose’s recent second edition revised. This provides increading details about Charted Space, the Official Traveller Universe (or Original Traveller Universe). There are of course a few digressions on the way, such as GURPS Traveller being an alternate timeline, GURPS Interstellar Wars being a jump back to the early part of the setting, Traveller 4 which is set around the start of the Third Imperium, T20 which is about 200 years before the the original (and current Mongoose) edition. Most of the official Traveller material is set in around 1110, give or take a few years, with earlier editions from Game Designers Workshop pushing that timeline forward through to around 1248. Mongoose has come back to the 1110s for their own published campaigns.
One of the major hassles folks seem to have when running factions in RPGs is deciding what they are trying to do and what assets they have available. One possible framework for thinking about this is to steal from the military, who need to evaluate threats within an area on a routine basis. There are a few frameworks that are in common use (and someone has already covered one: SMEAC). This post will look at the METT-TC framework, along with some examples.