I was very much a designer in this vein when I was building ships for the PE campaign I ran about 14 years or so back. The ship typically had enough juice to run the engines at full throttle and the weapons but if you wanted to crack fuel you had to turn something off. The Jump drives were J3 but it was only fueled for J2 so if you wanted to do a J3 you had to consume some of your maneuver fuel so the crew had the option of knocking a week off the trip but what was the consequence to be at the far end? Would they be short on fuel if they got into combat? The solution that the players came up with was to jump in, launch all the missles and use them as drone sensor net for information gathering while the ship ran silent. They'd then insert the missles into orbit as overwatch while they went dirt side and when the job was done they'd simply pick up the missles, refuel and restock them for the next port of call.
I had a hand wave that allowed the characters to use common areas as cargo spaces, typically because they ships they were in were so tight and high strung they didn't have much more cargo space than was absolutly necessary for that APC / Grav Van that they were transporting. Unfortunately filling the halls with cargo makes routine maintenance much less routine.
I was also running a handwave that allowed the use of lowberths as bunks. The crew bunked out in a single area and the captain had the only cabin.
IIRC there was some weirdness in FFS around the design of small arms that basically increased range and dmg the larger the round and the slower it was traveling.
----- Original Message -----
From:
To: "Traveller TNE" <>
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 9:18:27 AM
Subject: [Traveller_TNE] Unique tech advancement approach
I think Uxi and I discussed this system before, either on this forum or
directly, and I liked it. I think this is related to something you've
tried in your games, like those skill-related system charts?
This reminds me of two things, and since I'm in a chatty mood lately:
1. I've mentioned this here before, but I was moving toward a
skill-related system in the TNE starship construction system. I found in
the process of designing Brilliant Lances (also rolled into FF&S) that the
system's (incrementally) greater detail required more design trade-offs,
and this requirement could be turned into a virtue by introducing fiddly
little flaws and "personality" into ship designs (the sort that many
games, most annoyingly BattleTech, handled by fake fiat, as it was not
based on any actual antecedents in the design process) that would then
require crews to counterbalance. In BL you were always finding systems
that you could almost, but not quite, make as big as required. You could
design them this way, but they would function less effectively. There
would be defined thresholds based on % of actual requirement, and at each
threshold the system would require a set of tasks (played day-to-day at PC
level) or +1 skill, say Engineering (played at the long-term/fleet level)
to keep the ship running effectively. I was already starting to put this
into designs in fuel purifiers and power plants that couldn't run the
whole ship at the same time (FP in the form of time to process full load,
time to process J1, etc., or PP can run this, but not that at same time)
and was going to define engineering tasks for "here39;s what it takes to
seamlessly switch power between these systems under duress," but didn't
get there before the lights started going out at GDW. I was really looking
forward to this, because players and refs and ship designers and fleet
builders who like "crunchy" details would have enjoyed it, although not
everyone would have used it, as it would have raised the level of detail.
2. I did some work over the years on a ship design system kind of broadly
based on things like the pre-WWI British-German naval arms race that was
like Uxi's system, except that instead of player skills, it would be based
on investment in industrial plant and research through-put, where instead
of a one-size-fits-all "tech level" the different nations (wet navy) or
races (SF) would have a "State-of-the-Art" (SOTA) which represented their
farthest mass-producible engineering solutions. Obviously this would not
be Traveller, as the global TL is exactly what it was NOT doing. Rather,
it would be more like Imperium or Task Force's StarFire or Star Fleet
Battles. The SOTA would be defined in several areas, engineering plants,
weapons systems, sensor suites, etc. and these would embed various design
trade-offs, so that one player might have systems that were lighter or
faster, while another might have systems that were more robust or damage
resistant, and these would interact to allow them to create ships that
were distinctively different, and would have different implications for
how they were operationally used, both at the fleet level and within the
design. Another example of this from the pre-WW1 arms race would be the
way the British a continuous powder train and the Germans had better
ammunition hoist practices which affected rate of fire, but also meant the
Brits were more susceptible to catastrophic damage from flash. This is
very similar in feel and intent to what Uxi describes. I would say, "great
minds think alike," but that would mean complimenting myself.
Obviously Uxi's idea, though cool for your individual "IMTU," would be a
difficult fit over top of Traveller UWPs. As the UWPs were already
sufficiently buggy to begin with, adding an additional layer of
interpretation over top of them would make everyone's head explode.
Finally, "Bonus Dave Crunchy Hooey," the mention of "folio games." One
thing we learned at GDW was that every time we tried to define a new way
to knock out a "simple, quick" product that would free up design time for
the bigger projects it always worked in reverse. The time required to
develop them always became disproportionate to what we could make back on
them proportionate to their size. The series of "folios" (what did we call
them?) we put out for MT, Dark Con, and Twilight were blood baths. It
turns out, as famously observed by Mark Twain, that it takes longer to
write short than it takes to simply allow something to run long (observe
my e-mails, for example), just so you can set a lower price point for it.
Another "hey, here's a good quickie we can knock out" idea was Star
Vikings. I think the end product was good, but it was not quick, nor a
time-saver.
Ah, well, life's a bitch, and then you die. There are trolls out there who
will observe that this demonstrates the need for real business models and
MBAs in the gaming industry. When I was in the biz, GDW was still a
remnant of the "mom 'n' pop" operations that gave us the "golden age of
wargaming," and that's where a lot of its fun and eclecticism came from.
Besides, anyone with an MBA would know that there wasn't enough money in
that sort of wargaming to begin with. The two answers to that, WotC and
computer games are 1) life lessons on what happens when you get it, and 2)
it's a completely different industry completely underwritten by deliberate
government tax breaks. Welfare state for "slackers," perhaps.
I had a hand wave that allowed the characters to use common areas as cargo spaces, typically because they ships they were in were so tight and high strung they didn't have much more cargo space than was absolutly necessary for that APC / Grav Van that they were transporting. Unfortunately filling the halls with cargo makes routine maintenance much less routine.
I was also running a handwave that allowed the use of lowberths as bunks. The crew bunked out in a single area and the captain had the only cabin.
IIRC there was some weirdness in FFS around the design of small arms that basically increased range and dmg the larger the round and the slower it was traveling.
----- Original Message -----
From:
To: "Traveller TNE" <>
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 9:18:27 AM
Subject: [Traveller_TNE] Unique tech advancement approach
I think Uxi and I discussed this system before, either on this forum or
directly, and I liked it. I think this is related to something you've
tried in your games, like those skill-related system charts?
This reminds me of two things, and since I'm in a chatty mood lately:
1. I've mentioned this here before, but I was moving toward a
skill-related system in the TNE starship construction system. I found in
the process of designing Brilliant Lances (also rolled into FF&S) that the
system's (incrementally) greater detail required more design trade-offs,
and this requirement could be turned into a virtue by introducing fiddly
little flaws and "personality" into ship designs (the sort that many
games, most annoyingly BattleTech, handled by fake fiat, as it was not
based on any actual antecedents in the design process) that would then
require crews to counterbalance. In BL you were always finding systems
that you could almost, but not quite, make as big as required. You could
design them this way, but they would function less effectively. There
would be defined thresholds based on % of actual requirement, and at each
threshold the system would require a set of tasks (played day-to-day at PC
level) or +1 skill, say Engineering (played at the long-term/fleet level)
to keep the ship running effectively. I was already starting to put this
into designs in fuel purifiers and power plants that couldn't run the
whole ship at the same time (FP in the form of time to process full load,
time to process J1, etc., or PP can run this, but not that at same time)
and was going to define engineering tasks for "here39;s what it takes to
seamlessly switch power between these systems under duress," but didn't
get there before the lights started going out at GDW. I was really looking
forward to this, because players and refs and ship designers and fleet
builders who like "crunchy" details would have enjoyed it, although not
everyone would have used it, as it would have raised the level of detail.
2. I did some work over the years on a ship design system kind of broadly
based on things like the pre-WWI British-German naval arms race that was
like Uxi's system, except that instead of player skills, it would be based
on investment in industrial plant and research through-put, where instead
of a one-size-fits-all "tech level" the different nations (wet navy) or
races (SF) would have a "State-of-the-Art" (SOTA) which represented their
farthest mass-producible engineering solutions. Obviously this would not
be Traveller, as the global TL is exactly what it was NOT doing. Rather,
it would be more like Imperium or Task Force's StarFire or Star Fleet
Battles. The SOTA would be defined in several areas, engineering plants,
weapons systems, sensor suites, etc. and these would embed various design
trade-offs, so that one player might have systems that were lighter or
faster, while another might have systems that were more robust or damage
resistant, and these would interact to allow them to create ships that
were distinctively different, and would have different implications for
how they were operationally used, both at the fleet level and within the
design. Another example of this from the pre-WW1 arms race would be the
way the British a continuous powder train and the Germans had better
ammunition hoist practices which affected rate of fire, but also meant the
Brits were more susceptible to catastrophic damage from flash. This is
very similar in feel and intent to what Uxi describes. I would say, "great
minds think alike," but that would mean complimenting myself.
Obviously Uxi's idea, though cool for your individual "IMTU," would be a
difficult fit over top of Traveller UWPs. As the UWPs were already
sufficiently buggy to begin with, adding an additional layer of
interpretation over top of them would make everyone's head explode.
Finally, "Bonus Dave Crunchy Hooey," the mention of "folio games." One
thing we learned at GDW was that every time we tried to define a new way
to knock out a "simple, quick" product that would free up design time for
the bigger projects it always worked in reverse. The time required to
develop them always became disproportionate to what we could make back on
them proportionate to their size. The series of "folios" (what did we call
them?) we put out for MT, Dark Con, and Twilight were blood baths. It
turns out, as famously observed by Mark Twain, that it takes longer to
write short than it takes to simply allow something to run long (observe
my e-mails, for example), just so you can set a lower price point for it.
Another "hey, here's a good quickie we can knock out" idea was Star
Vikings. I think the end product was good, but it was not quick, nor a
time-saver.
Ah, well, life's a bitch, and then you die. There are trolls out there who
will observe that this demonstrates the need for real business models and
MBAs in the gaming industry. When I was in the biz, GDW was still a
remnant of the "mom 'n' pop" operations that gave us the "golden age of
wargaming," and that's where a lot of its fun and eclecticism came from.
Besides, anyone with an MBA would know that there wasn't enough money in
that sort of wargaming to begin with. The two answers to that, WotC and
computer games are 1) life lessons on what happens when you get it, and 2)
it's a completely different industry completely underwritten by deliberate
government tax breaks. Welfare state for "slackers," perhaps.