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 "here'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.
> That resonates with how in another Draft, skills could/should be
> integrated in. I like the idea of FFS being a *players* manual instead of
> a
> ref one. The *character* can only do it, if they have the appropriate
> Advanced skills. And even once a design was done, a prototype would have
> to be constructed the GM would run an opposed roll and introduce a number
> of flaws/bugs (based on complexity, maintenance, and wear) into the
> prototype that have to be discovered the hard way during testing and
> evaluations.
>
> Then, tooling could be made for mass production, or slightly cheaper
> refined copies of prototype could be made depending on the funding
> available.
>
> Ultimately that could hint towards an economic modeling in the rpg, if not
> into a UWP extension (ideally reverse conpatible with the existing codes,
> particularly government and law).
>
> Which brings in more specific addendems in specific regional models (Path
> of Tears vs RSB etc) if not things like folio adventures for the world of
> the month and Vampire Fleets, etc. Which brings to mind the "society" of
> Parent Virus entities I designed on the edge of Alpha Crucis/Leonis and
> their economy-equivalent...
>
>
> - Sent from my SM-N900T
> On Mar 8, 2014 10:48 AM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> For those just joining us, "WTH" may or may not stand for "What the
>> Huh?"
>> the lost TNE book.
>>
>> > Fair point. The WTH mass combat system essentially has the players
>> acting
>> > as commanders back at headquarters.
>> >
>> > But on page 63 of WTH you (or another author) put some rules for
>> trying
>> > to integrate PCs into the mass combat system. These assumed a PC was
>> > acting as commander or military advisor for a particular mass combat
>> unit
>> > in the field.
>>
>> That sounds like the sort of thing I would do (either assigned or seeing
>> a
>> gap, throw myself on, usually the latter) and leads to my recollection
>> "there were gaps between the poles." If I made the time to dig WTH out I
>> could tell you who wrote it, as it's obviously easy-ish to pick out my
>> writing from Frank's or Terry's.
>>
>> > WTH also had the black powder design sequences that were an addition
>> to
>> > FF&S.
>>
>> Yes, I do remember those. I think Terry made a stab at it and then Frank
>> re-did it. There was also a "choo-choo train design system" that I
>> dropped
>> because it mostly got at the visual appearance of a locomotive and
>> didn't
>> adequately touch on their engineering-physics (tractive effort, wheels
>> for
>> speed vs. pulling power, size of boiler vs. combustion unit), and for
>> the
>> ROI was not worth the design time. Someone probably also tried a
>> "sword-pike-pointy stick" design system at one point.
>>
>> One "design system" that I definitely try to avert my eyes from is the
>> "battle dress design system." It was one of those bad ideas where
>> someone
>> from the Art Dept said, "hey, shouldn't there be a design system for
>> this?" "Yeah, we don't have to send this to the printer until 5:00, and
>> it's 2:00 now, so we've got time," so it was written half at the
>> conference table and half at someone's desk. When asked, "whaddaya
>> think?"
>> there wasn't enough time to form specific logical objections, the best
>> one, "there39;s not enough time" having already been excluded.
>>
>> There was a spaceship design system made for Hard Times that was
>> extremely
>> detailed and fiddly and mostly seemed to be made to allow players to
>> design "every rocket propulsion system you've ever heard of," but it had
>> that two-fold TL problem where 1) it focused on all of these different
>> approaches that only fall into a fraction of one TL, and therefore from
>> the standpoint of the larger game don't haul much freight, and 2) the
>> top-down logic that says TL ultimately has to be focused on "what was
>> found to work," not things that were tried but failed. But HT is
>> arguably
>> a MT product, so doesn't belong here. Spiritually it was a transition
>> product, but game system is obviously MT. There are a large number of
>> "MT"
>> products that are spiritually TNE products: Arrival Vengeance,
>> Astrogator39;s Guide to Diaspora, Assignment: Vigilante, some other stuff
>> I
>> can't think of. It makes it hard for me to remember "when did you start
>> work on TNE" because it literally goes back to my first day at GDW in
>> one
>> form or another.
>>
>> Last thought, there was always a typical error on the part of
>> "design-system designers" to mistake "when we on Earth got around to
>> thinking of a logical solution" for an actual TECHNICAL change (e.g.,
>> superfiring guns, ballast tanks in submarines, multiple locomotive
>> units,
>> etc.), which caused me to reject a lot of design sequences over the
>> years.
>> I would rather not have a thing than publish one that is wrong. In
>> fairness, it is easy to see how this confusion begins, as it's not
>> always
>> easy to separate "this is now possible/embedded technically" from
>> "there39;s
>> now enough related technical that it's easier for people to say, 'oh
>> yeah...'". That is especially the case where TL is saying two utterly
>> different things in the "pure" Traveller rules, where it is merely
>> descriptive and can be (theoretically) based on multiple parallel
>> technology systems (think tech for an aquatic species vs. tech for a
>> terrestrial species) all governed by the same laws of physics, vs. what
>> it
>> is saying in the 3I campaign background where it tends to reflect the
>> dissemination of core Imperial technology. There's also the
>> understandable
>> tendency of writers to fall back on real world or Star Trek examples:
>> "this was solved by Thomas Edison or Dr. Richard Daystrom with the XXX,"
>> but TL is not defined by a guy, that guy is just the expression of that
>> TL
>> "fact" (a.k.a. "hooey assertion") in that timeline.
>>
>> To conclude, some TL vs. discovered principles things ARE easy. The best
>> example of this is germ theory. The benefits of germ theory do NOT arise
>> at TL...(whatever late 1800s Earth is). You can tell TL 0 people, "don't
>> build your toilets next to your drinking fountains" and it works just
>> fine. If you're describing an isolated species with no transmission of
>> knowledge from more advanced people, yes, they probably have to invent
>> microscopes first to figure it out on their own. But you could just as
>> easily posit that they are psionic and can sense the presence of tiny
>> life
>> forms all around them so don't need microscopes, or say that they just
>> evolved to be neat freaks so gain the practical benefits of germ theory
>> (at least in prevention of disease) without having to reach a certain
>> TL.
>> It's SF, if you're not confounding someone's pre-suppositions somewhere,
>> you might as well stick with crossword puzzles.
>>
>>
>>
>
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 "here'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.
> That resonates with how in another Draft, skills could/should be
> integrated in. I like the idea of FFS being a *players* manual instead of
> a
> ref one. The *character* can only do it, if they have the appropriate
> Advanced skills. And even once a design was done, a prototype would have
> to be constructed the GM would run an opposed roll and introduce a number
> of flaws/bugs (based on complexity, maintenance, and wear) into the
> prototype that have to be discovered the hard way during testing and
> evaluations.
>
> Then, tooling could be made for mass production, or slightly cheaper
> refined copies of prototype could be made depending on the funding
> available.
>
> Ultimately that could hint towards an economic modeling in the rpg, if not
> into a UWP extension (ideally reverse conpatible with the existing codes,
> particularly government and law).
>
> Which brings in more specific addendems in specific regional models (Path
> of Tears vs RSB etc) if not things like folio adventures for the world of
> the month and Vampire Fleets, etc. Which brings to mind the "society" of
> Parent Virus entities I designed on the edge of Alpha Crucis/Leonis and
> their economy-equivalent...
>
>
> - Sent from my SM-N900T
> On Mar 8, 2014 10:48 AM, <> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> For those just joining us, "WTH" may or may not stand for "What the
>> Huh?"
>> the lost TNE book.
>>
>> > Fair point. The WTH mass combat system essentially has the players
>> acting
>> > as commanders back at headquarters.
>> >
>> > But on page 63 of WTH you (or another author) put some rules for
>> trying
>> > to integrate PCs into the mass combat system. These assumed a PC was
>> > acting as commander or military advisor for a particular mass combat
>> unit
>> > in the field.
>>
>> That sounds like the sort of thing I would do (either assigned or seeing
>> a
>> gap, throw myself on, usually the latter) and leads to my recollection
>> "there were gaps between the poles." If I made the time to dig WTH out I
>> could tell you who wrote it, as it's obviously easy-ish to pick out my
>> writing from Frank's or Terry's.
>>
>> > WTH also had the black powder design sequences that were an addition
>> to
>> > FF&S.
>>
>> Yes, I do remember those. I think Terry made a stab at it and then Frank
>> re-did it. There was also a "choo-choo train design system" that I
>> dropped
>> because it mostly got at the visual appearance of a locomotive and
>> didn't
>> adequately touch on their engineering-physics (tractive effort, wheels
>> for
>> speed vs. pulling power, size of boiler vs. combustion unit), and for
>> the
>> ROI was not worth the design time. Someone probably also tried a
>> "sword-pike-pointy stick" design system at one point.
>>
>> One "design system" that I definitely try to avert my eyes from is the
>> "battle dress design system." It was one of those bad ideas where
>> someone
>> from the Art Dept said, "hey, shouldn't there be a design system for
>> this?" "Yeah, we don't have to send this to the printer until 5:00, and
>> it's 2:00 now, so we've got time," so it was written half at the
>> conference table and half at someone's desk. When asked, "whaddaya
>> think?"
>> there wasn't enough time to form specific logical objections, the best
>> one, "there39;s not enough time" having already been excluded.
>>
>> There was a spaceship design system made for Hard Times that was
>> extremely
>> detailed and fiddly and mostly seemed to be made to allow players to
>> design "every rocket propulsion system you've ever heard of," but it had
>> that two-fold TL problem where 1) it focused on all of these different
>> approaches that only fall into a fraction of one TL, and therefore from
>> the standpoint of the larger game don't haul much freight, and 2) the
>> top-down logic that says TL ultimately has to be focused on "what was
>> found to work," not things that were tried but failed. But HT is
>> arguably
>> a MT product, so doesn't belong here. Spiritually it was a transition
>> product, but game system is obviously MT. There are a large number of
>> "MT"
>> products that are spiritually TNE products: Arrival Vengeance,
>> Astrogator39;s Guide to Diaspora, Assignment: Vigilante, some other stuff
>> I
>> can't think of. It makes it hard for me to remember "when did you start
>> work on TNE" because it literally goes back to my first day at GDW in
>> one
>> form or another.
>>
>> Last thought, there was always a typical error on the part of
>> "design-system designers" to mistake "when we on Earth got around to
>> thinking of a logical solution" for an actual TECHNICAL change (e.g.,
>> superfiring guns, ballast tanks in submarines, multiple locomotive
>> units,
>> etc.), which caused me to reject a lot of design sequences over the
>> years.
>> I would rather not have a thing than publish one that is wrong. In
>> fairness, it is easy to see how this confusion begins, as it's not
>> always
>> easy to separate "this is now possible/embedded technically" from
>> "there39;s
>> now enough related technical that it's easier for people to say, 'oh
>> yeah...'". That is especially the case where TL is saying two utterly
>> different things in the "pure" Traveller rules, where it is merely
>> descriptive and can be (theoretically) based on multiple parallel
>> technology systems (think tech for an aquatic species vs. tech for a
>> terrestrial species) all governed by the same laws of physics, vs. what
>> it
>> is saying in the 3I campaign background where it tends to reflect the
>> dissemination of core Imperial technology. There's also the
>> understandable
>> tendency of writers to fall back on real world or Star Trek examples:
>> "this was solved by Thomas Edison or Dr. Richard Daystrom with the XXX,"
>> but TL is not defined by a guy, that guy is just the expression of that
>> TL
>> "fact" (a.k.a. "hooey assertion") in that timeline.
>>
>> To conclude, some TL vs. discovered principles things ARE easy. The best
>> example of this is germ theory. The benefits of germ theory do NOT arise
>> at TL...(whatever late 1800s Earth is). You can tell TL 0 people, "don't
>> build your toilets next to your drinking fountains" and it works just
>> fine. If you're describing an isolated species with no transmission of
>> knowledge from more advanced people, yes, they probably have to invent
>> microscopes first to figure it out on their own. But you could just as
>> easily posit that they are psionic and can sense the presence of tiny
>> life
>> forms all around them so don't need microscopes, or say that they just
>> evolved to be neat freaks so gain the practical benefits of germ theory
>> (at least in prevention of disease) without having to reach a certain
>> TL.
>> It's SF, if you're not confounding someone's pre-suppositions somewhere,
>> you might as well stick with crossword puzzles.
>>
>>
>>
>