We went to see the in-laws and we had the first Raclette of the season, and I drank too much white wine, and I ate a lot of ice-cream, and some whiskey. Now I’m sitting on the sofa, listening to Evanescence, drinking water, trying to write a blog post. I wanted to do some programming but didn’t know what to do. How weird.
When I ran my Traveller campaign this year, I used a random subsector filled with the Traveller random tables I had at the time, via Hex Describe. Some things I noted:
The rules sometimes generated ships and bases for particular systems, and if they had a lot of crew (more than three or four named characters) those were not too useful. It is true, at one point I made great use of a military transport with three squads, each character with names, UPP, skills, and so on. The problem is that this particular ship was not generated by the generator; I had it generated later, using the same tables, but for a special purpose. All of the other patrol cruisers never saw any use. It would make more sense to generate a list of ships for the entire subsector, and use that as a random table.
I had spent a lot of effort building little quests and adventure seeds into the tables: scout ships lost, escort missions, and so on. As it turns out, not a single one of these got used.
The prep I did myself for the game was always the same: based on the basic facts of the setting (star port, tech level, law level, government, atmospher, mega corp names) I’d generate a list of ten or twenty characters consisting of names, job titles, and a little something. That’s it. Atop that layer of characters I had a list of events: demonstrations, riots, terrorists, a rebellion, spies, union busting crack downs. Events were player charcters could get involved in, and characters that were easy to run.
None of these characters had stats or equipment, even if that would have made things easier sometimes. None of them had any fetch quests or anything like that. Job titles were much more important.
So now I’m tempted to restructure it all.
The first order of business would be to move all the ships to the back of the document, have just three or four of each hull type, and be done with it.
I also need more patterns for ship names.
It would be cool to have more special buildings. I got a lot of mileage from a radio station, a dig site, a hospital. More such buildings to use as landmarks at the starport would be cool.
More starport visuals.
It would be cool to have a separate face generator for a science fiction setting.
#RPG #Traveller
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
These tables are amazing, and I enjoyed the campaign that spun off them.
I don’t know about making star ship encounters less important, though. Maybe add some action oriented encounters to the [ship in orbit] table? Like patrol cruisers hailing the characters ship, maybe even asking to “stand by for routine control boarding”?, or add the ever popular derelict space ship drifting seemingly lifeless somewhere around the system, potentially leading to a “dungeon crawling” episode? And of course “Pirates!”?
In the campaign it was fun to meet some of the ships more then once. So maybe it would be worthwhile to differentiate between recurring ship encounters and truely random and less important encounters?
Star port visuals, yes! Maybe something along the lines of my 46.656 Psychedelic Landscapes
I guess I should have another look at the Hex Dexscribe syntax and try to add some stuff.
– Wanderer Bill 2021-09-27 10:10 UTC
---
I always love collaborators. 😃
– Alex 2021-09-27 16:58 UTC
---
I’ve been working on having more list of peoples for all the organisations, companies, governments, and so on, with appropriate job titles, maybe also appropriate skills (although many of them don’t need skills).
I like how it is developing.
– Alex 2021-10-16 22:19 UTC
---
An interesting thought process! I’m currently gearing up to run a game, and I’m seeing some automation options. I would take your thought process a step further, write something to build a ship crew, and something different to build the star system and planets. That way you can focus on one thing at a time, and any refactoring doesn’t impact the other tools. That also means your incoming contributors have a much smaller code base they need to understand before they can contribute.
Your subsector generator is awesome! The main issue is that it is geared towards the way you game, and other DMs may run a different style of game. One game I ran had a mercenary Marine phase, and then a space navy battle phase, and later a commercial entrepreneur phase. Very different needs, and everything was focused on one player character! A group of players may take even more diverse courses.
– Leam 2021-11-06 01:56 UTC
