Assembling the Sky Mall

I'm assembling/editing the SKY MALL (i.e., Gear Book) for the Traveller campaign.   It's basically a re-edit of the Rhylanor Express book, but I've re-done the armor names and progression a little bit, and changed some of the weapon data in a minor fashion.

I'm having a few bouts of indecision here and there on a few issues.  

Melee Weapons:  Traveller has always had and used melee weapons, in fact the Marine career gets "Cutlass" skill as a free skill at enlistment, rather than any sort of gun skill.   There aren't any super advanced "vibro-blades" or "energy knives" or anything else, just plane old knives and swords.  I don't know whether to add a few of high tech sci-fi type blades in.    Regular weapons are plenty dangerous most of the time, unless the targets are in Combat Armor or Battle-Dress, which should not be a common event outside of a high-powered mercenary game.  On the other hand, COOL TOYS!.

Weird Weapons:   I'm also wavering about adding some additional experimental, weird or rare weapons.    On the one hand, I'm thinking that shoving all the weapons I possibly can into the Sky Mall--things like the Insidious Face Melter-- might be Hella-cool, on the other hand, there's much to be said for the Sky Mall book is just for the commonly found items, and the weird stuff should pop up as surprises during play.

Metagame Mechanisms for Traveller

The Traveller combat rules we're going to use are based on the Traveller Boardgame called "Mayday" for ship combat using Classic Traveller ships, and on the Traveller miniatures game called "Striker" for ground combat.   But since we're porting them into the role-playing realm, I think it would be good to add a few meta-game (i.e., non-simulationist) features to up the heroics and lessen the lethality a bit.  

Now, I don't want the lethality totally nerfed.   I find that when there's no real risk the fun drops out of the game entirely.   In fact, I'd prefer a lot more "dead" to a lot more "critically injured and out of action" on the whole.

Anyway here are some ideas:

XP for Damage Saving Throws:
I touched on this in a previous post, but after some thought, I think this is the scheme I like:
        To reduce the Wound Effect (Dead/Destroyed to Serious Wound, or Serious Wound to Light Wound for example)  1 XP for 25% chance, 2XP for 50%, 3XP for 75% for the reduction to take place.

XP for Re-roll
Spend 1 XP to re-roll 1 skill roll or ability check that you yourself need to roll.

END SCENE NOW
On majority vote of the players, once per game session, the players can cash in the "END SCENE NOW" card to end an encounter--this of course won't allow them to get something they don't have in their hands, but might allow them to escape while running away with a stolen item  etc.

AWESOME STUNT WAGER
Once per session, each player can call for an awesome stunt wager.  He describes an awesome stunt and what he intends to accomplish by the stunt.  The GM then proposes an evenly disadvantageous result for a failure of that stunt.   If the player accepts the wager, both the player and GM rolls 1d6.  If the player rolls higher, he wins and the stunt is successful and he gains the benefit.  If the GM rolls higher, the stunt fails and the player suffers the consequence.   If the rolls are a tie, the GM must raise the stakes by about twice and they re-roll.

XP System for Traveller idea

EXPERIENCE POINT SYSTEM

One notable feature of Classic Traveller was the absence of any experience point or other sort of adventure-based skill advancement. The only way to improve your character was by training, which was long, slow, uncertain and didn't reward adventuring. Most of the many, many, many subsequent versions of Traveller had some sort of adventure based experience point system included. I used a version of one of them in the Rhylanor Express campaign, but was a bit dissatisfied with it and would like to try another.

Here's the basic scheme: each adventure, each PC gets a number of XP based on a schedule something like this:

Showing up and playing: 1 XP

Achieving the main goal of the session: +1 XP

No serious wounds or deaths on your side: +1 XP

Making a profit for the session: +1 XP

Voted MVP +1 XP

Voted “Hard Luck Charlie”: +1 XP

These XP can be spent as follows:

Converting a level 0 skill to level 1 2XP

Converting a level 1 skill to level 2 4XP

Converting a level 2 skill to level 3 9XP

Converting a level 3 skill to level 4 16 XP

Converting a level 4 skill to level 5 25XP

Converting a level 5 skill to level 6 36 XP

Increasing an ability score by 1 point 12XP

Re-roll a die in an adventure session 1 XP

The last is sort of a base place-holder, I'm thinking of letting people use XP in some fashion like Bennies are used in Savage Worlds.

I'm looking for some feed-back, suggestions etc on this whole process.

Traveller NPC cards

I decided to make a deck of NPC's for Traveller awhile.   I already have plenty of employee/henchmen cards, but thought that Andrew's scheme of having the pictures of NPC's would be particularly useful for Traveller.   In fact, since a Traveller character stat block is very simple, just a list of ability scores, in a quick format, and a list of skills, I could get the entire stat block onto the picture card.   I started by making 1 for each of the 36 types of "patrons" listed on the patron encounter chart.

Actually, I think that the picture cards will be even more useful for Traveller than they are for ACKS, since at high level, most NPC's are largely irrelevant to the players, while in Traveller they are constantly important.   One of the things I like about Traveller is the fact that the PC's are really any different than the NPC's around them, and there isn't a huge difference between a character's innate power in the first session and the last.

Here are two examples:

#1 Gleep-Glorp the Spanky, doing research for groin called shots:

Here's #2:  Rutherford St. Cool, galactic playboy

Backlog Continued

A squad of Saxon slingers

An owlbear

Some familiars

Operation Backlog

Most of my new sci-fi miniatures have arrived, but I wanted to try to clear my backlog of old lead before charging into the new stuff (or else old lead never gets painted).  So, I've gotten through enough of them so that I can proceed with my newer stuff without feeling like a hoarder.  The only things in my back up box are those plastic Viking spearmen (who I may try to get rid of, as I really don't need them), and some snake-men, which I think Jason gave me (no guilt involved if I didn;t buy them).

I had one disaster in the process.   When I was bringing in the primed and assembled historicals from the car-hole, I dropped them on the floor, shattering much of the assembly work (I never did find one of the lances and some of the bases are still cracked).

Anyway, here are the results:

3 mounted knights from the 1400's

4 mounted knights from the 1200's

A byzantine emperor and his retinue

Long Delayed floor plan project

Many, many years ago Andrew gave me a bunch of floor-plan blue-print type thingies (not actually blue) which I believe were made by his students when he taught some CAD type course at YTI (again, many, many years ago, so details are a bit foggy).   I was going through my basement throwing away all the extraneous card board boxes when I found this lump of paper.

At first I was just going to chuck them (chuck fever was raging) but instead I went through them, found 5 or 6 that would actually be pretty useful, right scale, top-down view, not scribbled up with comments.   So I cut out the actual floor plans from them and pasted them on hunks of card-board.

Here are a couple of pictures: