Friday, September 9, 2011

Miscellanea: Traveller Trade, GM Screens, and Upcoming Game

Nothing groundshaking today, but a couple small things:

First, trade in Traveller has always bothered me because it's kind of a pain to actually do.  Too much bookkeeping for not a whole lot of raw fun.  I recently found this pdf full of commodity cards, though, which looks like it might improve play considerably, both by speeding up random cargo generation (draw a card, roll tonnage, roll type, go) and by kind of concretizing them (players buy cargo?  Give them the card).  These kind of seem like they'd make Traveller trade bearable, which is a Good Thing.

Along a similar line, I've been thinking about how convenient the Stargrunt reference card makes the game, and it's inspired me to build a Traveller GM screen covered in handy tables of things I often forget, like weapon range modifiers ("What's the mod for an assault weapon at 50 meters again... ?"), law levels, radiation effects, and things like that.  Alternatively, I might build a series of reference sheets for different parts of gameplay; a combat card with actions types, cover, ranges, autofire, and similar, a "Crime and Punishment" card gathering the government, law level, sentencing, and starship loan default rules, and so forth.  These would be damn handy, and also useful on the player end of things.  So that might be worth the time to put together if I end up playing or running Trav...

But, this weekend, I'm running a Trailblazer one-shot of a stripped-down version of one of the Dungeon Crawl Classic modules that I played through once.  The intent is to test TB's action points and short rest rules, as well as to game for the first time in a good while.  So the rest of my afternoon is going to be prep for that, interspersed with homework.

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