So apparently I haven't been the only person taking an interest in Gygax's timekeeping lately. I stumbled into a cluster of blogs describing three campaigns currently being run with 1:1 timekeeping:
- Bdubs' ACKS campaign
- Bdubs discusses observations on the effects of different timekeeping strategies in play here
- Jeffro's AD&D campaign (which has been running for about a year now)
- Waterdeep OSR's 5e campaign (this post also discusses the how to effectively delegate the activity of high-power NPC patrons to players)
This seems like a very natural/consistent/worthy next thrust for the OSR. Having recovered the early rules, and made them readily available, rediscovering and repopularizing the culture of play of the early days for which those rules were intended.
It kind of tempts me to run Traveller in this style... the most obvious difficulty is figuring out the resources available to patrons, and Striker's rules for planetary GDP would provide a very workable starting point.
Hi John,
ReplyDeleteone of the players in our current Traveller Campaign pointed me to this post, great stuff! I've already devoured Jeffro's posts. So thank's for the other links.
As to our campaign, it's 1:1 timing, there are three patron players and two regular player groups roaming around the subsector, nine players total. The rules system is Traveller5. It's been very interesting so far, and conflicts and ramifications start to develope. Next session will most likely see the first actual mission instigated by a patron player.
As to resources available to patron players I didn't try to somehow balance them, but rather just put in what seems logical and fun to play with. As long as the patron players weekly orders are reasonable within the narrative, they're good to do whatever they can think off.
I hope to get around and post something about this game and 1:1 patron style campaigns on my blog some time soon.
Cheers,
W.B.
Very welcome! I look forward to reading your posts about running Traveller in this style.
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