Category: Into the Void – Ref’s Notes

Session 54 was a classic example of the primary and most important principle in RPGs: Player will always do the unexpected.

The happenings in Scuuries Tavern were nice. A good chance for some roleplaying and information gathering. Lucky’s player, Jeff, did the unexpected by taking up a spot to watch the group from a distance. That had important effects on the rest of the game. Then of course when Roger (played by Randy) clung to the outside of a speeding Mag-Lev train I also was not expecting that. As Ref I had to decide on the fly how to go about this. Was it possible? And could he succeed. I set a level for a DEX roll and had him jump, and he managed to cling on to the train as it was leaving. I had really expected several of the PCs to commandeer grav bikes parked in front of the tavern, but they didn’t. Barney quickly bought one and took off after the train alone. Then he and Roger fought 3 thugs in the train. We’ve been playing long enough that the know getting shot in Traveller is likely to render you unconscious. They were quite daring.

Flint (David’s character) is proving to be quite important in the game. He has leadership and tactics. Davis is naturally a very tactical gamer, so he’s playing the character really well.

The session was fast-moving and crazy.

So, we had a good session. After everyone signing on and a little chat we played got in about 1 hour 40 minutes of roleplaying. It thought it went well. The players all had a chance to spend a little bit of their wealth on some cool stuff, an interesting new world was introduced, and potential complications to their mission came up. I expect the next session will have some action. Should be fun. But I never just assume out players will do any one specific thing.

The night after our game I was on the way to my aikido practice and I was listening to a gaming podcast. As usual my mind kind of wandered, and suddenly I have a “revelation” about the direction our campaign was going, and how some elements that were introduced over these first 53 sessions tie together. That’s right. I introduced stuff with no idea how it would fit together. Because this is a long form campaign though it all fell into place in my cranium that night. I feel really good about the campaign going forward. No need to railroad the players, force things, or so forth. I just have a clear idea of how some big trends fit together, and how that might affect the PCs, and it’s going to be really fun exploring this.

Session 52 was almost all roleplaying, with a few dice rolls here and there. The PCs had some decisions to make. I was ready to deal with whatever they decided.  That is one advantage of running a long campaign. I know the motivations of the NPCs, I know the undercurrents of what is happening, I have NPCs and encounters in reserve, and have a good idea how long any particular encounter will take.

I think I’ve talked about this a bit with Jeff on SAFCOcast, but I’ll say it again here. As a gamemaster, you have to get used to the idea of a quiet table. You have to get over the idea that YOU personally have entertain the players 100% of the time. If they are taking a long time to make a decision, sometimes you need to just let it play out. Of course, decision paralysis does happen, and sometimes you have to do something to break that. That is a challenge in a more open-ended sandbox style campaign. I think I’ve heard it said that with regard to prepping for such a game you need to “be prepared to improvise.” I think there’s a lot truth to that.

I think the hollowed-out crazy asteroid world I’ve come up with will be a fun setting for a session or two.

Our previous session, while it did involve some quality roleplaying, had a lot of dice-rolling. The ship race was fun, but mechanical. It was a great chance for the PCs with great ship-related skills to practice ship combat, and a great chance for me as the ref to get some practice running ship combat, without actually destroying or damaging their ship. But those 3 of the 5 PCs didn’t really do much roleplaying that game.

This session was a balance to that. Almost all roleplaying. A chance to get their winnings, discuss as a team where they are, what their goals are, and think about tactics for achieving those goals. So they had a good 30 minutes of just discussing, in character, the challenges facing them.

With just a little help from the Ref – in the form of what I would call a “passive” Leader-1 skill roll, they came up with a great way of solving the mercenary problem. Honestly, Flint’s player David was about to come to the same conclusion without the roll. Caliban’s player, Todd, was out, so I ran Caliban as an NPC thinking I’d need to give them a bit of help, but I didn’t. Caliban’s recruiting skill was pivotal. A success really helped him and Flint hire away the mercs. Frankly I’d have made it succeed anyway, because David played Flint so smoothly during those interactions.

It was fun to have the 3 race crew members become minor celebrities after winning the race. The post-race party was a great way to introduce some new NPCs and complications, and the players used it to solidify some alliances as well. The party, however, isn’t over. More to come…

Sessions 49 and 50 were important to our campaign for a couple of reason, but primarily because SESSION 50! I never ran a campaign nearly this long in terms of number of game sessions or years played in my youth. In the last week both this campaign and my D&D campaign reached session 50. I am very happy about that.

It’s not just the fact that we’ve played a lot of session now. We started this campaign in April of 2018. So we’ve been playing, in just a few days, for 8 years. In those 8 years we have, as a group of friends, endured job losses, severe illnesses, loss of parents, a global pandemic, and other challenges, but we have kept it going. This past year, after 7 years of play, we added a great player and friend to the group. I could not be happier with all of this. It’s about more than the game. It’s the friendships.

As I have gone on and on about before, the long-form campaign has allowed the player characters to be developed in a way that you just can’t do with limited (but fun) campaigns. The players have taken these very on-paper-simple characters and breathed life into them. In a game in which the characters don’t really change very much mechanically (not “levels” and not much skill improvement), I feel like the PCs are all valuable and irreplaceable. One might look at Classic Traveller and say “oh, if my character dies I can just roll one up who is just or good if not better”, but I think that misses the value that a real in-game history brings to the character. It’s more valuable than “character improvement” because it requires real world time to create. It’s just so cool and amazing, and over time it’s made my job as referee easier as well.

I wrote about this over on my 2d6SF blog a while back. 

OK, the last two sessions the PCs were split up into two groups. One group was the crew of a ship involved in a race through an asteroid belt. The other was back on-world in a casino, interacting with NPCs.

The race was challenging to run. Even just concentrating on 4 ships (including the PCs), there was a lot to keep track of as the Ref. In session 49 we played the first 2 rounds. I thought I was ready for the complexity but I wasn’t. So before session 50 I created some “control sheets” for each round, that would help me keep track of the happenings as well as make the whole thing run faster. It worked. I thought session 50 ran really well. I probably made a few mistakes, but overall it was good. Bopping back and forth between sets of PCs kept things lively and for the most part everyone engages. With the race happening I’ll admit the PCs in the casino probably got less of my attention, but what they did get was put to good use.

We used the ship combat rules from Cepheus Light (in a simplified form) for this race. They worked really well. I am going to play with creating a Ship Combat Round Control Sheet for normal ship and vehicle fights that takes into account all the possible crew actions. However, I don’t really want to dwell on ship combat. It is a fun thing to happen, but I want to make sure the roleplaying stays the center of our game.

Well, we are closing in on Session 50. We are already way beyond any campaign I’ve ever run in the past. My current D&D campaign is at session 48.  But in the old days, probably because our group rotated DMs, I probably never got past 15.

I’ve decided to move both of my campaigns to alternating weeks. I can’t keep up the weekly pace on both, and the truth is I haven’t anyway, so I’m making the schedule I can actually maintain official.

This session went well.  I think we have set up some very fun situations. It’s always interesting to me how much we can get done in about 2 hours. This session was really all roleplaying, sneaking around, information gathering, and interacting with NPCs. I’m always pleased that my players seem happy with such a game, and don’t require constant shooting and fighting.

These two sessions involved the team fleeing from a planet, pursued by a System Defense Boat. They were aboard a Jump-2 Maneuver-2 Far Trader with 1 double beam laser turret and 1 sandcaster. To say they were outgunned by the SDB, with its Maneuver-6, two triple laser turrets, and two missile launchers is quite an understatement.

These sessions were a learning experience for both me and the players. We haven’t done much space combat. With the SDB starting 150,000 km away, the players had a couple of rounds to start a getaway, though really according to Classic Traveller ship combat rules they weren’t even at long range at that point.

A challenge I have found with Classic Traveller ship combat has been making it exciting. For the most part I feel like we’ve managed to do that by doing it very cinematically, using different home-brew rules over the years. I want the ship combats to still have lots of personal actions in them.

The ship combat rules from Cepheus Light have some great actions for each position in a ship during combat. They have some things that I had not considered and my player’s hadn’t either. The rules, however, highly abstract combat. While I generally have no problem with this, for about half this combat there was just no substitute for the Classic Traveller vector movement system. It was critical for maintaining the feel of the chase.  So we used the vector system, but we mixed in the rules for Advantage and the crew actions from Cepheus Light, with a touch of me (the Referee) simply deciding when a skill roll was need to accomplish something (like make a difficult vector turn while moving at 8G). I always feel “guilty” when I port rules into Classic Traveller from…well…anything. I love the game so much. I think the tradition of the game is improvisation from both the players and ref. However, with ship combat I think having some minimal framework is needed, and it needs to be fun. The Cepheus Light rules are, in fact, very fun.

Now, while those rule are fun, it was the actions of the players NOT in any rulebook that were really interesting. Example: Barney trying to use his Engineer-3 skill to get one more safe redline out of maneuver drive. Or Flint and Caliban trying to send the SDB a fake message from base. Or Roger using the planet and then the moon as cover. Or Lucky’s compassion for Silvonius after the team really put him at risk he didn’t sign of for.

Overall I felt like it went well. I got a little confused a few times and made mistakes, but my players corrected me when appropriate and that was appreciated. Now, having done this two session chase/non-battle, I think we could do a similar one in half the time with a lot fewer mistakes.

I think that when you start talking about combat a lot of players and refs start down the road of increasing complexity to better mimic “reality”, even if reality involves shooting lasers from the cargo bay of a starship travelling at 140,000 kph. I think that for any campaign, game session, or encounter there is an appropriate level of detail, and that includes space combat. For a Traveller ref it is a matter of finding the right level.

Original Carl, from a Traveller Discord server I participate on, mentioned the Traveller: Out of the Box series of blog posts. I am particularly found of this post: TRAVELLER: Out of the Box is Driven by ADVENTURE, not Hard Science. It’s a great article, and good to read from time to time to really remember that it isn’t a tactical war-game. It is for adventure, and agonizing of minute details can really destroy adventure.

Here’s the thing. Admitting that Classic Traveller doesn’t include every single possible thing and that you have to make some stuff up doesn’t mean the game itself is flawed. It is exactly as it needs to be, as it was designed.

I can’t overstate how well weekly short (2-hour) sessions are working for us. And the virtual tabletop. Everyone is tired after work, especially me, and the idea of going BACK out into the world after work is totally implausible. Well, maybe not totally, but it is an impediment. I don’t think we’d have such good attendance in-person. The ability to sit down after dinner, log in, and play for a couple of hours is great.

I introduced the NPC Jinx a couple of games back. I think Jinx is a great example of how Traveller gives you plenty to work with, without having long character sheets full of stuff. The character’s stats are, in words, small and not that strong, good dexterity and endurance, high intelligence, low education and low social status. 4 skills, all at level 1. A belt pouch with some stuff in it, possibly a dagger in his boot, no armor. Because he is clearly inspired by a young Flinx, from the Alan Dean Foster novels, he has a very low level psi talent that he really doesn’t understand and can’t control.

It is easy for me to get into character as Jinx, as I’m currently about 40% through the Pip and Flinx novels. Even without the psi talent he’d be a good NPC. It has driven home the point that good NPCs are perhaps the most enriching thing in an RPG session, and that Classic Traveller gives you what you need.

The players on our campaign are doing things “not on their character record sheets.” By that, I mean they are taking actions that are impactful in the game, clever,  and fun, often without resorting to their skills. It’s really great to see.

I have some other ideas to write about, but it is 7:11am and I’ve gotta get ready for work. More later.