The Core Worlds

I’ve seen a lot of commentary about D&D 4E’s skill challenges but I haven’t drunk that particular bit of Kool-Aid yet (probably due to my only time using them being near the end of a session when everybody was tired). On the other hand, I got to try out the Traveller rules for chained skill checks last night (the Mongoose Publishing edition if that makes a difference).

This is a simple mechanic that lets a series of actions, by various characters, build upon each other to effect the final outcome. Let’s run through an example from actual play to see how it worked for my group.

First, the objective: To include a consignment of post in our cargo when we make our next trip. The rules are this are nicely laid out in the core rulebook.

We wanted to try to trip the balance in our favour though, so we looked at ways we could persuade the postmaster that we were a nice trustworthy bunch who would be ideal to hand a massive box of mail to.

That would be a persuade check, but it might go more smoothly if we buddied up to him in a social setting. That would be a bit of carousing then.

The best place to do that would be to figure out where his local was and join him there. There are several ways our team could have done that, including being stealthy and following him, or investigating him. We eventually went with the option that best suited the skills of the member of our team who, shall we say, preferred to avoid legal entanglements.

The rest of that roll was compared to a table, which gave a modifier to the carousing roll, which applied to the same table to give a bonus to the persuade roll, and then to the final check to see if any mail was available for us to deliver.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out and the last batch of mail had been shipped the previous night (that’s what happens when you miss the target number by one). Still, a certain postmaster really, really likes the diplomatic party member (that’s what happens when you roll a double six when you have a +6 modifier). Since we’ll almost certainly be coming back this way, it looks like a long term grav-tennis partnership might be forming.

I suppose I’d better say something about how I liked the rule, hadn’t I? I like it — it makes for a streamlined process of building a bit of story behind what would otherwise have been a simple dice roll, and it managed to introduce a bit of character development along the way.

I’m looking forward to the next game, when we blast off to take our cargo into a new system, and poke around the operations of a certain group that our patron is rather interested in.

A few hours ago, I was unfortunate enough to be in a conversation which included this little gem (or something closely resembling it):

“I need to set up a Wiki or something”, said Jim, “D&D dungeon crawls are simple enough, but in Traveller there’s a lot more information to keep track of.”

I managed to resist for a whole three hours before I pushed aside the project I was working on (I’d hit a speed bump, and was looking for an excuse to procrastinate, that’s the joy of personal projects with no deadlines).

So, a system to track information about a Traveller campaign. Clearly, a subsector or two is going to be a key point of this, so we’ll have to represent that somehow (yes, let’s run directly to the output for the system). There’s a lovely standard map for these, so producing something similar shouldn’t be too difficult.

By trade, I’m a web developer, and two hours ago I knew next to nothing about dynamically producing graphics (so all systems were equal as far as learning enough to get going was concerned). The standard subsector map lends itself to vector formats, so SVG was the logical choice.

An hour later, and I’ve picked out enough from the specification to write a Perl script to generate an 8×10 hex grid with coordinates. You’ll need a browser capable of rendering SVG (which is pretty much anything except Microsoft Internet Explorer (which is years behind its competitors in everything but market share)) or a stand-alone program such as Inkscape.

I have plans for this (which include a nice database and lots of JavaScript), some of which might even make it to fruitition. I’m not holding out hope of finding a great deal of time for those plans, so I’ll publish what I do have (including the source code) and hope that you find it useful.

Mongoose have released a playtest document for Traveller. I’ve only skimmed it so far, and it seems to be little more than character generation, skill resolution and combat rules, but what it does have looks quite nice.

Hopefully I’ll be able to put together a group and give it a run through.