I'm not really meaning for this to be self promotion (though I totally could understand if it appears that way), I'm just really excited. I got my first video review ever for the book I released last month Traveller Fleet Combat: Reimagined
RPG Overview 329 Traveller Fleet Combat: Reimagined
Last week I posted here about a fleet combat ruleset I’d been working on for Traveller, built around the idea that big fleet battles should still be about the player characters.
Well, it’s out now!
Traveller Fleet Combat: Reimagined is a 35-page TAS supplement for running the kind of battles where dozens of ships and fighter squadrons are smashing into each other without turning the event into multiple sessions of ship-by-ship bookkeeping.
Ships are organized into wings, players allocate dice between Attack, Defense, and Maneuver, and the Travellers generate Command Points through their skills and decisions. The fleet battle stays abstract enough to move quickly, while the PCs are still the people making the decisions that matter.
The premium version includes:
It’s $10, but I made a 25% off coupon for the first 10 people from Reddit who want it!
And because I know not everyone wants to spend money on a rules experiment before seeing whether it works at their table, there’s also a free version.
The free edition still includes the complete fleet combat rules, the magazine and printer-friendly versions, the Battle of Black Hole Station, and the play aids. You’re mainly missing the expanded appendices and the Foundry module.
If you grab either one and actually get it to the table, I’d really, truly, genuinely love to hear how the battle went; good, bad, indifferent, and ugly!
And, in keeping with my longstanding commitment to unbiased self-evaluation, reviews confirming my brilliance are also appreciated! Reviews that do not confirm my brilliance are, perhaps, less appreciated.
Happy gaming everyone!
I’ve been running Traveller a long time, across a lot of campaigns, and I keep hitting the same problem: fleet battles.
High Guard is great when the focus is one ship or a small group. But once a campaign reaches a real fleet engagement, like Yavin, the Battle for Deep Space 9, or Ring Station in The Expanse, resolving everything means a lot of prep, a lot of bookkeeping, and pushing the player characters who brought the campaign to that point waaaay into the background.
So I wrote Traveller Fleet Combat: Reimagined, and then play tested it with several groups of (mostly) different players.
It’s deliberately more abstract than High Guard. Ships are grouped into player-controlled wings, with dice allocated each round between Attack, Defense, and Maneuver, while the player character skills generate Command Points that can change the course of the battle.
The goal is fast, dramatic fleet combat that still feels like Traveller, and keeps the characters in the middle of everything.
You can use Fleet Combat: Reimagined for the big climax of one adventure, then let results kickstart the next one.
The 35 page supplement releases next week through TAS for $10, as well a free version that contains 100% of the rules needed to run the game, you just miss out on a couple of the VTT goodies and the appendices.
So, I'm curious:
When you run big fleet battles, how do you try to make the PCs feel important?
Am I the only one feeling like this is deeply overengineered?
Text/number fields you cant type in- because they have multi-step, multi-menu requirements instead of just editing a value directly.
Automatically advancing years. If there is a misclick the GM needs to open the core options, fix it, and then restart the session to fix it (depending on settings this might boot players from the game so they have to log back in, or just refresh the screen, closing all open windows, and interrupting whatever people were doing)
Byzantine opposed rolls resolution
Players cant just edit HP and keep action moving, they have to create a wound, then edit the wound?
Double confirmation for healing
Character creation mechanics that require way too many different classes of items
Huge amounts of data entry just to get the most basic use from the system
Bewildering UI/UX choices like:
Hiding the outline on an editable field so it doesn't look editable at a glance?
Some clickables require a double click, some require a single click. There is no rhyme or reason for which is which.
The character sheet is just badly laid out
The NPC sheet is badly laid out.
I have run hundreds of Foundry games, dozens of campaigns, and probably pushing more than 1000 players at this point. I'm a Foundry community developer. This has been the most labor intensive system I've ever had to work with. It has taken me longer to set up than any other system I've ever interacted with.
This system will slow the game down tremendously, and for a lot longer than the automation will speed it up. The GM will spend more time telling players how to interact with the software than how to use the rules or storycrafting.
It is abysmally bad. Working with the free system convinced me not to buy the Foundry Pendragon core rulebook.
Now that I've vented, I'm going to go keep working with it because I'm not going to make my own, and I have online players who want Pendragon.
Hi all,
I am an experienced Traveller GM, and am I getting ready to start up a Fifth Frontier War campaign. Besides the core book, what other books would you say are must haves?
There's nearly $300 worth of books available and I know from experience with Drinax and others, they're probably not all needed. Of them, what would you all recommend?
Thanks so much!