A few weeks ago, my friends started dragging me into sessions of Species Unknown, an early access "friendslop" game with a delightful premise straight out of Mothership: You and 1-3 friends are contracted out to go to an abandoned space ship, the HSS Hawking, to retrieve data, destroy the ship or to kill/capture one of five (planned ten) science fiction monsters. As I sat cowering in the bunker out of fear of whatever horrible thing is out there eating my teammate's faces, I thought back to the short-lived Traveller campaign that I ran in mid 2024, which I killed after I made the mistake of trying to run a traditional dungeon crawl with it.
There were a few things wrong with it. I hacked up the setting, found myself repeatedly distracted by the vastness of space, tried to hack together a little stock market minigame that was too punishing for my players to engage with, but in the end, it proved to be a fun few sessions until I abruptly changed course and ran Incunabuli.
But really, I kept running into issues with the rules. I ran Cepheus Engine, because 1) it's open-source and I'm a sucker for that, and 2) because I already owned a copy of the rules and I didn't want to buy anything else. The main issue (a perennial one) is that the layout fucking sucks. No offense intended, but it's terrible. It's hard to find whatever you're looking for as you flip through the book, and that meant that GM loading times would slow to a crawl. But that can be fixed, and the rest of my issues can be solved via houserules, such as:
Issue: Players can (and often do) start with incredibly high level combat gear
Meet Jaxxxon "the Jaxxxer" Starshitter. Former corporate police officer, now freelancer, he made enough dough in chargen to purchase battle armor with reflec. I love the Jaxxxer and I love his player, but that meant that he could single-handedly slaughter entire crews of pirates and conquer several low TL worlds at the same time. Jaxxxer made it difficult to plan ahead, since my players tended to use him as a battering ram to get out of difficult situations, eschewing diplomacy in lieu of sending out the Jaxxer to kill all who opposed them. I don't really have a problem with this as a solution, but it quickly got out of hand as it became the solution. So
Problem: Battle suits available at chargen negate early-game challenge.
Possible Solution: Add equipment degradation subsystem
This is my solution for literally everything. Mouseritter's d6 wear roll after use is probably fine, but I love making things more complicated. Why not tie the roll into the core mechanic?
"Players must make a Wear roll at 7+ whenever an item is used in a way that may cause wear or damage. Items of high or low quality may receive a DM as befitting their status. If the role is a failure, then the item has been damaged in some way, meaning that rolls using them are made with a cumulative DM-1. Most items are destroyed at DM-3, and it costs 10% of the item's value to have it repaired by a specialist. Weapons and Armor are tested after the end of combat, with armor making the roll at DM-2 if the wearer has taken damage from an outside source while wearing it, and armor receiving a cumulative -1 penalty to DT and DR per point of Wear."
My thinking is this: I like that players can buy the good shit right out of character creation. That's good to me. This way, though, there comes a price from constantly getting into scrapes, which will hopefully encourage my players to try blasting their way through less often.
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When I started this post, I had a whole laundry list of grievances, but since I've recently acquired a PDF of Mongoose Traveller 2e, I see that some things are less terrible than I may have thought based on the last game I ran. The ship combat, for instance, not too bad. I don't know why I hated it so much when I ran it in Cepheus Engine. I should try it again sometime. I just ported my subsector from a (hard to get a hold of) CampaignWiki to a (compact and easy to look up) obsidian vault, so I may do so sometime in the future, but I should probably, at least finish my game of Incunabuli, first. And to do that I need to summarize something like half a dozen sessions here before I even think about doing that.
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Note: It has come to my attention that the proper nomenclature is "Battle Dress."
