Postby Epicenter » Tue Mar 24, 2015 3:27 am
For solo traveller, I'd like to see activities that are a part of the sci-fi genre that are ... actually surprisingly boring to play out in a role-playing game group but aren't very well developed yet. I think there's a niche for things like this.
I also feel that solo traveller concepts will sell better if they have contribute to multiplayer Traveller, so that GMs can purchase solo Traveller goods to enhance their multiplayer games.
For instance, a detailed and functional Trade system would make merchant games more viable, especially if they were oriented towards ships players actually want (Jump-2 and above) instead of being viable only for Jump-1 Free Traders.
Exploration and Mapping
Trade
Starship Design and Construction
Exploration and Mapping
You've been assigned to land on world whose basic UPP is known. Since it is an inhabitable world, you (the Scout) have been assigned to explore it. Scout out natural resources, native lifeforms, and flesh out maps taken by cartographic sensors with 'on the ground' knowledge.
Trade
It's been over 30 years since Traveller came out. Mr. Sprange, perhaps you and your company would like to take a swing at the Holy Grail of traveller rules: Writing trade rules that would make ships like the Far Trader profitable? The basic Traveller trade rules do not. Ships like the Free Trader will make money steadily, hand-over-fist provided you're willing to play safe and boring. A Far Trader basically will go out of business. A reasonably robust trade system that would allow for people to "make or break" it in the stars as a solo merchant, just porting around cargoes through the stars. I think an abstracted space combat resolution system (for piracy) would be fairly useful (since space combat is basically a single-player and the GM minigame anyway, why not put it into solo Traveller?).
Starship Design and Construction
Recently, something has begun to bother me in Traveller. Why is it that Traveller has these detailed tables for character generation, including the chance of injury (or in older rules, death) during chargen ... yet despite all the nitpicky detailed design rules that have come out during various editions of Traveller, these concepts have never been applied to starship or vehicle design? A player assembles a staff (basically a group of characters with very abbreviated stats - the relevant stat, their salary, age, and dedication value). Factors such die rolls to influence systems integration (well, this gun should work in the system...), cost-overruns, bribery scandals, interference by competitors, could all be possible complications that need to be worked through. Failure at the rolls might result in the project being cancelled (death in chargen).
The final evaluation could list the complications and so on, then the entire "character sheet" could be posted online for other GMs to possibly use. It'd show the complications so that GMs who want "realistic" designs could pass over the designs that only have the most skilled team members and all the systems integration rolls are outstanding successes and so on.
Such a design system would produce many and varied starship designs, instead of these hyper-optimized designs produced in utterly ideal conditions cranked out by players. It might take a longer, but it's a solo game so that's all right isn't it?