Into the Void Ref’s Notes 11

A few notes about Into the Void session 11.

To start, every time we play now I can’t believe we are this far into a campaign now. We’ve been running this campaign for over a year, and though we’ve had some months when we didn’t play, we’ve been pretty regular. The goal has been been to play once a month, and we’ve done the best we can to make that happen. Again, this was about a 2.5 – 3 hour session, which seems about right.

We started this session where we left off on the previous session. In preparing for this game I honestly had no idea what the players would choose to do. I had some ideas. There given a possible Jump-2, there were three planets in range of their current position on Uetonah. Two they had previously visited, the third was fresh. I worked up a profile for that world as well as some encounters. I figured they needed to 1)manage to leave Uetonah in one piece, 2)go somewhere else, and 3)they’d want to sell the very valuable salvaged starship power plant and turret. An exciting get-away was called for, and the NPC Fardt the Gluck would figure prominently in that. They still had a lot of options, but I was ready. I had some encounters that would certainly present themselves as well as some possible encounters to drop in modularly, depending on where they went.

All if this is to help me NOT have to totally improvise. I’m just not that good at it. I need some parts to play with, then I can do my job as Ref.

Before the next session I want to write up ten interesting, useful, entertaining NPCs I can drop in. I want to also create a new list of science fiction tropes to drop into the game, and as always I need to remember to be highly descriptive.

We used the Cepheus Light rules for vehicle combat/dogfights. They worked quite well. Ship vs. three security speeders. Very, very fun. I was happy to allow Randy’s character, Roger, to use his Navigation skill to plot a stealth course out of the system, using the planet’s one moon to obscure their route. I did a “hidden” Nav roll for him. He knew I was making the roll, but would not know if his attempt worked until they were either out of the system or in combat with some system defense ships. As it was, they succeeded and managed to get away without having the ship blown up.

I need to go back over some things in Traveller Book 2 regarding ship combat. Though we’re using the Cepheus Light rules, I still need to remember things like 1)do dual or triple laser turrets get two or three to-hit rolls per shot (they do?), or that 2)Pulse lasers are at -1 to hit, but each hit gets two damage rolls. Stuff like that. I think I got all this right during the game, but it would be nice to not need to look it up. It’s not that complex.

I’m allowing some pretty cinematic actions. I think it makes the game more fun. Like in this session having Flint down a security speeder with a rifle and electronic scope. that was really cool and fun. I let Barney, with Engineering-3, make roll to temporarily boost the Maneuver drive up one level and get them to the Jump point a little faster. What use is it to have a “miracle worker” on the team if they can’t do cool stuff like that?

Looking forward to Session 12. The winter is here, the weather is crap. Perfect for reading science fiction and working on games.

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