By Paul Elliott
Art by David Reddington
There
was nothing really like Traveller’s original ship combat rules, with its
acceleration vectors and computer-programming-on-the-fly. For me, though, the
novelty was soon replaced with the burning desire to get on with the story and
find out how it all ends. One screenwriter in Hollywood is a critic of the car chase,
describing it as a gap in the plot, a gaping hole that leaves the audience
waiting for the outcome. I’d been wanting to plug Traveller’s ‘plot gap’ for
years, but only recently come around to the task when I decided to jump into a
Book 1, 2 and 3 only, universe.
The
system I developed is an abstraction of the Book 2 space combat rules as they
stand. An important point to make is that it leaves the starship construction
rules unchanged; any book 2 design can participate in these abstract combats
quite easily. I wanted to know very quickly, 'who wins?' without deciding which
programs to feed into the computer, or which turrets should fire on which
targets. There involves a short assessment procedure for any participating
craft which assigns each a number, a Combat Rating (CR).
Download the complete rules HERE!
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