Spinward - I've not seen that before, thank you. It must have been before 2020 that I last saw this masterpiece by Robert. There are some great additions in the 3rd installment aren't there? One of the great things I like, but only discovered after testing the mechanics out is the variable table size. we all struggle with tables. By that I mean we want huge d100 tables (for variety) but don't want the faff of writing every entry, rolling and scrolling through them just to get, well what? Perhaps an NPC reaction, a type of star ship or an interesting item. It all takes time, space and effort. Then there is the straight jacket of the dice roll outcome. So you can only realistically have 6, or 11, or 20 or 100 or whatever the number of facets is of the dice you are using. My tables had weird and random totals in them (7 problems why the traffic is backed up today, 26 types of animated roadside advert, 43 reasons the cyber-cops stopped you in the street etc.). all because you're not using a dice so the table length doesn't matter and the long tiresome list is hidden from view and you only write it once anyway. you can add to it later as inspiration strikes without scrapping anything you've already done. Want the reason "stop and search for drugs" to be the main reason the Cyber-cops stop you? Add it several times to the list and you soon have a 2d6 type bell curve. You can customise every list like this - easy and fun - Tim
All - Seeing the 3rd page reminds me that Robert has generously made the whole Emulator available to download. I thought that was a great idea, so I did that (although of course my version was an earlier one as mentioned above). However downloading it doesn't teach you how to maintain and adapt it, only how to use it as written. Now that might be fine, but we all have different ideas about what is important and what isn't and how to use various rules and so forth. So I recommend reviewing it for its rich potential in terms of content, layout and access ideas and then creating your own from scratch. My "proof of concept" version was much simpler, alright cruder would be a better description, and the content was also more Cyberpunk than Traveller. But it was easy to do (and I'm not a n Excel genius as I said) once I understood the use of pages and learned a few new equations. I say "learned", but I just googled how to randomly select from an excel list. The difficult part was thinking up the whole thing which Robert did so well on our behalf. Anyway, whether you download or start from scratch, it's a whole new way of soloing and I recommend trying it out. There is no reason why conventional rules for a face to face GM led game, couldn't use the same ideas to speed up play in a game session too. After all, a number of on-line generators do for Character, Sector, Planet etc. creation do that already. you could just build a more unified one based around your favourite Traveller, Cepheus or Hostile rules - Tim.
