On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 13:52 Timothy Collinson - timothy.collinson at port.ac.uk (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:


On Tue, 13 Oct 2020 at 21:30, Thomas RUX <xxxxxx@comcast.net> wrote:
Hi all,

My sides are hurting from laughing so hard not to mention that the tears make focusing on the screen very difficult.

glad to cheer you up.

I fear mine are a bit po-faced and 'useful' whereas Cian (and Kaladorn) have mastered the quite-believable-but-frankly-utterly-useless items down to a tee.
No, yours are what people would expect, but wouldn’t remember to expect - they look in the ships locker for something obviously useful, instead of remembering that if you remove the hinge-pin from the gardening shears (which you bought when you over-estimated the size of your apartment balcony garden plants), you get two slightly dull blades that you can duct tape to the mop handles, resulting in a primitive polearm.

I also suppose that there ought to be some kind of mechanism for using such lists.  I mean I wouldn't expect *everything* to be in a locker.  Though I suppose it might be fun to work out exactly what capacity a ship's locker that *did* hold this lot might be.  (The colleague who gave me her cupboard list pointed out that what Jeff is asking for is a Room of Requirement in another universe...)
Honestly, it’s based on the age and size of the ship, in relation to the weirdness of the objects. Roll twice for a lightly used free trader and increase as it gets older and larger. These will be scattered throughout the various equipment stores, in addition to the main “where does it go again?” Locker.

How about something along these lines:
The PCs as a crew can access the ship's locker up to 10 times in a week, or once each at the start of an adventure/play session and once each in the middle.  Roll d666 and live with the results.  [Or maybe the referee can fudge things if the players need help]  [although ideally such 'help' would be something that could be useful with a bit lateral thinking rather than obviously directly useful]   [1]

hmmm, not quite sure I want to be so prescriptive - but for the What's Wrong With the Ship? tables it *is* really helpful to have a framework for how often the engineer (or captain or whoever) has to roll on it.  Perhaps this is different

You want to strike a balance between it being a bit of fun with some potential application to the need at hand by players and just being abused by them.  Hence I *think* that the bigger the lists the better so they don't get predictable.

Right, really *must* go to bed.

tc


[1] This last reminds me of Andy Lilly's d66 tables for the Chirper games he runs each year to such acclaim.  (Filling three slots across the weekend with players looking for some chaotic silliness as they play very low INT chirpers who are trash collectors.)  The d66 tables are usually rolled on somewhere near the start of each session as the chirpers go about their business (and before they run into whatever the trouble du jour is).  Invariably the items really are *rubbish* (trash) but invariably a bit ingenuity during the game comes up with a way of using them to aid the chirpers in getting out of whatever trouble they're in.  Well, I say 'getting out of'.  Usually making things much worse before by some fateful twist they accidentally stumble on victory over the bad guys).  I really really hope he's writing these up to publish as a collection/series.  They're not everyone's cup of tea (two of my players, as it happens, avoid them like the plague), but as a change of pace from the more serious games over the weekend, they're an absolute delight.


-----
The Traveller Mailing List
Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com
To unsubscribe from this list please go to
http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=amMCEsAh8SelT75EVv8Wao45GtHm9ZRf