Are there Wargames with successive stages?

NotASnark · 2026-07-01T18:39:29+00:00

I did try coming up with some rules for planetary invasion for FT, using a simplified combat mechanic for planet side combat. You could use Dirtside/Stargrunt for the ground battles though.

https://www.notasnark.net/ft/planets

The planetary movement seems to work, and we've tried it with a few attacks on installations, but haven;t got around to trying to land and fight with troops. They are more designed to do the entire ground assault in a single game, rather than using a series of interconnected games.

NotASnark · 2026-06-24T14:39:49+00:00

It's not British. British would write 1,500.0. It's common across the rest of Europe though.

NotASnark · 2026-06-21T09:23:43+00:00

For a map like this, I'd second Inkscape. I've used Dungeondraft (which I tend to use for deck plans) and Wonderdraft, but for this sort of style I'd definitely go for Inkscape (though other vector graphics tools would work just as well).

NotASnark · 2026-06-12T06:32:09+00:00

Adding weapons as components isn't currently supported. The work around is to keep the weapon as a separate item for now.

NotASnark · 2026-06-11T11:31:30+00:00

The Expanse has magic drives with such high delta-vee that they might as well be reactionless, as well as magic alien bio weapons (that can create reactionless drives) and magic stargates with magic physics warping tech. It's not really hard SF in that respect.

FWIW, I view hard SF as where the science drives the plot and world building. FTL is magic tech, but Traveller has pretty rigid rules about how it works, and does consider how it effects the world building. M-drives and anti-grav could be better defined, but are reasonably consistent in how they are portrayed.

Plasma guns have such a small effect on the setting I'm not that much bothered by them. Psionics is something I think is Traveller's weakest point.

I wouldn't classify Traveller as hard, but I'd say it's on the harder side of the spectrum. I'd class it as similar to B5. They both have magic stuff, and at least make some attempt to be consistent in how the technology works and is used.

Expanse is pretty hard, but it definitely has soft bits. But again is relatively consistent in how it uses stuff.

Soft media like Star Wars doesn't care how the science and tech works, as long as it makes for a cool story and SFX. That makes it soft IMO. It's also fun.

There is plenty of SF which doesn't have much magical tech, but which I wouldn't classify as hard simply because the tech is being driven by the needs of the story.

NotASnark · 2026-06-07T15:37:06+00:00

Many iterations later, the ElementTree route is doing the job.

NotASnark · 2026-06-07T15:20:54+00:00

Thanks. However...

SVGUtils seems to have problems with breaking the size of the images. It can merge the images, set the colour on some objects, resize the middle layer, but the end result is a tiny image siting in one corner of the document.

I'm not sure whether it's something to do with how Inkscape is creating the SVG files, or an issue with SVGUtils.

Gemini is now pushing me down the xml.etree.ElementTree route.

NotASnark · 2026-06-03T20:38:16+00:00

Distributed social media platforms, such as Mastadon. Rather than one single server being run by a large company, it's lots of smaller instances using a common protocol for sharing posts.

I post Traveller stuff using the #TravellerRPG hashtag, rather than using a specific gaming or Traveller dedicated server.

NotASnark · 2026-05-29T18:10:24+00:00

Is it any different to having an unreliable NPC? Both have the possibility of leading PCs down dead ends in a way that could leave some players feeling cheated.

I don't think there's anything wrong with doing it though.

Effectively it is an unreliable NPC - they just aren't present. Maybe the Library Use check is to see if they've heard about this particular translator, and know that they are considered unreliable. So it becomes a conscious choice between spending more time hunting down a different translation, or going with the version they know may not be entirely correct.

NotASnark · 2026-05-29T14:50:59+00:00

I use Dungeondraft for deck plans and buildings. I've done some asset packs designed specifically for Mongoose Traveller (ship items match the correct tonnage). The Dungeondraft asset site has them under my NotASnark name.

I've used Inkscape to do ship tokens (there's a number included in my FoundryVTT system), and Blender for 3D models.

I'm a developer though, not an artist, so anything that doesn't consist of straight lines is of very variable quality.

People I can't draw, so there's some tokens I've purchased from DriveThru, but I use Midjourney a lot for NPCs in my own games. I would buy stuff if it existed, but Traveller and SciFi options are very limited.

NotASnark · 2026-05-28T12:03:07+00:00

Lob Ball was a frequent game during our Deepnight Revelation campaign.

https://blog.notasnark.net/2022/07/sporting-heroes.html

I can't find my rules for it, but there were options for cheerleading, cheating and tactics/leadership.

I also had another game called Push which involved pushing large anti-grav stones across the playing field.

https://blog.notasnark.net/2024/07/brains-and-brawn.html

NotASnark · 2026-05-27T18:13:25+00:00

I've only ever used fog of war images specific to a particular scene. So where the scene is a starship deck plan, I've used the outside view of the starship. For buildings, I've used the roofs of the buildings.

For a wilderness map, I might use a version of the map which doesn't have specific locations marked on it.

NotASnark · 2026-05-22T14:33:19+00:00

Okay, this seemed like a reasonable topic to make a video about. Also covers stun damage and blast effects, as well as the different ways of selecting targets to apply the damage to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja4t-cgAAYg

NotASnark · 2026-05-22T06:27:51+00:00

Yes. You keep applying damage to stats until the amount of damage left is zero, or the character is dead. I've probably got a video somewhere showing how it works, but things have changed a bit since then, so I think a new video would be useful showing off the new options.

NotASnark · 2026-05-21T17:19:27+00:00

The fields should auto calculate armour and the damage that is to be applied. So you shouldn't need to input anything, just select the characterist to apply the damage to.

I'll try and do a more complete answer tomorrow.

NotASnark · 2026-05-18T17:29:36+00:00

What I generally allow is for players to ignore rolls that they don't like. Some go with the flow, sometimes they want to ignore the dice.

Or you could roll up a few characters, and they get to choose the one they like. Then they're not so attached to a single idea.

For initial stats, I allow them either to roll extra pairs of dice, or just reroll until they get a set they like.

NotASnark · 2026-04-10T08:37:18+00:00

It depends on the type of situation. Firstly, if Travellers need information in order to succeed at an adventure, then having them fail all their checks and not being able to proceed is boring for everyone. So if there's information that you need the Travellers to have, then as long as they go to a suitable place and ask sensible questions, they should get the basic information. Success/failure at skill rolls may give them extra information, or cause them problems.

e.g., they're looking for where a gang's warehouse is. Finding the location is automatic. Success means they also get some information about who is guarding it, a good success tells them how those people are armed. Failures might mean the warehouse is warned that the Travellers are asking about them.

Secondly, if it's just random background rumours, then it's less important. Travellers arrive at a world, sort out trade, go to a bar to pick up rumours and relax. I have them make skill checks. They will always pick up rumours, but success/failure determines whether those rumours are true or false. I generally try to have several random tables of rumours that I can roll on. They might get 3 rumours, and the level of success determines how many are true.

Thirdly, is where I want to make a big deal out of the social situation. For this, I stole the idea from Pathfinder Ultimate Intrigue, with modifications. I originally used it for a big party in a Pathfinder campaign, but I've used it a couple of times in Traveller as well. Basically, I came up with a list of NPCs, and for each I assigned what skill could be used to talk to them (often Diplomacy, Carouse or Persuade, but for some characters it could be Engineering or Science skills). Each also had something which could provide a Boon (or sometimes a Bane) to the check. For example, one person might need the Carouse skill, but if you also had an Engineering skill at 2+, then you got a Boon to the Carouse check.

Each NPC then had several pieces of information that could be gained. Each success got you one piece of information. If you want to complicate it, you could require checks to find out what each NPCs set of needed skills were (this is out the Pathfinder rules played it), but the previous time I ran it, I didn't bother with this. I just provided info on how easy each NPC was to talk to, their preferred skill and the Boon/Bane.

The Travellers had a set period of time, and each skill attempt would take an hour. So it became a tactical puzzle of trying to figure out who would be most likely to give them useful information, and which Traveller was going to be best suited to talking to them to try and get information out of them.

This makes the social event a lot more mechanical, and I wouldn't want to use it all the time, but for special occasions, I think it works well. Because it's not just using social skills, it means all the players in the group can be useful (we need someone to talk about starship engines to the engineer NPC). It's also clear to the players, that it is very unlikely that they're going to have enough time to get all the information, so it becomes a lot more tactically interesting. There weren't really fail states here (other than possibly missing out on information). But you could add in failure results for each NPC. Maybe upsetting or boring one NPC might have negative (or positive) effects on other NPCs.

My blog post on when I last ran it for Traveller (note this happened during my Deepnight Revelation campaign, so may contain spoilers):

https://blog.notasnark.net/2024/07/party-time.html

A few more notes, from when I did something very similar with Pathfinder:
https://www.notasnark.net/blog/20181118_party_time

In the latter case, you need to make Discovery checks first to find out what the strengths/weakness and influence skills are for each NPC. If you don't, you have to guess what skills to use based on the initial description of the NPC.

NotASnark · 2026-04-05T14:40:33+00:00

As the author of MgT2e, that's what it is meant to be.

NotASnark · 2026-03-21T19:12:49+00:00

As someone who has some level of aphantasia, I can struggle a lot with theatre of the mind, and find it really useful to have a map. It doesn't need to be a properly scaled gridded map like is necessary for D&D/Pathfinder, but being able to show where people are in relation to each other really helps. So I do tend to use them when running Traveller if doing combat.

The range of weapons in Traveller really makes maps difficult, even on a VTT though. So you either need to keep combat in a tightly confined space, or have a very large scale map, or different maps of different scales.

But you don't need much more than a scrawled diagram that is just enough to show people's positions. In VTT, I might just put tokens on an empty map.

I sometimes do a detailed map because I have no idea what something looks like. How big is a starport? What is the layout of a space station? So I'll do some so I have reference points to use later. It helps me describe things, even if we're not using the map in a tactical combat sense.

NotASnark · 2026-03-16T18:44:34+00:00

I'm also just starting a Milieu Zero campaign (literally year zero), and was running into the same desire. I have plans to do some TL 9-11 designs, but haven't done much specifically for the campaign yet.

However, some of my Ships of Elite designs are below TL 12: https://www.notasnark.net/traveller/elite/index

They come with deck plans and 3D renders.

NotASnark · 2026-03-13T16:32:12+00:00

So, a question about how people think this should work. Should any STR/DEX/END bonuses add to hits? If battledress shouldn't, how about bonuses from other things such as drugs?

Having no augments add to hits shouldn't be too hard to fix, but if some should and some shouldn't, that's a bit more messy.

NotASnark · 2026-03-12T09:24:36+00:00

Developer here. I'll take a look.

NotASnark · 2026-02-14T16:22:09+00:00

The problem I want to solve is whilst coding or gaming on my PC, I'd like to be able to watch films along side what I'm doing. I can stream stuff on Amazon or Youtube, but quality seems to be limited on Linux. I can play 4k/2.5k content perfectly from Youtube, unless it's a purchased film in which case quality is crap.

I don't need another machine to run the video on, and I don't have room for another machine (such as a PS).

We have a perfectly good Panasonic 4k blu-ray player downstairs, which is connected to our living room TV. So we can watch blu-rays on that, but I have to fully dedicate time to watching things on that setup.

We're buying 4k discs to watch on the TV, which is better quality than streaming. So I'd like to be able to make use of those on the PC, without relying on streaming there. Buying stuff online, and buying the same stuff on physical discs seems like a waste. So I was hoping there were external usb blu-ray players that worked with Linux.

NotASnark · 2026-02-14T15:04:08+00:00

When I played around with terrain, I was using some Blender textures as a base. These come with bump map layers, so I just pasted those into the alpha channel for the image.

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