Does the 100D rule add anything?
- Thread starter Lapthorn
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With my group I haven't worried about this: I considered it but put my energies into other elements of play. Has anyone done this in any of their games? If so what mechanics did you use to determine the additional travel distances involved?
I've used jump shadowing as a plot element in one of my adventures, and I've worked on jump masking in other connections, but never gone as far as to use it.
Huh? You calculate where you have to be to clear the masking jump limit and do the usual in-system travel to get to that point.
I suspect that the tedious part of jump masking would be keeping track of when the worlds move into and out of being masked.
Hans
GypsyComet
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And from which direction.
Which is why, for the vast majority, it works best as a random occurrence or as a plot complication specifically and purposefully placed in the way of the PCs. The middle ground, of neutral documentation, is the path to madness if applied widely.
You can make a map for each world shoving when the surrounding worlds are masked (or rather, when you are masked from them). Then it's pretty easy to keep track of where you are in the cycle (On the day the PCs first check out the masking status of a world, you generate a number between 1 and the number of days in the orbital period and note that on 123-1105 the world was in Day 56 of its cycle). The problem is that creating such a map is a lot of work and has to be done for each world. I've done it for one world.
EDIT: And it looks like that map was another casualty of my 2010 computer crash. &%¤#"!
Hans
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GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
The problem is that creating such a map is a lot of work and has to be done for each world. I've done it for one world.
It is possible to limit significant masking documentation by assuming that most systems are not edge-on to each other, which allows you to keep the masking incidences down to special cases and, again, plot devices.
Isn't the Oort Cloud spherical in nature?
Yes (as best as we know), and it extends out to about 1 lightyear or more if our current understanding is correct. That being said, the numerical density (objects/unit-volume) of Oort Cloud objects is very small. Their 100dia shadows and/or masks should be insignificant at interstellar jump ranges.
Yes, but where's the fun in that?
Hans
being able to use GTFT as a halfway viable model of the universe...
GypsyComet
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The Oort Cloud, Centaur-class asteroids, and the occasional Protector or Mad Scientist are where that rare random comes from, which can be modeled by some specific outcomes of a marginal Jump. MT had some bad but not fatal results for marginal jumps, for example.
No, that's the practical benefit, but there's not much fun in enforcing such sameness. Jump masking and shadowing creates "terrain" and seasons. Adding "but it only applies in a vanishingly small number of cases" obviates much of that effect, and is thus very little fun.
(And note that even if you nullify jump masking, GTFT (and every other set of Traveller rules) ignores jump shadowing and is thus a less than halfway viable model of the universe anyway.)
Hans
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
At the same time, if the Standard travel time assumptions are a minority case, then a lot of other things change. One of those things is the ship's mortgage. The farther you get from four jumps in eight weeks, the more the calculations for viable commercial ship designs are affected, often in ways that cannot be stated generally. If you really want to have to tailor ship economics to every stellar neighborhood, you can kiss most of the playerbase goodbye.
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