Each game has a "star" that just sorta upstages everything else. Ogre is named for its "star." SFB has the Heavy Cruiser, Car Wars has the $30,000 Luxury, and Battletech has the 60 ton 'mech. These three games have tons of bells and whistles tacked onto them, but the essence of the game still centers on the "star" even after a hundred supplements. (And when GURPS gets ahold of these settings, it shifts the focus away from the "star" to making characters the center of the action.)
Anyway... I submit that the "star" of Traveller is the subsector. And the core premise of the game centers on travelling around a subsector. Your typical game session will tend to have the players travelling across 3 to 7 worlds or so on average... with some adventures taking place on a single world for one or more sessions.
Even after all of the development that's been done for Traveller, the color subsector map combined with a column of UWP data is still the most compelling thing about the game.
My question is this:
1) What would the ultimate Referee's subsector notebook look like?
2) What kind of information should a world have on it's primary page?
3) What kind of cool forms should a referee have that he can fill out himself to insert into the notebook?
4) How can you best integrate the archetypical Traveller supplements to maximize their usefulness to the referee?
5) How can you best organize the gigantic amount of background material to maximize their usefulness to the referee?
6) How can you do all of this at once to maximize the refs ability to manage travelling?
One thing I'd like to see is this: World Summary pages with Adventure seeds, Rumors, Patron encounters, Ship encounters, and Animal encounters specifically tailored to the world/subsector with a code beside them and a brief description and blank spaces for me to add my own stuff.
I'd like to see Supplements & Articles that expand on these encounter seeds and reference the codes on the World Summary page. Then when you add these Articles to your notebook, you can go back and highlight the World page so that you can find the article quickly when the players show up to this world unexpectedly. You can know at a glance what seeds have support and which ones you have to wing.
And when you get an adventure, you can write in your own stuff into the blank parts of the World Summary Page... and then while gaming you'll know immediately what encounters pertain to what adventure. You could even run more than one subsector-spanning adventure at the same time by using a different color pen to make notes on the World Summary pages.
And of course, there's room for a date or marking next to all the seeds so that when you use it you can mark a reference to what you did with it so that you have a heads up for when the players come back.
And of course... depending on what Adventures, Articles, and Expansions you choose, you can customize the OTU to fit your vision. One author might write more of a space opera type fleshing out of the basic seeds while another might emphasize more of a "Realpolotik" Imperium with his elaborations.
Just thinking out loud...
Anyway... I submit that the "star" of Traveller is the subsector. And the core premise of the game centers on travelling around a subsector. Your typical game session will tend to have the players travelling across 3 to 7 worlds or so on average... with some adventures taking place on a single world for one or more sessions.
Even after all of the development that's been done for Traveller, the color subsector map combined with a column of UWP data is still the most compelling thing about the game.
My question is this:
1) What would the ultimate Referee's subsector notebook look like?
2) What kind of information should a world have on it's primary page?
3) What kind of cool forms should a referee have that he can fill out himself to insert into the notebook?
4) How can you best integrate the archetypical Traveller supplements to maximize their usefulness to the referee?
5) How can you best organize the gigantic amount of background material to maximize their usefulness to the referee?
6) How can you do all of this at once to maximize the refs ability to manage travelling?
One thing I'd like to see is this: World Summary pages with Adventure seeds, Rumors, Patron encounters, Ship encounters, and Animal encounters specifically tailored to the world/subsector with a code beside them and a brief description and blank spaces for me to add my own stuff.
I'd like to see Supplements & Articles that expand on these encounter seeds and reference the codes on the World Summary page. Then when you add these Articles to your notebook, you can go back and highlight the World page so that you can find the article quickly when the players show up to this world unexpectedly. You can know at a glance what seeds have support and which ones you have to wing.
And when you get an adventure, you can write in your own stuff into the blank parts of the World Summary Page... and then while gaming you'll know immediately what encounters pertain to what adventure. You could even run more than one subsector-spanning adventure at the same time by using a different color pen to make notes on the World Summary pages.
And of course, there's room for a date or marking next to all the seeds so that when you use it you can mark a reference to what you did with it so that you have a heads up for when the players come back.
And of course... depending on what Adventures, Articles, and Expansions you choose, you can customize the OTU to fit your vision. One author might write more of a space opera type fleshing out of the basic seeds while another might emphasize more of a "Realpolotik" Imperium with his elaborations.
Just thinking out loud...
. Of course it makes the characters the centre of the action - it's a ROLEPLAYING GAME! And AFAIK, GURPS Ogre was designed to allow people to roleplay in the Ogre setting, not to play the tanks themselves. 
