Don't forget the usual NPC enounter chart.
Yes - anything to relieve the burden.
And I'll reconsider my "6 options" bit. The idea is to allow interesting solo play with the player releasing control from as many outcomes as reasonable with a minimum of work.
The main thing
lacking and needed is a way to determine age and rank for each career type -- and perhaps know when someone is not going to be highly ranked or experienced!
So then, the reaction table should be used heavily. In T5, the task system
is the reaction table for all practical purposes, but it works fine in the other flavors of Traveller too.
For example, Chloe Harris is an ex-Navy engineer. So the first places she'll go are the Naval base and the Naasirka yards.
First check: will the base let her in on an ID, or will she have to talk her way in? Give that a 50% chance, perhaps.
Suppose she has to talk to a guard. First she assesses her and his rank, her and his terms served, and her own bureaucratic skills. He's a guard, so there won't be a whole lot of chitchat, but this is a small base in a small city, and if she rolls ok for carousing, then she can find out that much about him.
So we roll to find out his age and rank.
If they're more or less equals, then she will try persuasion on the basis of similarity; their differences in rank and terms serve as a penalty DM.
If he's enlisted, then she could bully her way in. It's more direct but riskier, but she's an officer with five terms and maybe he's a private. And if she does a good job, she may well get to go see whoever she wants to, until she meets a peer officer, in which case the dance resumes.
If all goes well, she will finally have friendly acquaintances in the base. This can be viewed as an asset to rely on later in the game: it means she has earned the right to try to
ask for favors in the future. Of course such favors have to be reasonable; I assume part of the allure of solo play is that the course of the game has enough randomness to make it interesting.
The adventure itself is scripted; this element doesn't seem to be randomizable in any satisfying way. You can impose random rolls, like "when do they stumble into the next plot point?", but rolling for the sake of rolling doesn't add to the fun, especially when the outcome is already determined! You already
know they're going to find the brooch, follow the clues, get accosted by Anolas, thrown in jail, engage in tradewar. What you're solo playing for is the interactions in the middle - how well or poorly do they plead their case to the intolerant Pysadians (or is that Zilans?)? Which one ends up with the Anolas? Who gets in the most fistfights? Which one understands the Vargr, and which one just doesn't get it?
In other words, I think seeing your characters develop as personalities, through experiences modeled by imposing interaction rules, in the context of a frankly scripted adventure,
ought to be interesting.
