Session 2 of our Traveller campaign is now in the bag! The GM decided to run again on Friday the 8th, and it looks like he plans to run another session on the 15th. He'd mentioned me running that session last time, but after seeing everyting involved in tracking Trade and general finances, and all of the help I was doing with rules, he figured it'd be easier for me to continue focusing on that I think. Speaking of that, the logistics of the game did wear on me a bit. Manually figuring out passengers and freight can easily and literally require rolling 60 dice, figuring in multiple modifiers, the multiplying some numbers to get cash numbers, some Tetris action to squeeze the freight into available ship holds, etc. When you've gotten out of work, drove 40 minutes home, then drove 45 minutes through the rain to visit your friends, and are grinding away at numbers while they socialize, only to be interrupted by their occassional rules questions, it can have the possibility to rubbing the wrong way.

This all comes across as more negative than I really want to. There are procedures in this game that can be automated, I do believe. I've started this by creating a Passenger Availability Tool, which will save me a ton of rolling already. I coded it up with HTML Forms and Javascript. I'm no pro with this stuff and am very much learning as I go. I'm also working on a similar tool for Freight, then will follow up with a tool for Mail. The Freight page is quite similar to the one for Passengers and is close to ready, but I'm having some kind of bug I'm still tracking down. I also did up a help sheet for the session that provided a better travel and communications time table than what the book offers, which helped during the session. I still have more help sheets stuff to do. For me, creating help sheets can be useful in itself, but it's also a learning exercise in itself for the rules.

Anyways, a lot to still do. I haven't updated Bryson Tarn's Journal to reflect the actiivities of last session. Also, the GM has filled out more systems and this stuff could be added to the Data page for the game. I'll probably post again when I get more of that done. It might even include links to things you'd personally find useful if you're running some Traveller of your own!