Last night we played session 32 of our Classic Traveller Campaign, Into the Void. That’s the link to the session report. I also wrote up some Ref’s Notes for the last two sessions this morning.

I know I tend to go on and on about this, but Traveller and Cepheus Engine, with the 2d6 mechanic and simple but effective rules, make adventure creation and preparation amazingly easy.

Yesterday I needed to prepare the leader of a small Scout base, in case the team should go that way. I rolled some dice for the characteristics, decided to make her a 5-term scout, jotted down her skills and three personal traits, and I was done. No flipping through a massive rulebook for 20 minutes or logging into some online character generator. I knew what I needed for the game and it took me about 3 minutes to write out three or four lines that describe a fully developed NPC for my game.

Sometimes it is fun to really have high “mastery” of complex game systems. Some people really get off on that. It’s what they love. Decades ago I may well have been that person, but I’m not anymore. I want a system that has enough meat on its bones to get the job done, so we’re playing a game and not just “storytelling”, but otherwise gets out of my way.

I sometimes wonder if the complexity of other systems isn’t kind of a crutch for GMs and Players alike.

My other favorite system is GURPS. While you can make GURPS very complex, it need not be that way. I feel like if I ran GURPS more I could probably run it much like I do Traveller.