Playing the Game

It’s fair to say that my life has changed a lot over the last 3 years since my son was born. I’ve suddenly found myself time poor, which has really impacted the chances that I have had to put any significant time into gaming, let alone Power Projection specifically. Of course, there are consolations.

Anyway, I had a chance at the weekend to run some demo games for some of my friends who are Traveller fans but have never played Power Projection. We ran two battles; ‘A Good Clean Fight’, the classic introductory scenario we use at conventions and then a made up on the spur of the moment engagement with two Batrons, one a Zhodani Rider Squadron, the other an Imperial Battleship based one.

I took some pictures, and thought that I’d share:

Power Projection: A Good Clean Fight
The first battle...

As you can see, it got quite messy. The ships are GZG models, and a Star Wars Diecast miniature for the Plankwell in the second battle. The order of battle was as follows:

Imperials
BB Plankwell Class
CA Atlantic Class
CL Gionetti Class x2

Zhodani
BT Aatsdivr Class Battle Tender
BR Anzha Class x2
CL Zhdavldlits Class x2

In the first scenario, the Zhodani realised a crushing victory as their player rolled back the defences on the Imperials with massed missile strikes, killing the Fer-de-Lance missile escorts before they could respond in kind.

In the second scenario (which we didn’t finish as my pass out was expiring and I had to get home), it was too close to call. Initially, it looked as if the Imperials were doomed again, as they failed pretty much most of their spinal to-hit rolls on the first turn with spinal fire and Zhodani didn’t. Fortunately, the Plankwell has enough structure to shake off the damage (after it luckily managed to repair its bridge after the first threshold suffered took it out).

And, yes, I know that Ad Astra have a fantastic Plankwell model, but one of the time poor things I have at the moment is a large pile of books to read, games to play, videos to watch and miniatures to base and paint. However, I draw heart in the latter case as one of my friends, and stalwart Power Projection demonstrator, Neil always tells me that if you run out on miniatures to paint then you’ll have nothing left to live for and the end will be nigh!

Dom

Update

A quick update on the status of things:

- I’ve completed the book that I was doing the test layout on and it has gone in and out of print subsequently, and is now being published by d101 Games. It’s called Wordplay; if the idea of a narrative engined, fast playing game (think the lovechild of HeroQuest and Burning Wheel plus some others) then have a look at it here. The layout here is actually by someone else, as I did the initial edition that was used to put a foot in the water.

- I now have converted Quark files from Andy Lilly, which should mean I can extract the styles and frames used into InDesign.

- Next Power Projection related thing is to get the PDF of the Escort ships completed and on here as a download.

- I’ve also done a quick and dirty table for cross referencing the loss of massed systems to a threshold check. This came about having played some games with Capital ships at the weekend with some of my friends who are less enamoured with large numbers of dice rolls and more than happy with statistical resolution. So next time you need to carry out a threshold check on up to 100 systems you can just cross reference it on this table rather than rolling.