Scenes and nuggets - the DGP way

Anyone remember the DGP "nuggets" system? It was back when GDW had handed over most of the development of their Traveller game to Joe Fugate and crew of DGP. They had been thinking on adventure design a bit. The result was that they designed adventures in the format of "nuggest", which were self contained scenes. I wrote about them once before in relation to campaign play of Battletech. Now I'm thinking of them again, for organizing your scenario in a more general sense.

Each nugget had some thing that would happen, some NPC you could talk to and a place to visit. The new thing was that DGP had sorted these in order, and told you which nugget had to go after the other. It was kind of like the solos, where you had forks in the road where you had to choose were to take the plot. I always thought these nuggets were a sweet idea, but I also never felt they worked as promised.

In Trail of Cthulhu the authors write about how to structure your adventure along a "spine" and then have branches off that tree. Core clues, those that are crucial for the mystery, are forming the spine of the adventure. I have not yet played much ToC, so I have no  solid opinion on how well that works. It doesn't read like it would work that well, but maybe it just puts into words what we have been doing all along. The thing is, this is what the nuggets DGP used reminds me of. I guess nobody is surprised that this idea was old.


Now I feel like pulling out some of those old Traveller books and taking a look at them with ToC in the back of my mind. For those who are interested in adventure design, it might be something worth studying. Identifying where you have choke points is very crucial if you want to make sure you don't limit your players, and maybe structuring your scenario in nuggets like that is a good way to find out the logical structure of your design? If you do that, you can then design where to break up the rails, and where to leave them in. I for one am going to take a look at those old nuggets again.

Battletech: The Dragon holds the line! (and a few thoughts avbout Traveller)

A few days ago we assembled to commanders at my place and fought a Battletech scenario. BT is old school to me, whatever rules you use. My boxed set if the 2nd ed.

Along the border of the Steiner and Kurita empires, worlds have started to rebel, not respecting the deal by Theodore Kurita and ComStar. (this is before the clans. I did say old school, didn't I?). One such planet is Zyclone 3, where the samurai mechwarriors get their orders from the local warlord, that coming down from the mountains are two lances of Steiner mechs. They are spearheading a push toward the industrial centres in the lowlands. "We are redeploying to meet this thread, but you have to Hold the Line until reinforcement arrive and we can defend these vital resources!" Let the battle commence.

I played the Kurita guys, and had one lance of veterans in medium mechs. The Steiners had one light lance and one heavy lance. They were regulars, and the light lance mostly so. Naturally, the first thing that happens in that the heavy mechs stumble and fall while crossing a river! Some giggles in the light lance when that happened. Then I got my LRM and autocannons up on two hills with good visibility on a majority of the battlefield. Missiles started to rain as soon as the Steiners came into view. Two batteries of LRM 15, firing each round for four rounds. Just picture it!

In the end I managed to blow up two enemies, and shoot off the leg one another. It looked like a victory and the other player yielded. This was so fun that I at once started to think about doing a campaign. Naturally that makes you start to think about stories, free form developments and sandboxes. Again.

There are different rules for Battletech campaigns, and some of them have tried to handle the fact that you might want to play in a story line, but also to be the master of your own fate. I have read some of those and been thinking that maybe they can be used got a RPG campaign?

In a BT campaign you use something called tracks, which specify not which troops show up, but their relative size and strength. Also, the terrain is stated in a general case and the outcome can lead you to another track depending on what happened.

If you want to try to game a more controlled story, I don't see why you couldn't use something similar. In Traveller adventures, at least those from DGP, utilized something called nuggets. A nugget was a few resources for an encounter, and it had a dependency tree, i.e. it was connected to nuggets that had to happen before that one, and nuggets you could go into depending on the outcome. I think I'm going to go back and reread some of those old Traveller adventures and see how it worked.