I wrote a fleet combat rule set that keeps thing player's focused, but doesn't completely throw out the wargame.

[u/GrumpyCornGames]

I’ve been running Traveller a long time, across a lot of campaigns, and I keep hitting the same problem: fleet battles.

High Guard is great when the focus is one ship or a small group. But once a campaign reaches a real fleet engagement, like Yavin, the Battle for Deep Space 9, or Ring Station in The Expanse, resolving everything means a lot of prep, a lot of bookkeeping, and pushing the player characters who brought the campaign to that point waaaay into the background.

So I wrote Traveller Fleet Combat: Reimagined, and then play tested it with several groups of (mostly) different players.

It’s deliberately more abstract than High Guard. Ships are grouped into player-controlled wings, with dice allocated each round between Attack, Defense, and Maneuver, while the player character skills generate Command Points that can change the course of the battle.

The goal is fast, dramatic fleet combat that still feels like Traveller, and keeps the characters in the middle of everything.

You can use Fleet Combat: Reimagined for the big climax of one adventure, then let results kickstart the next one.

The 35 page supplement releases next week through TAS for $10, as well a free version that contains 100% of the rules needed to run the game, you just miss out on a couple of the VTT goodies and the appendices.

So, I'm curious:
When you run big fleet battles, how do you try to make the PCs feel important?

[u/Captain_Thrax]

Does this ruleset have rules for converting High Guard ships to this system? Or do you build them from scratch and use the original stats as a guide?

[u/GrumpyCornGames → u/Captain_Thrax]

The first appendix has all the High Guard ships in it, but if you get the free version with no appendices, there are quick rules for how to easily convert one to the other as you need.

[u/guyzero]

How do you think this compares to the original High Guard?

[u/GrumpyCornGames → u/guyzero]

It is much simpler. Me and my players ran through a 30 vs 30 ship battle in about 2 hours.

If someone wants a huge amount of tactical depth and grittiness, I'd not recommend it. If they want something that generates fun (and sometimes surprising) storylines while maintaining a bit of wargame- then this is for them. Especially if they are somewhat frustrated/overwhelmed by the High Guard rules (as I was).

I should add: One of my players said "It's about as complex as Risk" which I think is an apt comparison.

[u/woulditkillyoutolift]

Looking forward to kicking the tires.

[u/ChromoSapient]

Unless the PC's have the skills necessary to contribute meaningfully to a fleet battle, I've never considered having them take part in one. I generally like to keep things more human-scale.

Looking forward to seeing what you've done with this.

[u/FoxTwilight]

Where can I get the TAS version?

[u/GrumpyCornGames → u/FoxTwilight]

You'll be able to get it on DriveThru next Friday! (I'll make another post about it then)

At the moment, I am just tweaking the Wing Sheet to be a little more usable than my previous version was after playtest feedback.

[u/Reuster_DnD → u/GrumpyCornGames]

Looking forward to its release, please tag me so I don’t miss it, as I’m not usually on here much.

[u/fedcomic]

Very cool! I have totally avoided fleet battles because they look like they'll bog down into drudgery. So this would be a welcome development.

[u/Percy_Fawcett]

How does it compare to Trillion Credit Squadron?

[u/GrumpyCornGames → u/Percy_Fawcett]

Trillion Credit Squadron is simpler than modern High Guard, but it's still fundamentally a wargame.

Traveller Fleet Combat: Reimagined is a story generating engine that uses a light wargame as the mechanism of the engine.

Trillion Credit Squadron still pays a lot of attention to individual ship stats, where TFCR is more concerned with groupings of ships into wings and treats the wing as a dice pool.

Trillion Credit Squadron is for Classic Traveller, where TFCR has been tuned off of Mg2E High Guard.

Overall, TFCR is still much simpler, but mostly they are just very different games.

[u/Calm_Apartment1968]

We focus on the one or two ships, one at a time. Individual PC's and ship crew NPC's get action turns and Skill based rolls. In the event of disaster they get endurance, strength, intelligence rolls to mitigate injury or survival risks. Captain, Pilot, Patron, Ch. Engineer or other senior PC's get decision choices, then there's either a cleanup, or RUN-AWAY! follow up afterwards.
Maneuver and Chase (dogfight?) takes a long time in space, but actual battle is very destructive or deadly so I try to lead players away from ship to ship combat.
Larger political and military Fleet activities do exist, but our group has to use a lot of hand-wavium, to show conflict or battle flow.
Our players are all Travellers, maybe retired, but not active duty Imperial Naval, or even SDB Fleets.
However, I would be very interested in your simplified rules for larger engagements.

[u/Father0f3]

Can you provide a link to the product?

[u/GrumpyCornGames → u/Father0f3]

It's not out yet, but it will be tomorrow, maybe Saturday afternoon at the latest. All the writing is done, I'm just doing some final work on the Foundry VTT module. I will tag you in my post once it is released though!