On 22 February 2018 at 23:52, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

You're going to spoil your players,

I hope you mean 'treat them nicely' rather than 'provide spoilers for them'.

giving them a full list of everyone they've met.

But yes, I have thought about the wisdom of doing this. It will have the bold/italics etc removed.

The real driver is the fact that we play once every other month and have been doing so across a year and a half. So it's very hard for folk to remember the major points never mind the detail of what they do. They found the chronology very helpful. (No one takes notes and I have no problem with that. Almost all of them are very casual players in that they are happy to turn up on the night, contribute and enjoy it, but aren't interested in having much in the way of homework or development between times.)

But it's a great tool for yourself; there's nothing like having them stumble across someone they've previously met, particularly in wildly difference circumstances. That helps make the universe feel real to them.

Oh yes, it's useful to me already. And I ought to do as you suggest and have people 'pop up' again. Although I guess Bannerji already has so I should be careful with how often I do that.

BTW . . . The Dead Spacer?

Yes. Straight out of The Traveller Adventure. Not my invention. Below is an excerpt from the descriptive part of a piece I've sent Jeff for Freelance Traveller on fleshing out 'places to meet' with random tables and the like.

On of my games had "The Dead Spaceman Grill and Bar" - a [literal] hole-in-the-wall establishment on Koenig's Rock, in the Bowman Belt. :)

Stored... for future use!

cheers

As an example, in ‘First Call at Zila’, a chapter in The Traveller Adventure, a hostelry of some kind is a major part of the scenario. The players learn more of the ongoing plot, the PCs get involved in a bar fight, and that leads to them ultimately meeting a patron who is none other than an in-universe avatar of Traveller’s creator Marc Miller. It was all too easy to simply assume The Dead Spacer was just another non-descript bar. But picking up on the name of the place and the signage outside – which is gruesomely given in the text – it wasn’t hard to build on the limited interior description “a clean place with a friendly atmosphere”. Continuing the theme, I described the walls as decorated with dozens and dozens of images of starships of all different kinds. An Intelligence or Education check then allowed one of the more experienced spacers in the crew to realize that they recognized many of the ships pictured as ones that had been the victim of some disaster or another in which lives were lost. It wasn’t a stretch for the players to then assume that all the pictures represented something similar and gave a very macabre feel to the place for those who knew but nicely played against the relatively complex tale of the shenanigans with the Titan and the Mammoth and the crash of the latter. When the bar fight broke out, the pictures were then an additional bit of furniture that could be used as a dramatic, if lightweight, weapon – although I hadn’t specified whether they were digital images on the wall or framed photos or something else.