Solo Melee Mechanic Needed

[Kellri]

I'm still plugging away at my Solo Traveller book. It's going well, I'm up to around 100pp now..and it covers pretty much every facet of Classic Traveller, including patrons, planetside adventures, space combat, trade, etc. One bit that as been giving me trouble is melee. It's possible to lay out individual battles using Snapshot or something similar, which works just fine. What I'd really like is a simple mechanic for quickly resolving these combats without playing through a minigame like that.

Ideally it should be something that allows one to plug the numbers into a spreadsheet, roll a few dice and come up with a realistic result that accounts for character skills, weapons, armor and the number of combatants. For end results I'm picturing something that notes which side won or was driven off, and individual damage - dead, heavily wounded, lightly wounded, unharmed, etc.

Any suggestions?

[thedungeondelver]

Any luck so far, Kellri?

If not do you mind if I bring this up with Kyle Aaron? He's getting in to Traveller lately and might have some insights (I know I'm post-flooding but I'm being sincere).

[Kellri]

Yeah, good idea. I've always kind of respected Aaron's POV anyways. The man certainly gets a lot more exercise than I do.

Anyways, I've been considering using something along the lines of the FiveCore system used in various Nordic Weasel products, notably Five Parsecs from Home, Starport Scum and Five Men in Normandy/Kursk.

The difficulty with that is that I will have to completely rework or adapt the combat system in Classic Traveller. The upside is that playing out the adventure side of the game will be a lot more fun and less just rolling a few dice and consulting a resolution table.

Recently someone else has published a solo system for Traveller/Cepheus Engine which uses the typical question/answer solo mechanic. IMO, this is really not very interesting and way more "storyteller" than I would like. As with D&D, I much prefer things to be more random and deadly and leave the storytelling to after the game playing.

[thedungeondelver]

I will point him at this thread then; hopefully he can lend some insight.