#collapse subtables

[windmillcode]

LibTracker Updates 11/25/24: Simplify Dependency Management with this simple SBOM Tool

We are excited to announce the latest updates to *LibTracker*, our VSCode extension designed for professionals to simplify software bill of materials (SBOM) management. With LibTracker, you can effortlessly analyze and manage your apps, ensuring up-to-date versions, addressing security vulnerabilities, and resolving licensing issues—all at a glance.

Access it here: [LibTracker on VSCode Marketplace](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=windmillcode-publisher-0.lib-tracker)

### New Features in the Latest Release:

- **Grouped Paths**: Added the ability to associate multiple apps with a root folder, easing project transfers between computers.

- **App Detail Page**:

  - **Subdependency Information**: View detailed info and license info for subdependencies.

  - Toggle between root and subdependency data to explore license and CVE details.

- **Bulk Group Path Update**:

  - Recursively searches for app basenames within directories. or the exact subPath. Can specify a recusion level

### Upcoming Features:

- **App Detail Page Enhancements**:

  - Integration of CVE details for all subdependencies.

  - Search functionality extended to include nested child rows.

  - Expand and collapse all subtables within rows for streamlined navigation.

  - Responsive design updates to allow a card-based layout for improved usability.

- **Toggle Select All Apps**: Introducing a select-all option on the project detail page.

- **Workspace Folder Management**: Development depends on VSCode API’s ability to support VSCode profiles.

- **SBOM Generation**: Investigating whether to retrieve license and CVE details for every version of each package used in the app.

### Future Milestones (Exploring Feasibility):

- **Git Backup Changes**: Enhancements to streamline version control and backup capabilities.

- **AI-Powered Summaries**: Considering automated generation of license and CVE category summaries.

- **Subdependency Navigation**: Exploring the possibility of linking subdependencies in the license pane to their locations in the dependency table

- **Advanced Table Features** - the current package does not support

  - child row search

  - expand and collapse all subtables in a given row

  - responsiveness (remove columns or using cards at a certain viewport)

[sirpoley]

On the Four Table Legs  of Traveller, Leg 4: Random Encounters

In part 1 of this series, I described how Mongoose Traveller's spaceship mortgage rule becomes the drive for adventure and action in a spacefaring sandbox, and the 'autonomous' gameplay loop that follows.

In part 2, I talked about how Traveller's Patron system gives the DM a tool to pull the party out of the 'loop' and into more traditional adventures.

In part 3, I talked about Traveller's unique character creation system, and how it supports the previous two systems, and how to avoid some of the pitfalls that I've seen in play.

In this part, I'll talk about how each of these three systems interacts with, and in fact, relies upon, Traveller's random encounters.

The Many Random Encounters of Traveller

Traveller really takes the concept of random encounters and runs with it. Just in the core rulebook, there are random encounters for…

-          Encounters during space travel (with different sub-tables for travel near a space port, in settled space, wild space, and so on),

-          Encounters on foot in a starport, rural area, and urban area,

-          Encounters with the law (that is, random legal complications tables for accidentally or deliberately breaking laws on strange new worlds)

There are also several 'honorary mention' tables that interact with the random encounter tables, such as:

-          Random asteroid and random salvage tables,

-          Random passenger tables,

-          Random "bounty hunters come to repossess your ship if you didn't pay your mortgage" tables

-          Full random monster generator tables—this one is particularly impressive. When an alien 'animal' is encountered, rather than having hundreds of pages of animals, it seamlessly moves into generating a fully-unique animal on the fly

-          Random patron tables (these are truly in-depth: they generate who your patron is, what you're asked to do, random targets for your mission, and even who the opposition is).

-          A random piracy table (unfortunately buried in the spacecraft chapter, not near the table where pirate encounters are rolled), that provides inspiration for just how the pirates manage to get the jump on the party and what they want.

-          Of course, special mention goes out to the procedural subsector generator which is a full chapter in the book, in which the DM can generate the entire setting for the campaign.

What's impressive about Traveller isn't so much the volume, or even the quality, of the random tables, but how tightly they're tied into each of the other game's systems

Space Encounters

As Traveller is a game primarily about space travel, I'll focus on the Space Encounter table.

Sorry for the janky photo; I don't have the book on pdf. (Traveller Core Rulebook, 2008, p139)

This table is rolled on pretty much whenever the DM feels like it (the rules say: "roll 1d6 every week, day, or hour depending on how busy local space is. On a 6 […] roll d66 on the table below"). Many of these results tie in to subtables (any result of salvage, collision, mining, trade goods, or patron has additional rolls), but the photo above contains the most important part of the space encounter system.

Compare this table to the one from D&D's Manual of the Planes I used as an example in my series on wandering monsters:

Manual of the Planes, 2001. p. 151

Now, obviously, D&D's encounter table here is for an explicitly dangerous place—literally Hell—but the only result you can roll on the table that doesn't ­immediately move to combat is "72: Mercane trading mission." Thus, any time this table is rolled, there is a 99% chance of initiative being rolled.

Traveller's random encounter table marks its "unavoidable" encounters in bold (typically they're ones that immediately start a battle or some kind of dangerous phenomenon like a collision), though "patron" is also on there. There are only 7 results that are bolded this way, and only 6 of them are explicitly dangerous. Some of the non-bold rolls can result in battles as well depending on the party's actions, but there's no assumption of violence.

This is representative of most of Traveller's random encounter tables: they're not, by and large, random battle tables, but universe simulators. Depending on the context of the adventure, this means the random space encounter table could mean one of a number of different things. For example:

-          If the players are pirates, this becomes a random pirate target table. Most of the results are unarmed NPC ships that would be perfect targets for piracy. However, some are police or military vessels that would cause real problems for the party.

-          If the players are blue-collar miners and salvagers, this becomes a random treasure table, where the various derelict, asteroid, and salvage options become possibilities for work.

-          If the players are in trouble (suffering from a medical emergency or a mechanical failure), this becomes a random rescue table, where you get to find out who answers your distress beacon, and what their intentions might be. Additionally, the tables tell you how long it takes for rescue to arrive (for example, in lightly inhabited space, you have a 1-in-6 chance every week that a spaceship shows up. At that point, you're running up against hard limitations of fuel reserves on your ship as to whether life support will give out before rescue arrives)

-          If the players are simple traders, this table is a random flavour table, mostly adding a bit of flavour to the world while only occasionally having major impact on play.

"That's all well and good," you say, "but what does this have to do with tables?"

Encounters and Mortgages

Even with the bank taking most of the party's trade profit, without close attention to random encounters, the 'trade loop' can quickly turn into a 'roll dice and watch numbers grow' game. In a single iteration of the trade system, a lot of random encounters are rolled:

-          A Space Encounter in the origin system while flying to the 100-diameter limit (you can't safely use Traveller's FTL drives within 100-diameters of a planet),

-          A Space Encounter in the destination system while flying to the world from the 100-diameter limit (in the case of a mis-jump, which lands you far from the target world, this can use the more-dangerous less-settled options on the encounter table),

-          A Legal Trouble Encounter check upon docking with the new spaceport,

-          One or more Spaceport Encounter checks while in the spaceport and picking up cargo.

-          One or more Random Passenger rolls if passengers are picked up

That's four or more rolls on random tables just going from one planet to another. This means that what might otherwise seem to be a straightforward (and therefore boring) trading game becomes, in practice, a series of minor adventures and close escapes full of danger. Remember, any time a pirate is encountered, there's a real possibility the players will be forced to jettison their cargo, which typically represents all of their accumulated wealth. The stakes are very high.

These high stakes also provide motivation for your players to accumulate wealth beyond simply keeping the banks off their backs: ship-scale weapon systems are very expensive (in the millions of credits), but even one or two upgrades to a basic ship can give the party a huge leg-up against non-player ships (who usually fly unmodified ships lifted directly from the book).

Encounters and Patrons

Virtually every random encounter table has a one or two entries that result in the party meeting a patron, which, as I described in the second part of this series, are the keys to adventure in Traveller. Math isn't my strong suit, but back-of-the-napkin calculations suggest that around one-in-five trips between worlds will involve a run-in with a patron, and thus the start of a classic-style adventure. Note that while the book does provide tables to generate patrons, it really isn't practical to do this on the fly. What this does mean is that, as DM, when you have a free afternoon or just a couple of hours, you can create and queue up your own patrons in advance and trust that, at some point, the game's procedural universe simulation will put them in front of the party.

Encounters and Character Creation

Traveller’s character creation system is different. So different, in fact, that it can be tempting to cut it out altogether and replace it with something conventional.

The rulebook recommends that, if possible, patrons should be drawn from the PCs' existing contacts and allies. I don't think it explicitly mentions this, but hostile encounters should also often include the PCs' existing enemies and rivals. This ties player characters' backgrounds directly into the action of the game's 'present' timeline. In addition, it's actually much easier as DM to pull out a character that you already have in your rolodex sometimes than come up with a new, characterful pirate captain for each random encounter.

Missing Legs

Unless you really know what you're doing, Traveller runs a serious risk of collapsing if any of these four legs (mortgages/trade, patrons, character creation, and random encounters) is removed or seriously modified. Unfortunately, the game doesn't make this clear in any particular way, which is why my previous DM (who, again, is very good) struggled visibly with his two campaigns.

If you decide mortgages won't be a major aspect of the game, you have to remove or severely nerf the trade rules, or your party will be rolling in cash almost immediately. Because the trade rules are the primary motivation to move around (and thus, roll random encounters), you have to come up with another reason for them to do so. (Note that it's possible, during character creation, to be loaned a Scout Ship without having to pay mortgages on it. As DM, you should consider disallowing this, or at least be aware of the implications if this reward is rolled)

If you decide trading won't be a major aspect of this game, you have to find another way for the party to make money (lots of money) or they simply won't be able to pay their mortgage. You also have to find a reason for them to travel from place to place, or they won't be able to justify the cost of fuel, crew salary, and other expenses. The  game will run serious risk of defaulting to jumping from one patron job to another. This isn't inherently bad, but it's a lot of work for the DM, and, at some point, becomes a railroad of quest-to-quest with no other real alternative. You're also cutting off the party from meaningfully interacting with the spaceship upgrade system—there's pretty much no other way to raise the millions of credits needed to buy extra laser turrets and stuff for their ship.

If you decide patrons won't be a major aspect of the game, you might find that the party never leaves their spaceship. Skills other than those related to trading and spacecraft operation will never be used, most of the equipment chapter and the encounters and danger chapter will be left unread, and those wild and unique planets you spent ages generating before the campaign will go completely unnoticed.

If you decide Traveller's character creation is too unbalanced and ought to be replaced by a point-buy system, you might struggle to weave the players' contacts, rivals, allies, and enemies into the campaign (if they even have those), and you might miss out on having hired NPCs running around on the spaceship. This in turn means that there's many fewer opportunities for roleplaying during travel. Additionally, your players might then operate with the expectation that Traveller will have anything resembling game balance, and, as such, be frustrated by the game's hugely uneven random encounters.

If you decide random encounters won't be a major aspect of the game, you might find that the party never meets a patron, never has the opportunity to engage in piracy, never has any trouble watching their credits climb and climb indefinitely, and never has much motivation to make money (and thus, go on adventures and travel around) beyond paying off their mortgage.