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Trouble is intended to allow you to trigger things that only otherwise happen at a longer time scale than the one you’re working at. In the current update, that doesn’t explicitly include year long operations and moves, but there’s no exception made for them either (there is one for 3D printing).

The operation and move resolves when you make the trouble roll that results in the year long action. You make the decision what you’re going to do and where you’re moving and the total sequence resolves instantaneously. For operations it is assumed you started a year ago. For movement — well. What is completely abstracted away in the High Frontier rules is the fact you actually decided where you were going at the point you launched the rocket; and map movement is just a convenience that allows you to plot out this movement over the time it actually takes rather than pre calculate the entire path. It’s really not clear that’s how the game works until you start to look under the hood.

As for how often you should roll; you should do it for any action which consumes resources that are not easy to replace (top of page 23 in the Crewed Rules). This includes any actions that happen at a time scale where you’re using up oxygen or power without a good way of replacing these (eg you’re not carrying enough solar panels to last a full day/night cycle).

For base construction, this should be any action that is long enough to trigger an event that puts your population at risk. This is normally annually but might be every week if the base is starving.

However you’re correct in noting that if you’re working at a small enough a time scale, you never have to roll, which means you never trigger trouble and therefore never use up resources. I don’t have a solution I’m happy with here yet — I need to force a minimum number of rolls per turn at these smaller scales but I don’t have a clean way of doing so.

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It’s entirely possible that the correct answer is just you have to roll for every action.

I'd say yes, however this is such a big game that its definitely something that would take a lot of time. It might require some new skills, and definitely require you to go through every book and add a required skill for the action, which then requires everything to have a time it takes to do it (which I know most do already but still)(maybe it just takes an amount of time equal to the time scale?). With that said, however, I think that would be how I would do it, as people play tabletop games for the physicality, for the ability to roll dice and see the outcomes. And while you have that for the larger scales in 60YIS, smaller scales feel more like following an instruction manual than playing a game. Which to an extent is the appeal, but still I think more utilization of skill rolling at smaller scales would be a benefit. Though of course others might think differently.

It makes sense that you roll, but roll what? Crewed Rules says 3d6 for ability and 2d6 for skill, but does the required skill/ability entirely depend on what the player thinks fits the best? I'm not entirely against that seeing how there's so many different actions the game offers, but I guess this leads into the response I posted to your recent action post.

Based on your feedback it looks like I’ll be more explicit here in the next update. Player thinks best is appropriate but that also means some skills will be favoured more than others and I think there’s some non-obvious choices that might be more interesting.

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Yeah, if only because this game seems to sway back and forth between numerical objectivity and 'do what you want' pretty rapidly, which can get a bit confusing when you are trying to interpret rules, and are left wondering if something truly is left up to you, or if its just hiding somewhere else in the rulebook.

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I suspect its based on the interest level of the author in the thing being described.

Thanks for this feedback by the way - it’s a useful lens to think about things in the game.

Of course! This game is an amazing passion project and I'd love to see it reach more people, so this is my way of contributing :) I'm a solo developer myself (though I focus more on board games than ttrpgs), so I understand the difficulties inherent to developing something massive by yourself. People see things in ways you never thought to see them, break things in ways you never thought could be broken; and that's an important step in any game design.