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they're back btw https://www.humblebundle.com/books/traveller-mongoose-publishing-books
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Aug 4, 2023 13:13
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SniperWoreConverse posted:they're back btw https://www.humblebundle.com/books/traveller-mongoose-publishing-books
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Aug 4, 2023 13:55
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yeah i picked it up, pretty well worth it i suppose. Somehow I thought the charity cut would be higher? anyway the current rulebook includes some basic info about building ships which is something i've wanted to try out. Overall is a go if you have been messing around with traveller and want more than the single tidbit or 3 that you can get for super cheap.
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Aug 5, 2023 21:47
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After reading some more it is: 1 actually less clear to me how software is intended to work lol 2 drat it they're trying but they'll never match cyberpunk's insane levels of supersaturated raw style Cyberpunk is dripping & traveller is, you know, doing their best. A lot of the stuff in the supply catalog is cool and probably worth it, but it's rarely a HOLY poo poo moment. They're in there but it's a mixed bag. The other thing is you basically would have to just give people poo poo, some stuff is all slightly redone versions of the core stuff, trying to actually use this "on screen" could be a pain. Meticulously gearing up your char is fun but I dunno gently caress it a lot of this you can just give out without needing to specify precise setups Also there's a loving orbital defense cannon in there, a loving clone vat, fabricators. That's cool poo poo. Some stuff is mega boring & forgettable, some is lame, but there are some cool things. Some stuff would be more emphasized in certain kinds of campaign, but aren't valuable for say, trying to run it on the forums. Too fiddly imo. I wouldn't veto it, but wouldn't be reaching for some of these items demanding a player needs a drat bipod on their very bulky gun Main thing about the supply catalog is that you can in fact tell its designed around the idea there's going to be radically different campaigns that might only ever use a fraction of the book, & they fit a lot of diverse stuff in there. There's like 20 various kinds of body suits you can take or leave.
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Aug 6, 2023 18:00
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SniperWoreConverse posted:Cyberpunk is dripping & traveller is, you know, doing their best. A lot of the stuff in the supply catalog is cool and probably worth it, but it's rarely a HOLY poo poo moment. They're in there but it's a mixed bag. The best explanation I've heard of Traveller is: Most space games have you jumping about from star system to star system, getting your rakish young rogue into hijinks within and without the law with an impish grin. Traveller has your retired space merchant sitting on the bridge of his freighter in his best bathrobe and house shoes, stirring creamer into his cup of coffee as he waits the six days to emerge from jump space to watch the credits slowly roll in in hopes that he can make the ship payment this month. Traveller is the Eve Online of role playing games. Then again, a few years back we finished a 25+ year long campaign (real world years) that saw a humble corporate beat cop become the Viscount of the Scatters along the Zhodani frontier in the Spinward Marches. After recovering some ancient technology that utilized the Higgs Field to combine hydrogen harvested from gas giants to create 1 cubic meter blocks of lanthanaum at eleven nines purity that he could sell to the Inperial Navy via exclusive contract at ten million credits a block at a rate of one block every hundred days. This was after preventing a Zhodani invasion, meeting Grandfather, twice, the Emperor once and getting into a bidding war over a painting with Archduke Norris. So it’s not all spreadsheets in space. Agrikk fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Aug 9, 2023 |
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Aug 9, 2023 03:54
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Agrikk posted:The best explanation I've heard of Traveller is:  Holy poo poo, that’s perfect. Fake edit: Kudos on the campaign that sounded awesome! How often during that 25 year set did y’all get together to play?
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Aug 9, 2023 12:02
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I've gotten into Session 1 of my new Freelancers of the Trojan Reach game, a sort of 'you're not the Pirates of Drinax, you're living in their world' type game. The Aslan pronounciation guide in The Glorious Empire in that bundle is a loving amazing resource. SniperWoreConverse posted:After reading some more it is: Yeah, I kinda feel like traveller is a more subdued style- it's good, it's meant to handle 'whatever' so obviously a lot of the Central Supply Catalogue is going to not really matter for a particular campaign, but just having the stuff in there can really help broaden the palette of options in situations, though.
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Aug 9, 2023 13:02
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DerekSmartymans posted:
It was originally a solo campaign that I and another player started and we played roughly every other week for about five years while my entire gaming group focused on our main game. But then our primary campaign ended and this became our main campaign when the rest of our group joined and we played for another five years before that arc finished. We took a break from Traveller to play other games for a while before resurrecting the game as a “high level campaign” and we played every other week for another decade, taking breaks and coming back to it throughout that time. I’d estimate that we played somewhere between four hundred and five hundred sessions- converting characters to play in the rules and settings of the Black Books, MegaTraveller, Aftermath! (By Fantasy Games Unlimited), Traveller: The New Era then finishing the campaign with a little bit of time travel to prevent the assassination of Emperor Strephon by Archduke Dulinor after saving the life of Grandfather from an assassination attempt by Number 7 using the Black Books once again. We finished the campaign during covid during which we played weekly.
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Aug 9, 2023 14:08
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The only obivous missing element from the bundle, i think that sticks out is High Guard, which is pretty important if you like fiddling with space ships.
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Aug 11, 2023 01:17
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The 2022 Core update has some rules for ship building at least. Don’t know how complete, since I also have High Guard and haven’t given them a thorough look.
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Aug 11, 2023 01:37
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chglcu posted:The 2022 Core update has some rules for ship building at least. Don’t know how complete, since I also have High Guard and haven’t given them a thorough look. They're just enough to basically build something like the Type S and that's about it. Honestly, some critical pieces are missing, like the Particle Barbette doing triple damage past armor, because that's what barbette mounts do. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Aug 11, 2023 |
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Aug 11, 2023 01:45
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You could build basically any sorta medium sized basic ship with the core book, almost enough info is in there to build every ship included in the core. The biggest one's the merc sphere ship @ 800 tons. It doesn't explain what sphere hull means -- you will not be getting anything exotic at all, but you can rig together something interesting. There's a half MCr sensor station you can install into your ship. I have no idea what it does other than allow another sensor operator. Seems to be as expensive as a big part of the bridge, so why would you not just add more bridge if you're getting stations with it? All the ship maps seem to have almost random numbers of crew stations anyway, so I guess it's some relic from a previous version E: ffffff drat I knew the barbs did something e2: if i had some players who were commissioning a whole new spaceship from scratch and the slob engineer / sensor operator was too fat and lazy to haul his rear end all the way to the bridge and back i would just let them put a secondary bridge right in the engineering. The sci ship has a split bridge config anyway, why not? Also all the avionics and everything is technically included as part of the bridge so i can see why you'd set up the rules to require x amount of bridge space for y amount of total hull, but unless this extra station did something cool and extra it seems like it's not really even worth it imo SniperWoreConverse fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Aug 11, 2023 |
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Aug 11, 2023 02:46
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SniperWoreConverse posted:You could build basically any sorta medium sized basic ship with the core book, almost enough info is in there to build every ship included in the core. The biggest one's the merc sphere ship @ 800 tons. Yeah I don't think a sensor station is something you'd put on the kind of ship you'd optimize anyway (it's made more for large but not capital craft). It's more descriptive than prescriptive, if that makes sense- you grab the things you want on your ship and you work out the price later. I'd never put a sensor station persay on a PC tramp freighter for example. It's more for something like a Navy Destroyer. And yeah the way they handle bigger mounts is basically the damage multiplier, rather than cranking the dice up and having a bay fling 20+ dice.
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Aug 11, 2023 03:23
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Agrikk posted:
Pretty much every single space trading game goes back to CT, starting with Elite which already was a kinda unlicensed adaption (the default player name is Commander Jameson and you're trading the same goods shown in Book 3).
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Aug 11, 2023 03:32
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Panzeh posted:Yeah I don't think a sensor station is something you'd put on the kind of ship you'd optimize anyway (it's made more for large but not capital craft). It's more descriptive than prescriptive, if that makes sense- you grab the things you want on your ship and you work out the price later. I'd never put a sensor station persay on a PC tramp freighter for example. It's more for something like a Navy Destroyer. I think the role for additional sensor stations is to allow additional sensor actions in MgT2 ship combat, and I think it's a Mongoose thing (didn't play MgT1 so don't know if it's in there) , I don't recall seeing that option in earlier versions of Traveller. Sensor operators in MgT2 can use the main sensor station on a ship to gain a sensor lock on an opponent in combat for a +2 to hit, OR use electronic warfare to either jam opposed ship's comms OR break another ship's sensor lock, but not more than one of those per turn. So if you have an extra sensor operator you can do multiple tasks, or other things involving the sensors while engaged in combat (like, say, one sensor operator does target lock or ECM stuff on a ship you're engaged in combat with, while a second sensor operator identifies that new ship that just came into sensor range.) So yes, definitely something well suited to combat ships, or scouts with extensive sensor packages (like the Donosev class survey scout, which has an extra sensor station.) Might come in handy for couriers/smugglers/pirates, but not not Eneri Free-Trader.
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Aug 29, 2023 07:48
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For Pirates of Drinax, i've been iterating through a system to track information flow throughout the game that doesn't kill me. They let an Aslan prince go but took his ship. 4 months later they're at the Drinaxian Court. Does it come up when talking to the leader of the system defense forces? The general concept is to generate an Information Quality modifier that is used in DMs on skill checks that is somewhat sane to track, the players can follow, and adds information flow as a strategic concern to the game. Currently landing at the following: Rumors - information generated by the Travellers' actions that they hear about later. Clocks (from PbtA games) or countdowns in weeks to track how rumors spread, with a dice roll + modifiers degrading the Info Quality score as it passes from, for example, a system-wide rumor to a sub-sector-wide rumor. In practical terms, determines how much any given NPC cares about a rumor about the Travellers. Regardless, it's important that for any given rumor, the Travellers know exactly what Really Happened, so they are reacting to how the perception of events have changed over time. Secrets - information gathered by the Travellers' asset network. Assets are a mechanic specific to the Pirates campaign, i believe. Setting up a network of informants and keeping them happy, and increasing their trust, etc. Secrets take time to reach the Travellers. Information Quality here is determined by dice roll + modifiers on the strength of the assets, type of information, how illegal it is to share, etc. and clocks are used to determine how quickly it reaches the Travellers. Degradation isn't the point here. This is more about setting a date on when a bit of info will be available. Intelligence - assuming a Rumor or Secret reaches the Travellers with a high enough Information Quality modifier, it becomes Intelligence -- a thing the Travellers now know and based on that knowledge can add to skill checks, etc. The Quality now degrades 1) every 4 weeks, and 2) when the Intelligence is actually used. Travellers can refresh the Quality score by revisiting assets, following up on rumors, etc.
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Sep 2, 2023 04:01
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fosborb posted:For Pirates of Drinax, i've been iterating through a system to track information flow throughout the game that doesn't kill me. They let an Aslan prince go but took his ship. 4 months later they're at the Drinaxian Court. Does it come up when talking to the leader of the system defense forces? the campaign fizzled (that's to say it went for ages but we only got two of the chapters done out of ten) before we really got into it but i absolutely love the PoD chapter that's a bunch of imperials tooling round the sector hearing rumours of what the players have been up to
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Sep 2, 2023 04:08
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sebmojo posted:the campaign fizzled (that's to say it went for ages but we only got two of the chapters done out of ten) before we really got into it but i absolutely love the PoD chapter that's a bunch of imperials tooling round the sector hearing rumours of what the players have been up to a couple of the players know this is coming and are so loving excited about it. thats in part why I've invented all this extra book keeping for myself
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Sep 2, 2023 21:03
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fosborb posted:a couple of the players know this is coming and are so loving excited about it. thats in part why I've invented all this extra book keeping for myself Yeah i feel like if you time this one right it's an amazing change of pace in a game that can run too long. I'm doing a game set in the Trojan Reach where Drinax is more of a villainous entity but i'm pondering having a similar scenario with an alternate crew in that vein.
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Sep 3, 2023 02:10
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Hey if anyone has a few posts a week they can spare we are currently doing a traveller pbp game, a few people have dropped out which is fine but that does mean we got some spare slots. It's very chill and I really like the gm, it's a good time.
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Oct 13, 2023 02:56
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I dunno why but you can get Classic Traveller in pdf for free at the moment: https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/355200/classic-traveller-facsimile-edition
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Oct 30, 2023 21:18
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Siivola posted:I dunno why but you can get Classic Traveller in pdf for free at the moment: https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/355200/classic-traveller-facsimile-edition getting a weird error on that link.
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Oct 30, 2023 21:21
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Worked for me. Thanks!
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Oct 30, 2023 21:25
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sebmojo posted:getting a weird error on that link. Is this any better? https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/355200/Classic-Traveller-Facsimile-Edition
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Oct 30, 2023 21:29
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Siivola posted:Is this any better? https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/355200/Classic-Traveller-Facsimile-Edition yes! ty. new site is extremely clunky though, which is a pity.
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Oct 30, 2023 21:36
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1: glass cannon season 2'd traveller: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz3Be--ot61P_-ge1l71k7ps4y8U12H4A which this playlist also has season one crammed in there 2: does anyone know how to extract and manipulate vector data from pdfs? One thing i noticed is that the images in the core book seem to be at least partly rasterized, or internally stored as jpegs, or something, but ex death station isn't like this -- you can zoom in further & maybe just the fuel will look pixelated. Really crank that thing up, this doesn't work too great with the core tho. It would be interesting to know, but that doesn't actually matter. What I did was zoom in as far as it would go and screengrab all the quadrants &c from the map, then carefully stitched it together and did some lovely changes:  (standard 100% zoom) This thing is absolutely huge, like 7777 pixels across. What matters is that each square is spatially matched, 1 square = 1 square, you can tromp around np. Gimp has filter > distort > polar coordinates. This is useful because traipsing around a ring station is a pain in the rear end when it's all disconnected pieces. It's not super intuitive imo. So because the lab ship is just a ring, you can flip this bad boy to polar coords and there's a region that's of pretty low distortion -- near the pole but not right up on it:   Idk some kinda math poo poo, i just kept redoing it and messing around until it started looking good. The bottom line is the position of the map items vertically will strongly influence how distorted the cells are. obviously there's no way to change projection without any distortion at all, but you can get it pretty close, and it also dramatically reduces the size as well:  (fairly big but not one billion pixels in diameter. Dunno if i can use that filter on path data, but it would prob be smoother) weird niche thing, but maybe it's useful if you find yourself with ships or even big stations that have ring sections you can manhandle em into something that makes sense visually but is still flat and you can look at the entire thing and understand the relationships between areas, even if they're not exactly square squares anymore. For people on the ship they're looking down straight hallways &c, and the walls aren't curved, it's the floor that curves up. Maybe beats printing out a literal ring-shaped map and taping it together.
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Oct 31, 2023 06:35
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Also I was crankin around thinkin of what might be some good character concepts and came up with a kinda hilljack royalty. It's a high risk, probably lovely reward kind of thing, but if the dice are there could end up pretty strong. get Colonial Upbringing from the companion book, which you can just click left and read. This is a different kind of pre-career education, where you are automatically in if your homeworld is TL8-. You get a lot of skills, but there's a few drawbacks, which are extremely rough if you roll bad: dm-2 for any career that isn't rogue or scout (those are dm+1). dm-1 for every promotion check if you graduate, decrease edu by -d3 (ow my brain) if i'm interpreting this right you start aging ahead of time by a term or possibly two, you "graduate" at 22+2d3 years old (ow my bod) Pretty sure it's supposed to be the kinda thing you absolutely for sure do as your first term, no jerkin' around. However! If someone were make it through with say a social that is 10+, you're guaranteed in as noble anyway, so you can look at the pre-educated list of skills as something like the 17 skills to pick from, subtract the giant pile of skills you get from colonial, subtract the noble basic training = Art, Carouse, Flyer, Language, Science, Streetwise, Vacc Suit A LOT of which you're likely to pick up just by being a noble, or can pave over with money, or might not even need at all. I ended up rolling up a humble country diplomat who had bad book learnin' but was smart and I chose Language, Streetwise, Vacc Suit (just kinda arbitrarily), and ended up with a cool dude with a very weird vibe. Depending on how things play out any two characters like this would have radically different personalities and goals. My guy got a huge collection of enemies and rivals because of his justice and honor lol. Absolutely crushing the poo poo out of promotion rolls despite the minus, and then botching literally every single benefit, that kinda thing.
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Nov 22, 2023 12:27
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So, reading through Whispers on the Abyss, and one of the early parts is just ridiculous, it's like there's a whole chunk of adventure missing. The characters are involved in a shady Imperial trial of some Vargr for piracy. The premise of the mini-campaign is that the PCs are doing a marketing tour in a new Type R mod to drum up business. They are enlisted by a Sword Worlder captain who's in system on a diplomatic showing the flag thing. The PCs are accepted as "starship experts" in the trial and questioned by the captain. This results in the exoneration of the Vargr who promptly zoom off with the Sword Worlder. I felt like I was taking crazy pills reading it, because none of it makes any sense. Is there some canon source on imperial law that makes this make a lick of sense?
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Mar 23, 2024 22:58
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Hypnobeard posted:So, reading through Whispers on the Abyss, and one of the early parts is just ridiculous, it's like there's a whole chunk of adventure missing. The characters are involved in a shady Imperial trial of some Vargr for piracy. The premise of the mini-campaign is that the PCs are doing a marketing tour in a new Type R mod to drum up business. They are enlisted by a Sword Worlder captain who's in system on a diplomatic showing the flag thing. The PCs are accepted as "starship experts" in the trial and questioned by the captain. This results in the exoneration of the Vargr who promptly zoom off with the Sword Worlder. It feels like something where they really needed to build more of a situation than the solution to the situation- if they're trying to take a Type R and drum up business for it, the adventure needs to come up with hooks that are opportunities, rather than just 'here's a cool scene idea'. the thing posed might be really cool if one of the PCs had a really good Advocate skill but yeah the situation as presented is a mess
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Mar 24, 2024 00:18
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