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I'm actually in a game of traveller right now in the mongoose 2e rules and supplements and i can answer questions if you need. It's definitely more modern (and no, you can't die in character creation in the modern editions, though you can hurt yourself and begin the game with crippling medical debt).
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Jun 12, 2021 12:58
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Has anybody here ever played a campaign with PC psionics? Is there anything I should look out for. I know most of the editions are pretty discouraging to it but i'm pondering a campaign based on them. I also think(at least in Mongoose 2e) that the benefit tables are a bit off to me(too many ships, not enough cash) and i'm pondering redoing all of them.
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Jun 25, 2021 13:16
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Notahippie posted:The benefit tables are heavily skewed towards creating the "classic" Traveller story of a crew of almost-broke working class folks with a ship trying to stay one step ahead of creditors. I think tweaking them to fit the story your table wants is probably a good idea. Yeah, after some games with it, the out of the box way character creation does things is very much designed to get a few 38-42 year old burnouts at least a rickety ship and a lot of debt ready for some hijinks in a way that's fool-proof. It's probably why they're so afraid to give PCs cash- if the DM was careful about how money could be spent, a character with 4 million coming out of character creation would not be that big a problem(that's about a down payment on a ship), but it's an easy thing to miss, things like legality, so instead of risking a DM letting a player begin with combat power armor, they just hand out very little money and give out the things they want. As I usually prefer now to go 1-on-1 with whoever i'm creating characters with, DM to player, it's easier to work things out and I think i'd be okay giving out less ships and random trinkets and more cash. (The original method does tend to result in more than one ship being generated for a party which is usually awkward, they have rules to do away with multiple ships in a party but it just turns it into a pension.)
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Jun 25, 2021 19:07
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Currently playing a traveller game, this session made us turn into Alex Jones once we realized we had a Zhodani passenger on the same passenger ship as us. Telepaths can do that in a campaign where you're supposed to be a group of Third Imperium intelligence agents. It's funny as poo poo when our expert on Zhodani and psionics in particular mentioned how worthless both IIS and conventional wisdom was about trying to 'blank' at your thoughts are against a true telepath.Jetrock posted:There is a bit of a cash difference between a game based around operating a ship vs. a group that doesn't have a ship--giving more cash and fewer ships makes it easier for starting characters to load up on battledress and plasma guns (or start arguments with the GM about why they can't muster out with battledress & plasma guns.) I do like the Mongoose convention of ship shares, which both lowers the otherwise crushing overhead of that 40 year mortgage and creates good excuses for an adventuring group (Mongo doesn't know the first thing about starships, but he's handy in a bar fight and his dad left him a 15% share in our Far Trader!) While the game is pretty restrictive in RAW about what you can do with money you muster out with, yeah, i figure i'd have to be up front about what, precisely, can be bought with mustering cash. It's kind of annoying that a lot of weapon and armor costs are based on mustering out with very little money and fitting into the generic gun/weapon/armor benefit rewards. I'd also probably have to look into things players can spend a lot of money on legally. This would be a lot more work than I first thought. nonathlon posted:The mustering out with ship was always a bit of a convenience, a way so the players could actually get a ship. I recall the original trading rules were pretty brutal, like you could easily run out of money, misjump, or have an encounter with a pirate or someone hostile who was much better armed than you. Oh, definitely, I think it's easier to just kinda hand out a ship with a particular set of conditions than give players some money to make a down payment on a ship and have to work that out pre-game as a group. And yeah, trading can be really brutal, though MgT2 is generally ok if you've got someone with good broker. It's kinda meant to make trying to run a far trader an adventure in and of itself, even if the DM doesn't do a whole lot of direct input. I don't think i'd want to play a random tramp trader campaign with a group of random people, but it's definitely the path of least resistance in the core book. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Jun 28, 2021 |
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Jun 28, 2021 01:54
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sebmojo posted:the fall of tinath is a brisk, solid starter campaign. Yeah if i want to run a campaign without having to do too much jimmying with character creation or systems, Pirates is a really solid way to go, and it need not necessarily involve piracy if the players don't want to do it. You still have to deal with benefit rolls giving people fleets but it's not too difficult to convert those to ship shares. In my intelligence campaign the GM converted ship shares to shares of the company we're using as a cover(though we do have a ship).
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Jun 28, 2021 10:55
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Bliss Authority posted:It's well worth mentioning that the first edition of Traveller wasn't wedded to the Imperium at all - it was an entirely different experience, one that I prefer to games set in the Imperium. There's a really great blog on first-ed play out of the box, linked below. I don't mind it either way. I think there's plenty of room for whatever you want in the kind of broad defined setting of the game but as long as you're willing to play a sci-fi universe where the hex borders are a pretty good barrier for communication, the sector/subsector/system generation tools work great and will give you something to that effect.
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Jun 28, 2021 19:20
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sebmojo posted:If anyone has done a lot of mongtrav space combat I'd love an example, I find it very awkward I've found it to be not too bad if you don't get too into the high guard stuff and you make sure every NPC ship has an appropriate skill pool for its crew. Much like with everything else, it's almost all skill checks, but it's not obvious that it's all skill checks. It's also very abstract.
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Aug 22, 2021 12:56
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CitizenKeen posted:What Traveller should I buy in 2022? My FLGS said Cepheus, but what say you, Traveller Nerds. The 2022 new core is good. Also playing an Aslan with melee(natural) 3 feels like an absolute badass in close quarters, you just parry everything effortlessly and hack your way through.
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Feb 15, 2022 01:04
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sebmojo posted:tbf i haven't played cepheus, i don't actually have strong views on whether it's better than mongoose. mongtrav is good, but i wouldn't call it perfect. cepheus is fine, but it's kinda bare bones for what you get
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Feb 15, 2022 01:33
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Does it do anything about things scaling towards "endgame" any better? Its been a few years since I played and I'm dealing with crippling sleep deprivation right now so its hard to remember details (I'd have to ask the guy that did all the ref'ing for better details) but we had some issues with things getting too easy and combat being super killy once we stacked up some skillpoints and good equipment with a prior version of Mongoose. Not particularly- you do kinda have to be careful about letting people have high skills, especially with +2 attribute bonuses. I kinda see it with the melee beast character I have, where you're so far up on the 2d6 curve you barely ever miss. If you let the chargen work normally and you don't let people go nuts with anagathics you shouldn't have this problem, but yeah, a skill point or attribute bonus ends up being worth quite a bit and it is very possible to get stacked up enough that 8+ checks are trivial.
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Feb 15, 2022 03:29
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Siivola posted:Wow, what happened? T5 is a massive tome of things that don't really coalesce into a game. Well, there is a game in there, it's just convoluted as all hell. One thing i'll say for T5 is that its task resolution system allows it a lot more granularity in skill levels and attributes. For example, in T5, every point of an attribute matters, and skill levels are more granular. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 12:06 on Feb 15, 2022 |
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Feb 15, 2022 11:48
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Agrikk posted:As a 50 year old player of the Little Black Books in the eighties, I was drawn to the appeal of spreadsheets in space. Traveller was less about jumping across the stars in the Millennium Falcon and is more about jumping a tramp hauler from port to sleazy port to make a credit and never mind the legality. Combat was more about protecting (or acquiring) a cargo or enacting revenge for a deal gone wrong rather than Good v. Evil In The Universe. The basic skill and task resolution of T5 is fine, and generally the lifepaths go reasonably well unless you want to deal with the weird entertainer subsystems. The problem is, everything else. For example, in Mongoose 2e, there is a table of guns and they do damage. While theoretically, T5's gun statlines are shorter, in reality, T5 doesn't give you much of a table of guns in the first place, it has this huge GunMaker module- while there are a few examples, it's expected that you use GunMaker to make the guns you need for your campaign. The way damage itself works is kinda funny. In an actual game like Mongoose 2e, they tell you that damage is rolled and applied to your physical attributes. Once you get two down to 0, you're out, and all down to zero, and you're dead. It's a bit weird and iffy as to how stun actually works, but it's a functioning system. T5 has weapons do damage called Type-X, so, a rifle will have the effect 'Bullet-3' which means you'll roll 3 dice when you hit, you'll inflict a severity of hit equal to half the amount that gets past the armor value. Once that's done, you'll get a location, and.. welp, you go to a table that tells you what's needed to diagnose and repair the damage. At no time does it tell you what kind of 'hit' kills you. Or, really, any guidelines for what to do. For a game with all these tables that codifies whether a gun has a muzzle flash or not, you'd think they'd have that. No, instead that's a referee judgement call. Fine, if it's some mook you're shooting at, I can handle them being out of action on a serious hit, but for the players, i kinda want more. T5's main usefulness is that it has a ton of generators for things. Generating androids, aliens, worlds, etc. I think if someone did a good run through and dug down into the player facing stuff, a good game could be made out of T5, but i've only got so much time in my life. sebmojo posted:^^ there's still a fair bit of spreadsheets in space with drinax, if you have a player who thrives on that absolutely put them in charge of the numbers and have them be the Purser The spreadsheet stuff can give a DM really good grist for the mill in terms of problems to give players but yeah, generally speaking, if you have a numbers person go for it. If you don't have anyone interested in that, you can handwave most of it. There are tables for how to make money without much spreadsheeting, and then ones for people who really do want to play a commodities market in the journey. And yeah, go term by term for everyone, I highly recommend doing that, as it'll make people be less likely to min max, though if you're running a piracy campaign, it might be good to give people a couple of boon die on their attributes to make sure they have something they're good at. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 12:19 on Feb 16, 2022 |
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Feb 16, 2022 12:14
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I've got the Mongoose Traveller Starter Set, which I thought built up to Mon2E - how much of a bummer is it going to be to use that as a starting point for new players and GM (me)? Is it going to mess me up if I later want to run Pirates of Drinax? I think I have the 2020 Core Rulebook and a bunch of the expansions in PDF form. Shouldn't be a big problem.
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Feb 16, 2022 17:46
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Central supply, yeah, is gonna give you equipment. Otherwise, the core has enough to get you going for simple, episodic stuff. As said before, Pirates of Drinax has some useful generators. To go outside traveller a bit, Stars Without Number also has some very nice tables for your use.
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Mar 17, 2022 11:47
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In one of my games i have a character who's a female Aslan history nerd and it's great to invent wrong details like how Napoleon's reputation for skill with artillery is just a human distortion out of shame because it was actually Josephine, his wife, who commanded his artillery while Napoleon took all the credit, an example of the cultural barbarity of the Solomani. Napoleon had a second wife, Marie Louise, who handled his home affairs.
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Dec 14, 2022 19:25
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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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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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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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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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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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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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