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Notahippie
Feb 4, 2003

Kids, it's not cool to have Shane MacGowan teeth
Traveller is also great for solo roleplaying - it's old-school enough even in the Mongoose version that a lot of activities come down to "roll on these X tables to see what comes up" and it adapts pretty easily to a solo setting. Solo (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/207164/Solo) is a whole solo game based on Traveller that can also be used as a sourcebook to run solo Traveller campaigns.

Naturally, you miss out on the big planned narrative arcs but you can get a lot of the same experience generated procedurally - if a mission generator says that a Navy captain gives you a mission at time 1, then a later one says that your enemy is a Navy captain, then you can connect the dots and have the twist that a DM might have planned.

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Notahippie
Feb 4, 2003

Kids, it's not cool to have Shane MacGowan teeth

SkyeAuroline posted:

It's definitely on the list of things I want to give a solo shot at some point. Zozer SOLO looked a little too... procedural for me, though. Less of playing the game than the average GM emulation.

Of course I'd also love to just play it normally (especially Drinax), but that's group dependent and my group is... not the Traveller type.

Oh yeah, it's real procedural. When I'm running a solo game I tend to adjust how much to use the structured system versus something like an oracle die scene-by-scene depending on how I'm feeling or how clear the narrative arc is about what should probably happen next.

Notahippie
Feb 4, 2003

Kids, it's not cool to have Shane MacGowan teeth

Panzeh posted:

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.

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.

Notahippie
Feb 4, 2003

Kids, it's not cool to have Shane MacGowan teeth

xiw posted:

What kind of visuals do people use for traveller energy weapons when describing things while GMing? I'm going back and forth a bit on realism vs visual effectiveness, and I do definitely want to differentiate particle weapons like the one you're handed in PoD from lasers but i'm going in circles a little with whether I want to treat them all as just straight speed of light pulses or whether I want to come up with specific visuals for each kind of weapon.

Basically I can run fantasy combat all day but it turns out I have to think a little more when describing what people see when particle weapons are being fired or laser rifles light up a room - are they noisy, can you see the flash, etc. I'm assuming most of these weapons are charge-up-then-fire-a-pulse rather than targetted cutting beams by default.

Some potential ideas that are afaik more or less plausible.

Lasers: in real life probably invisible, but maybe theoretically if they were powerful enough they'd superheat the air along the way and be visible as a flash of beam. They may sound like the crack of air superheating, and/or you might hear the sound of capacitators discharging or the sound of armor ablating. If it hit anything with a lot of moisture (like a body) then there'd be an explosive pop/crack of steam superheating and blowing up.

Particle projectors: I believe some of the theories about how to build them involve shooting an ionized pulse (so basically a lightning bolt) that the energy beam follows. So it might involve the zap/crack of lightning and would probably completely flash light up a room.

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