Traveller General - Spacers Never Die Edition

>How are your players about just-talking roleplaying?
Terrible at it.

I was definitely going to do dice, I'll do cards as well but I think I'll get some sneers about how I'm just trying to fill time.

I think it could be really cool with the right group and I want to encourage RP but I'm not sure they'll bite.

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can any anons tell me the pros of Traveller 5? ASIDE from home defense?

Eat. Shit. Sleep.

You might want to look at manned space flight history too. Sounds like apollo and Gemini (and the soviet contemporary missions)

Any of the shenanigans that went on would be fair game.

Some that I remember -
* Having to calibrate the navigation system (from sextant readings through the window - is that a star or the cloud of ice particles around the capsule?).
* Hatches jamming/getting stuck
* Colds/illness

Now it's traveller, so I'd imaging that the capsule would have gravity (grav plates are cheap enough for cars). It's calibration or regulator might be wonky. (When was the last time you checked the tire pressure in your spare?)

There might be a radio that needs fixing.

If you run dry, and it's your style, it might be fun to do some flashback scenes to pad it (see Firefly's 'Out of Gas' for an example of this)

Thingbuilder is pretty cool, as is the idea of QREBS.

If you can make sense of the map portions of world gen it's pretty rich for a random terrain system.

Any tips for a new traveler GM, I was thinking of running a far future, cyberpunk style game, maybe incorporating only a few alien races. PC's working as agents for a large megacorp in my home-brew setting. Would traveler work for this type of game? I was thinking of giving them access to a spaceship as the reached about the middle of the campaign, for them to go and explore the colonies on astroids and far flung planets.
Any advice or general tips on how to run the system?

Mechanically Traveller can do all of that, yes.

Are you thinking of multiple systems with an alien race or two, or all in one system? Or some combination of the two so you can have aliens while limiting *play* to one system.

One system, aliens from separate systems but integrated into society

Anybody knows if there is any info online about The Great Game which Traveller 2300AD's creators used to develop the setting?

Pros? For actual play there are very little. For setting creation/construction, however, there is a shit ton of stuff.

Thingbuilder, alien creation, world mapping, QREBS, there are a lot of similar systems you can use to flesh out you setting.

>Would traveler work for this type of game?

Yes, very much so. I've run Traveller noir campaigns many times. Your plan to initially limit the action to one planet and then "step out" in the system and beyond later is a good one.

Many new GMs new to Traveller go too big too fast. They try to detail an entire sector only to end up finishing nothing and having nothing to use.

COTI would be a place to ask. IIRC, there are pictures of some of the maps. The rules are long lost however although someone claims to have partially recreated them.

What people don't understand about the Great Game is that it was an old school Kriegsspiel-type game. Any written rules are minimal and the results of play actions depend almost entirely on decisions by the gamemaster.

As long term grognards who started gaming in the early 70s, GDW could easily play such a game in which RULINGS are used instead of RULES. Current day sperglord gamers who need a written rule for every possible situation, plus most of the impossible ones, could never do so.

TL:DR - The Great Game was not the heavily detailed 4X game you want to think it was.

I just popped into mega to check out the things you described. Alien creation is somewhat usable but thingbuilder seems like a very autistic way to do a very simple thing.

>like a very autistic way to do a very simple thing.

Congratulations. You just described T5 in a nutshell.

Sadly, other than the similarly autistic FF&S we've no similar resource.

Thanks, any general tips on how to run the system. Generally have played fantasy RPGS like WFRP and D&D up until now, so this would be my first foray into sci-fi-fi

1st, combat is deadly. DEADLY. Your players will need to understand that.

2nd, they is no substantial difference between PCs and NPCs. Mooks and other easily handled, thwarted, killed, etc. cannon fodder do not exist.

3rd, they are no levels or XPs. While character advancement exists in varying degrees across the many versions, it's neither as easy or rewarding as d20 type games. Rewards are primarily in-game things like money, equipment, influence, and knowledge instead of meta-game things like increased HPs or Stat & Skill buffs.

4th, chargen is a game in itself. Making good choices in chargen requires some knowledge of Traveller and the campaign you'll be playing in. A good PC for a merc game will have little to do in the trade game, for example.

Seeing as you and your group are new to Traveller, I'd run a one-off "test drive" session fist. Select a Double Adventure from Classic, use the pregen characters in it, and walk through the scenario together. I'd recommend Chamax Plague because it touches on various aspects.

When you're ready to play your campaign, have a session devoted to chargen. Guide you players' choices to help their PCs fit your campaign. Forex, a noncombatant scientist isn't really going to fit well in your noir, corporation, cyberpunk game.

Finally, start small and only add those things which you absolutely need. Traveller is 40 years old and you can easily drown in all the materials which have been written for it.

Jump

What this user said Also, Traveller is generally better at more grounded sci-fi. If you haven't watched the stuff mentioned in the OP (Firefly and Cowboy Bebop) I'd recommend doing so, as it's their broad tone that Traveller's good at.

Jump-2

Always loved the Animal-class safari ship. There's a merchant version floating around the net someplace.

>cyberpunk

Somebody on these generals long ago wrote a hacking add-on for MGT1, if you're into that sort of thing.

Traveller name generator site

spacecorsair.com/wordgen.html

anybody got Mindjammer up in the archives?

Mindjammer is in the MgT2e folder.

do any anons have a favorite not third imperium setting for traveller, homebrewed or in the archive?

I've been using a little backwater cluster of systems, ranging from tech level 5 to 10. The furthest system out has a world war going on, and the party is currently running higher tech weapons to them.

I've often played "over the border" in places like Foreven, The Beyond, The Islands, etc. The 3I is somewhere "back there" and not of any immediate importance.

There are some excellent 3rd party settings around now, stuff like Orbital, Outer Veil, Clement Sector, and others. Thanks to CE, there are many more in the pipeline too.

Thanks to Mongoose's idiocy in first releasing the SRDs and then later screwing over their 3rd publishers, an OSR is washing over Traveller and that's a good thing.

(Mongoose 2.0)

What's the simplest adventure I can run to see if my group wants to play Traveller?

Do you have to use Mongoose rules for the "test drive"? If not, I'd suggest running Classic's Chamax Plague from the Chamax Double adventure.

Classic is dead simple, basically roll 8+ for nearly everything. The adventure has pregenerated PCs and covers most of the Traveller tropes apart from trade. You fly a ship to intercept another one, make an EVA to board it, and save the pilot before it plunges into the local star. Next you negotiate with a company wanting to hire your ship to search for a missing science party. Next you fly to the world in question, land, and investigate an abandoned lab ship. During that investigation, you get to shoot at a LOT of Chamax bugs. When/If you're able, you than search the lab ship's computer to determine where the science party is. If you've enough time, you can even poke into some native ruins.

You could run this telling your group you're using Classic to gauge their interest. If they like the game, you tell them you'll use the more detailed MgT rules with it many options, more detailed chargen, etc.

High and Dry is a good introductionary adventure if you already set your mind on playing Traveller, but for checking out session it would be good to run some adventure from Classic folder, they should be pretty balanced in term of fight/skills/travel.

High and Dry is good, but are there pregens in it? Spending time in chargen during a "test drive" could turn some folks off.

Nope, at least not in MGT 2.

Too bad, it's a nice adventure. The referee could make up 10 or so and let his group select from them. They choose a pregen and are then given a few points to boost a stat and increase/add a skill.

That way you get playing right away and no one is stuck with a PC that doesn't "fit" the session.

Anybody willing can check out Classic pregens, or even take some characters from the numerous MGT books.

>but are there pregens in it?
Is MGT2 chargen really that difficult, or is this just crying into your beer?

Chargen is much hassle for generating statistics and skills, because most of the events that you roll will be unimportant for a person running a pregen in a one shot.

>Is MGT2 chargen really that difficult, or is this just crying into your beer?

It isn't difficult, far from it actually. Part of the problem is what refers to; you're rolling up a one-shot.

Another part of the problem has to do with the players having NEVER played Traveller before. Without that play experience, how will they know what sort of a PC the adventure requires? I used the scientist with no combat skills example already.

The user in question can look over the many pregens in Classic and MgT. Some of those tailored for their particular adventures and some are more generic, but they'll still be a good pool to look over.

How would you suggest I make weapons available to the players? Many really powerful weapons are somehow dirt cheap in the central supply catalogue, and I really wouldn't like them to get the best possible things at the very start of the game just by throwing some of their benefit roll money at the nearest arms dealer.

I'm pretty sure it says in the CSC that you're under no obligation to include that stuff at all, and that if you do some it should be pretty hard to get.

So if your players want a personal Rooty-Tooty Meson-Shooty you should probably make them work for it.
I'd dare say that most planets capable of building the crazy bullshit probably don't sell them to random space-hobos, so it's either a case of trying to get one as a favour from the government, or stealing one from whoever makes them.
Either that or they could try to find a high-tech Ancapistan world where they will sell actual you recreational nukes, but then the problem is that everyone else can buy them too.

Hell, that's another thing too. If your players can get crazy broken tech, so can NPCs, which should help to level the playing field a bit.

>So if your players want a personal Rooty-Tooty Meson-Shooty you should probably make them work for it.

THIS. Make all that cool stuff a goal and not a gift.

I think allowing them to do such a thing would actually be balanced out, in some ways, due to the inherent restrictions on the usage of such weapons. I think it should be fairly easy to find someone to sell it to you--there are plenty of violent shit-hole planets which would (this further balances acquisition as you must brave a violent shit hole planet), gunrunners (another balancing factor; buying guns illegally is a big no-no on high law worlds), and of course the case of ex-soldiers who kept their weapons when their term was up, Switzerland-style. The biggest single balancing factor to this is one everyone seems to forget: Even if you have the biggest, nastiest plasmacaster that ignores conventional armor and walls, it's useless if you can't bring it off the ship with you.

The fact of the matter is, most of the worlds the PC's are going to be visiting early on (unless they WANT to die by ancap hellhole rape gangs) are going to have a high law level. Most of these planets don't even ALLOW personal firearm ownership unless you're part of a security form or have otherwise somehow gone through the trouble of acquiring a license, and the only reason they'll let you land with them ON YOUR SHIP in the first place is because Starports aren't theirs--they're the Imperium's. Sure, your players can scoff at this and bring them with them, but GM's should be encouraged to punish them for this with extreme prejudice; it's not going to be any easier smuggling a gun out of a high-tech high-law spaceport than it's going to be smuggling it out of a modern airport. There will be scanners. There will be guards. You may be able to get away with carrying that shit around inside the spaceport itself, but as soon as you step outside, you're in the planetary government's jurisdiction. And if you do get one through? Using a gun in a fight on a world where civilians don't have them means every squad car/air-raft in the precint is going to be on your ass.

And of course, it gets worse; just as in real life, the more police calls which come in about a gunfight and the more panicked they are, the more cops are going to come. And if those reports mention bigger guns? High-caliber rifles? Automatics? Energy weapons? They're going to send in their planetary equivalent of SWAT. Depending on the grade of weapons used, they may just skip that and send in the military.

And if they use it on low-law worlds? Well, that self-balances too; after all, the other guys will be carrying around the nastiest guns they can manage, too, like mentioned.

tl;dr: Don't put artificial barriers in the way of your player's ability to buy guns. The natural ones should be sufficient enough; it's just that you have to remember that the natural ones are there and make them very apparent as Referee.

On a similar vein, having the weapon doesn't necessarily mean you have the ammo for it. It's gonna be just as hard to get rifle-food on a high-law world as it is to get a rifle, which could make for interesting RP usages of the skill system: I'm imagining more mechanically-oriented characters with ranks in chemistry perhaps having the option to reload spent brass to make ammunition whose quality depends on their successes in skill rolls in relevant areas. I think it'd be really cool to allow people to bypass law restrictions in this fashion; like, maybe have chances to malfunction go up depending on how badly they roll. "Okay, so I can't get ammo here, so I'll make some--I just have to be careful, because it means I may be clearing more Failure to Feed malfunctions from underpowered rounds, or if I'm really unlucky, having my gun blow up in my hand."

>Don't put artificial barriers in the way of your player's ability to buy guns.

Unless you're using the MGT1 CSC, it's full of terribly written, broken stuff.

I can see the marketing now
"Every girl needs her BRA."

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Here you go...
waynesbooks.com/TheGame.html

>waynesbooks.com/TheGame.html
Very interesting, although still unplayable. Thanks.

jump-1

you're sitting in the Regina Starport cantina and this guy slaps your gf's ass - what do you do?

btw this guy is 250lbs and has no concept of death

Ugliest ship in all of Traveller. Makes my head spin looking at it.

I cast flare.

Wonder what the heck he's doing so far from home, and tell my gf she should be honored that an alien crossed five sectors to slap HER ass.

>ugliest ship in all of Traveller.
Hnesshant, anyone?

So.

Someone recommended this system to me for my homebrew scifi setting. Looking in the Mega, there's a lot of shit to sift through. 5 versions of the game. So, my question is what would the best system be for a semi-gritty setting with less civilization and tech and more wild, unexplored planets (i.e. less lasers more bullets, less hoverbikes more ATVs) while still having ayylmaos and interplanetary travel? Also, which has the best system for ships, especially concerning customization?

What do you like in a system?

Traveller is already more bullets than lasers, with ayylmaos and interplanetary travel.

The only parts that aren't gritty is Jump Drives, Grav Technology and Fusion Tech. (So hoveratvs are a thing for everyone, but I could see, if you were on the edge, an atv might be easier to maintain.)

>what would the best system be for a semi-gritty setting with less civilization and tech and more wild, unexplored planets (i.e. less lasers more bullets, less hoverbikes more ATVs) while still having ayylmaos and interplanetary travel?

That's pretty much any edition, just have to fiddle with the available tech level a bit. Popular choices are Classic and Mongoose 1e/2e. Cepheus Engine is an up-and-comer, with third parties jumping ship due to MGT 2e's bullshit licensing rules.

>Also, which has the best system for ships, especially concerning customization?

For simple and easy to use, I'd go with either Classic's High Guard, or Mongoose 2e's High Guard. I haven't looked at Cepheus Engine's ship building rules yet, so I don't know much about it, but the system's based on a mix of of MGT1e and CT, so it should be fine.

If you want more detail and crunch, the crunchiest is Traveller: The New Era's book, Fire, Fusion, & Steel, which lets you drill down to the nuts and bolts level if you're autistic enough to want to do that.

Well, I'm trying to persuade a group of 3.PF kiddies to play something that's not D&D, so I'm thinking of simplicity of mechanics (so I can learn to GM quickly and homebrew ships/items/creatures for when established content isn't enough) but still having a lot of options for character building and combat. Also wild survival mechanics would be nice, but I can improvise that if there are none.

>character building

That might be a problem. Traveller defaults to a lifepath system where you roll to find out what your guy's backstory and skills are.
There have been point buy systems made for it (Mongoose includes one) but they've never been a very good fit.

Generally, Traveller is pretty simple on the player's end. More complicated on the ref end though

Hmm, allright. Looks like I'll start with classic then. Any must have PDFs from the Mega besides the obvious core rules?

High Guard maybe? It expands ship-building, but some people prefer the simplicity and "small ship" nature of Core ship-building. High Guard's the one that adds fuckheug captial ships.

Citizens of the Imperium (I think) has more options for civilian careers during chargen, so that could be nice.

Also, you should consider having a look at Cepheus Engine. It's a retro-clone of classic, with some of the better bits of classic supplements integrated into core. It's also a bit clearer and easier to read
It's pretty much Traveller's Swords and Wizardry

Seconding HIgh Guard, and Citizens of the Imperium. Ignore the chargen stuff in High Guard, Classic has two chargen methods, basic and advanced. Basic is what you find in the core rules and the CotI book, Advanced shows up in the various expansion books like High Guard and is much slower and generates much stronger characters.
Also grab the Rule63A pdf, as it's a huge help to understand the loose task system of CT.

>It's a retro-clone of classic

Actually it's Mongoose 1e with a few bits of Classic in it.

Hnesshant doesn't google.

Found it in a thread from last year, turns out he misspelled it.

archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/48535347/#q48582330

It's the Hnneshant Tradeboat from the IISS Ship Files. See also the Leviathan, which is basically a big flying brick.

Huh. I kinda like it.

Confirmed for Ugly+6. To compare: Leviathan, Ugly+4.

Check out Apollo 13.
Hitchcock's Lifeboat
and Stowaway to the Moon (1975)
or Das Boot and Run Silent Run deep.

>Ugliest ship in all of Traveller. Makes my head spin looking at it.

Very true, but also one of the most fascinating ships. People have been trying to explain and/or understand it since that 1979 JTAS issue. Miller finally explained a few things about it during a con Q&A last year which someone recorded and put up as a podcast. There's a link at COTI.

1st, the two jump drives, jump2 and jump3, are actually exponential drives from T5. The ship's max range is then either 2^3 (8) or 3^2 (9) parsecs.

2nd, AN is an example of the "ship of Theseus" trope. It's a very old ship which has been repaired so often and for so long that little or nothing remains of the original vessel. USS Constitution is another example. She was commissioned in 1797 but very little remains physically from that ship in 1797.

3rd, the ship dates from the early Vilani jump drive period before the 1st Imperium. An explorer misjumped and was rescued by an alien race who helped him repair his ship. The exponential jump drive was their improvement. The explorer returned to Vland, used the ship to make a fortune, and his descendants have used & maintained it every since. By the time of the Classic AN adventure, those descendants had lost track of it.

can anybody give me a simple explanation of the various 3rd party settings for CE? and is These Stars Are Ours it, or will they also do Ashes of Empires at some point? for those who don't know, Ashes was set after the Terran Republic from TSAO imploded in and on itself

any other fascinating ships?

>character building

Other anons have already answered your questions about gritty play, combat, ships, and whatnot. I'm going to caution you about introducing 3.PF kiddies to Traveller's chargen and style of play.

Traveller is VERY different from the D&D, d20, PF style of games they've played in the past. There are NO levels, XPs, feats, etc. which turn the PCs into demigods who can shrug off lightning bolts and slay entire armies without getting a hangnail. PCs in Traveller are mostly ordinary people in extraordinary situations. While increasing skills and stats is possible in Trav, it's both a lengthy process and one that yields small results.

Rewards are in-game things like money, equipment, and influence rather than meta-game things like levels and HPs. That makes chargen important because the PC you begin with is pretty much the PC you'll end with.

PCs and NPCs are on par with each other too. No mooks, no cannon fodder. That means combat is DEADLY as anyone with a gun can quickly kill anyone else.

Run a few "test drive" sessions to help your players transition between the two play styles.

Check out the Kinunir adventure in Classic, the Leviathan adventure, and the AHL supplement. Those books present entire classes of ships with noteworthy, mysterious, or unlucky ships noted.

Some examples are the Kinunir cruiser which disappeared in the Marches, a Leviathan was pirated and has been seen in various systems, and a badly damaged AHL cruiser is floating in a sea of ammonia in a gas giant in Zhodani space.

AHL?

And these are all for classic?

Alzhanti High Lightning (AHL). It's both a ship design and a man-to-man skirmish level war game for Traveller. It's in the Classic folder. Look for Supplement 5: Lightning Class Cruiser and look in the Classic games folder for the associated maps, war game rules, etc.

Sorry, Azhanti and not Alzhanti. Slip of the thumb.

>the Kinunir cruiser which disappeared in the Marches

There's a novel about that one, Fate of the Kinunir, in the Library Data Archives in the OP. It's pretty solid, and presents a good feel for how things work out on the frontier. Most of the story revolves around the Kinunir being in a backwater system trying to get repairs and deal with pirates and crooked planetary government and so forth.

Is the T4 FFS as good as the TNE one?

T4 had some nice ideas, but was very poorly edited, and had a ton of problems. I wouldn't recommend it as anything more than a place to steal bits from.

>There's a novel about that one,

"Fate of the Kinunir" is quite possibly the WORST novel I've ever read, RPG based or not. Seriously. It made me ashamed that I play Traveller. It made me furious that people reading it would think it represented Traveller.

Vardeman is a worthless hack who is wholly ignorant of important aspects of the game and setting. In one scene he has a marine officer standing on the bridge's aft bulkhead after taking his acceleration "pills" despite the fact that the Kinunir's thrust is parallel to it's decks. He has no conception of how time, distance, and acceleration works in Traveller space combat as the opening scene with the pirate shows.

t. autism

Wanting a Traveller novel to actually follow Traveller's setting, technological assumptions, and other unique aspects is autistic?

Whatever you need to believe, faggot.

>Is the T4 FFS as good as the TNE one?

No. They fucked up most of the equations during the editing & proofreading process.

Pointing at some parts where the author fucked up the details and then declaring it the WORST NOVEL EVER is, if not autistic, then at the least it makes you the Comic Book Guy.

>Pointing at some parts where the author fucked up the details and then declaring it the WORST NOVEL EVER is, if not autistic, then at the least it makes you the Comic Book Guy.

I didn't declare it the WORST NOVEL EVER, asshole. I said it was the WORST novel I've ever READ. I'm mortally certain there are thousands of Harlequin romance novels out there which are worse.

I'm also not talking about niggling details. I'm talking about ignoring fundamental parts of the setting the book was supposed to represent. I'm also talking about execrable writing, wooden characters exhibiting irrational behavior, and huge plot holes. The book wouldn't even get a passing grade in a middle school creative writing course.

In one paragraph, Vardeman has the ship's captain seriously consider ordering his marines to MURDER everyone aboard the yacht he'd just saved from pirates because it would be "easier" than dealing with them. In another scene, the same captain is yelling at his XO about the AI program which has been installed in the ship's computer while also thinking about how blue her eyes are and noting how her tits push out the front of her uniform. Hell, Vardeman's captain makes Janeway in ST:VOY seem sane.

If the WH40K or Shadowrun novels were as bad as Vardeman's book, players and fans of those settings would be screaming bloody murder.

Well then, what're the good Traveller books?

There are Traveller books?

Agent of the Imperium is damn good, and not just "good for a tie-in book."

I'd rate Fate of the Kinunir as "pretty decent as far as shitty tie-in books go" but apparently some folks disagree vehemently.

>Well then, what're the good Traveller books?

Agent of the Imperium. It's by Marc Miller himself and, yes, a sequel is in the works.

>There are Traveller books?

Several. They're all in the Archive. The TNE books are meh, the T4 book is meh, "Fate of the Kinunir" is shit, and "Agent of the Imperium" is mind boggling.

A few people have sniffed about AotI from a purely literary perspective, but from a Traveller perspective its incredible. The Imperium is suddenly incredibly strange, brand spanking new, and intimately familiar all at the same time.

After reading it I was surprised to see how alike and different "my" 3I was compared to Miller's. A few Veeky Forums threads back we talked about how Traveller had always been wheels within wheels and stories remaining the same while perceptions changed. Miller does that in spades in AtoI.

It's almost a secret history of sorts. All the events, names, and dates are exactly the same, but the hows and whys of everything is suddenly very different.