Traveller General-- 100 DTons of Cake and Booze Edition

>The lack of flavor images is a bit unfortunate though.

Do you want pictures or rules?

Rules desu

Then why worry about "flavor images"?

They are appealing, but clear and concise rules come out on top.

>tfw hes just keeping the thread alive with pedantry

>>tfw hes just keeping the thread alive with pedantry

There are worse ways to keep the thread alive.

Does anyone have any good scenarios/ideas for if the players misjump?

Event Horizon

Good?
Not this, then, assuming you want the campaign to continue.

While there are examples of ghost ships and sargasso regions in the OTU, they are rare enough that the rules on misjump shouldn't lead to them very often.
Misjumps can be used to go nowhere when you wanted to move, to move in a different direction, or to completely relocate a campaign with a sector-long leap.
It can also be used to strand a crew on a world that you really want to dig into, either while waiting for parts or for your Engineer to be confident the drive won't get everyone killed.

Flow control.

Or ghost ships (per at least one Challenge adventure), if you really hate your PCs.

Thanks user, good idea about using it as a control over movement. However, isn't the chance of misjump reliant on things like using unrefined fuel and poor astrogation skill rolls? How would you use this as a more reliable method? Fudge the target number to force a misjump?

>Does anyone have any good scenarios/ideas for if the players misjump?

Okay, this is one of the bigger misconceptions people new to Traveller have and one of the bigger mistakes many new referees make.

The majority of misjumps are a FAILURE to jump and not an uncontrolled jump with an unknown direction and distance. The "easier" misjump to roll results in no jump and a damaged jump drive. The next most common type of misjump, especially from MT onward, is one which takes more time than normal. While the specific odds vary across the versions, no-jump and variable time misjumps are far more common than the "random" direction/distance type.

In many versions, you have to TRY to misjump. That is you have to add multiple DMs like jumping inside 100D/10D, using bad fuel, not maintaining engines, etc. MgT has a slightly increased chance of misjumps because of their innumerate decision to require multiple die rolls for a jump.

In the RAW for any version, a random distance/direction misjump is a death sentence. If as a referee you let one occur, you should only do so WHEN you have a adventure planned just for that occurrence. In other words, you're flatly imposing a "deus ex machina" to get the players where you want them. Do that often enough and your players will understandably be pissed.

Follow the RAW and you'll never have to "worry" about misjumps at all. Misuse or otherwise impose misjumps to drive your campaign and you're players will rightly call you on railroading.

>How would you use this as a more reliable method?

And that's exactly the misconception I posted about.

Misjumps are by definition unreliable, so making them more reliable is a contradiction in terms.

>a random distance/direction misjump is a death sentence.

This. Most ships, esp. the longer-legged ones have only enough fuel for one jump. Your option at that point is to put everyone in cold sleep, use half you remaining M-fuel to accelerate towards the nearest civilized system, and hope someone's there to rescue you. At best, the campaign marchers forward a few years without the PCs.

To further explain Mongoose's innumerate decision to require multiple die rolls for what should be everyday activities, let me share a little math with you. Don't worry, you won't even have to add.

Imagine if the rules allowed you to safely jump as long as you didn't throw a 12 on 2D6. You' succeed 97.2% of the time. You're only going to fail roughly 3 times out of 100. Pretty good right?

Now imagine if the pilot, navigator, and engineer all had to succeed at the same throw. The chance then becomes 0.972 x 0.972 x 0.972 or 91.8% of the time. Now you're going to fail almost 9 times out of 100.

Requiring rolls for what should be everyday and mundane tasks increase the chance of failure and requiring multiple rolls increases that chance faster than you'd think.

As long as all the usual precautions are taken and no extreme situations exists, pulling out your driveway, using a computer, and jumping shouldn't require a die roll.

As a referee, if my players are jumpign from beyond 100D, using refined fuel, keeping up with maintenance, not begin shot at, etc. I have the navigator make a roll which only modifies jump time and not whether a jump occurs or not.

If a dozen-parsec "misjump" could be done reliably, the Imperial Navy would already be doing it, and there'd be no need for an X-Boat system.

Conspiracy types, of course, say the 3I's been doing this for years. Maybe they have.)

>If a dozen-parsec "misjump" could be done reliably, the Imperial Navy would already be doing it, and there'd be no need for an X-Boat system.

Exactly. Of course, that only applies to the OTU/3I and if you're not using that setting...

T5 has several methods for reliably "cracking" the OTU/3I's six parsec barrier.

This fascination with misjumps never fails to amaze me. It's as if people seize one small part of the rules while ignoring all the rest.

>>Conspiracy types, of course, say the 3I's been doing this for years.

As a referee, my "explanation" for that continued belief is the constant shell game Imperiallines plays with it's public, jump2, TI and private, jump6 TJ class ships.

Anyone has made states for the legend of galactic heroes space ships but for Traveller?

sarna.net/wiki/Tetatae

Although it's less ree-inducing, since traveller has aliens and battletech doesn't.

Or hope local systems pay a scout to jump into adjacent hexes and check for beacons every few months. It can't cost much, and would seem like an ideal job for the scout service to hand out to any mustered-out scouts in the region. j2 away from inhabited space is a bit more of a hassle, although j2 ships doing a 4-parsec transit through the region with holds full of inflatable tanks could probably be talked into spending a few days checking their sensors for beacons - it's not an everyday trip, but it's again not something that never happens.

hell, smugglers. have a rigorously anonymous tip line for people who just happen to have maybe been in empty sectors mark somewhere as maybe, not that they were there doing anything, maybe having a ship in need of help.

>Or hope local systems pay a scout to jump into adjacent hexes

Have you any concept of just how big a parsec is? It's 3.26 light years or about 31 TRILLION kilometers. That's the "width" of the Traveller hex - 31,000,000,000 km.

The signal from the "beacon" your scout is looking for is going take more than THREE years to cross a hex and more than 1.6 years to cross the "radius" of the same. Considering attenuation, can the radio or laser aboard a normal Traveller ship even be detected across those distances?

>31,000,000,000 km.

Oops, I left off some zeros...

31,000,000,000,000

This actually leads to a question I have wondered about. Drop tanks let you cross "too long" distances to permit deep strike into enemy territory. Naturally, any interstellar navy would very much like to prevent (or at least know of) any such manoeuvre. My first thought about this would be for the navy to place outposts with sensors and a high-jump courier ship out in interstellar space.

I figured this would make strategic sense, but most importantly serve as a convenient reason for someone to be there to rescue the players when they inevitably manage to strand themselves in deep space. Of course any such rescue would be incredibly awkward for the navy, since the precise location of the outpost is probably top secret.

The problem with that is that, as said upthread, interstellar space is big. You might think that the walk down to your local chemists is a big distance, but that's peanuts to space.

The chances of the drop-tank ship(s) coming out of jumpspace anywhere near the listening station is hideously unlikely. Remember, the emissions that sensors pick up travel at c, so by the time you see someone they'll have already jumped again to wherever they're going. You'd have the outpost's courier showing up to warn about an attack that happened nearly a year ago.

Unless of course jumping into a hex of interstellar space will always spit you out at roughly the same point in that hex for reasons or whatever

>My first thought about this would be for the navy to place outposts with sensors and a high-jump courier ship out in interstellar space.

Why? What use is it?

>>I figured this would make strategic sense,

No it wouldn't. You're unconsciously presuming FTL sensors & comms while forgetting about jump time.

Let's say there's a listening post. The enemy exits jump space "only" one light-hour away, are detected, and the courier jumps away with the news. That news will take ONE WEEK to reach it's recipient. If a force is somehow dispatched IMMEDIATELY upon receipt of the news, it will arrive TWO WEEKS after the enemy was spotted. You want to bet that the enemy is still there?

Picketing empty hexes doesn't do squat and, or the most part, the time for needed for any jump is the reason why.

I figure it is a case of deciding how quickly you want to get the alarm vs. how much money you are willing to spend. If you consider the 3,26 light years figure, it is about 1190 light days. If the maximum time to alarm is 10 days, then the outpost (given good enough sensors) sees everything within 10 lightdays, for a 20 lightday detection diameter. To make a line of such stations across the hex you need 60 outposts. If you covered the hex in a grid pattern you need 60 such lines, for a total of 3600 outposts. This is a big number, but not astronomically big. Less if you use a more optimal placement than a grid, but I'm a bit too lazy to deal with the math at the moment.

If each outpost cost you, say, 100 million credits, then each hex you cover costs you 360 billion credits. This is expensive, but not inconceivably expensive for a wealthy interstellar polity to purchase.

This all of course relies on the Traveller maps being 2d. If you include the third dimension the cost goes through the roof. Covering a cube with such a net requires 216000 outposts, which is going to put the cost to 10,8 trillion credits if you somehow slash the cost of each outpost to a mere 50 million credits. While the cost of a single hex is affordable to a wealthy polity, it is unlikely that covering just a single hex is going to provide much strategic benefit.

>sees everything within 10 lightdays

And then needs ANOTHER SEVEN DAYS to send the message. That's the part you're continually forgetting or ignoring.

If you want a grid which produces a 10 day detection & report "alarm window", your outposts need a 6 lightday detection diameter rather than a 20 lightday one.

>>This all of course relies on the Traveller maps being 2d

As you correctly note, 3D makes the problem much nastier.

>>While the cost of a single hex is affordable to a wealthy polity, it is unlikely that covering just a single hex is going to provide much strategic benefit.

Agreed.

A maximum of 10 days to alarm at the outpost, not at the naval base. While the message then spends a week traveling to the naval base, the enemy also spends a week traveling to their target. Instead of getting a week to burn the whole system to the ground, they will have to contend with reinforcements from the naval base.

*an extra week

>A maximum of 10 days to alarm at the outpost, not at the naval base. While the message then spends a week traveling to the naval base, the enemy also spends a week traveling to their target.

That doesn't matter because...

>>Instead of getting a week to burn the whole system to the ground, they will have to contend with reinforcements from the naval base.

... you don't know WHERE to send the reinforcements.

Assume 3I/SolCon/ZhoCon tech with their (mostly) jump4 fleets. You spot the enemy refueling 10 or fewer lightdays away from your outpost, send a courier to the naval base, and then what?

All you know is that that force was HERE on such and such a day. A week later it can be ANYWHERE within a 4 parsec radius. So WHERE do you send your reinforcements?

Is the enemy force spotted heading for the naval base which was warned? Or is it a piece of misdirection? Feint towards the base, freeze the forces there in place, and then attack elsewhere?

If you haven't yet played Classic's "Fifth Frontier War" game, let me strongly suggest you do so. It's a real eye-opener with regards to comm lag and how it controls operational and strategic planning. If you can arrange to play the game double-blind it will be better yet.

>tfw forget to print double-sided
>tfw only realize halfway through

Ohhh... how may times have I done the same thing...

You want a membership card, user? I'm the fucking president of that club.

Sure. Is the card one-sided?

It's two cards actually because I printed it one-sided.

Any good books than have a traveller feel? Like Vatta wars.

I'mma be a smartass and say Agent of the Imperium, to keep the thread alive, also, bump

How about the Dumarest of Terra series?

>Any good books than have a traveller feel? Like Vatta wars.

There's no Appendix N for Traveller sadly and nearly all the books written for the game range from complete shit to meh. Miller's Agent of the Imperium, which you can find in the Archive above is both fantastic and thought provoking.

H. Beam Piper's stuff is useful despite using different ship drives. David Drake's RCN series is good too, again despite different ship tech. Jerry Pournelle's future history "Empire of Man" and especially "King David's Spaceship" is good as is the Pournelle/Niven book "The Mote in God's Eye". Frezza's "Small Colonial War' is good. Jack Vance's "Planet of Adventure" and nearly everything by Poul Anderson can be used too.

Tubb's "Dumerest of Terra" series was a huge influence on Miller. When you read those books you can see all the bits that were borrowed. Despite their being a big influence, I must force myself to read them and haven't read more than a handful of the couple dozen which exist.

bump

Bertram Chandler has a merchant series that would fit Traveller with a little bit of re-scaling the FTL drives.

I'd add various Andre Norton novels, even though the technology curve it more 50s sf than 70s.

I've only got the first book of this, but it is Traveller As Fuck.

Jack Vance has some good traveller inspiration too, demon princes perhaps? and I'm sure he's got a story where scouts go out alone in scoutships to scout, and one where there's a really nice inhabitable world but because it's in the middle of nowhere the only thing on it is a bar (and attached landing pads). People drop by because it's a good staging point on frontier trips or something.

>Bertram Chandler
Captain/Commodore Grimes.

I read that already desu, the one in the trove etc.
Oh, I read a few of them, quite good but very old school.
Jack vance I like him, I read his Dying Earth and Tschai stuff, I remember starting the Demon princes and not getting into it as a teen tough, perhaps a bad translation. All the other tough I never read anything about them, tough a friend recomended me the mote in the god's eye. Thanks bro that was helpful.
I kinda of dig the old school feel, specially afte reading some new USA sci-fi in the Hugos. Never again desu.

I think this is the issue I have. I'm currently coming out of a pathfinder campaign where for some inexplicable reason the DM is having us roll for every little thing (including in one case a strength check for someone to pick up an item much lighter than their above head withy limit) and I think it's affecting me more than I thought.

Usually I just go with if someone is trained in it, and the task is routine, then I just say they pass regardless.

Must purge the innumerable skill checks.

Is there anyone who has figured out a way to use Traveller rules to run a WH40kRPG? I know that the design philosophies, sci-fi schools, and basic physics assumptions are as different as night and day, but surely someone has given it their best shot at some point?

The only reason I'm asking is because I frankly hate the crunch for WH40kRPG. It's unwieldy, overly situational, and needlessly complex. Traveller, for all its hard science in the backdrop, is actually much simpler to learn in practice.

In my game, if my player's character succeeds in her Jump Drive test (she literally can't roll below a 4), then the jump is successful. One roll, and that's it.
It would only ever be an issue if a different character had to try and get the J-Drive to work, but I'd have the jump just not occur in the event of a failure.

I would be surprised than no one did desu, but probably it has been pruned from the web or something.

>As long as all the usual precautions are taken and no extreme situations exists, pulling out your driveway, using a computer, and jumping shouldn't require a die roll.

OK.

Would a 747 pilot need a skill roll to take off from or land at a modern airport in good weather? Would a tugboat captain need a skill roll to bring a supertanker into a port designed for supertankers?

Did Neil Armstrong need a skill roll to land the Eagle?

I would argue that Neil needed to roll for the landing, since the first moon landing was an unusual situation. Subsequent pilots of lunar landers might not need to roll, if the GM has grown bored of the idea that they might crash.

Why on Earth would you ever want to inject that concentrated goatpiss into Traveller.

Quite so, and your point also invalidates the option "point the ship at the nearest star, accelerate and go into cold sleep." That means travel times of tens of thousands of years - for all practical purposes, the characters lost for the referee's campaign unless the ship emerges at the fringe of a settled system.

(Can't be bothered to calculate the exact number of years for a parsec because it becomes irrelevant once it goes above 100 years or so.)

Nah, rescue should be within a decade. Fifty years, tops. Then you get the salvage scene from Aliens.

>Would a 747 pilot need a skill roll to take off from or land at a modern airport in good weather? Would a tugboat captain need a skill roll to bring a supertanker into a port designed for supertankers?

Both good examples of actions that should simply occur rather than needing to be rolled for. It's called ROLEplaying and not ROLLplaying after all.

>>Did Neil Armstrong need a skill roll to land the Eagle?

Very much so. The planned landing site had boulders not picked up in photographs, so Armstrong had to divert and land the Eagle with only seconds of fuel left before reaching the lander's bingo point. Definitely a skill roll required there.

>Is there anyone who has figured out a way to use Traveller rules to run a WH40kRPG?

I've been playing Traveller since 1978 or '79 and wargames even longer than that.

In all my years of gaming, I am happy to say that I have NEVER SEEN a WarHamster - Traveller crossover. I'm sure some degenerate, brain damaged, or otherwise psychotic "person" somewhere has attempted to fashion such a crossover but, mercifully, has failed to share their carcinogenic efforts with humanity.

>> I frankly hate the crunch for WH40kRPG. It's unwieldy, overly situational, and needlessly complex.

But those things are EXACTLY what makes WarHamster WarHamster. If you aren't dealing with needless crunch, unwieldy rules, overly situational exceptions, and needlessly complex stats, you're not playing game which is the engine of the con men at GW's wholly cynical figure-selling process.

WarHamster IS ALL ABOUT being able to open the latest "codex" and tell your fellow morons that a Triple-Whipple-Dipple Douchebagerator (with Optional Chainsaw Eyelids for only $29.99) gets an extra 1.5 dice on Sim-Sala-Bim worlds during full moons in months with an "R" in them if the player's surname end in this limited list of vowels.

The idea you'd want the change THAT is quite frankly unbelievable.

No accounting for taste.
With the bits already hidden in Mongoose v1 and a few adjustments to psionics you are well on your way. What parts do you consider difficult to adapt?

So I'm looking at Cepheus Engine, and I'm having trouble with the starship weapons. I mean, surely a triple turret with, say, particle beams is more powerful than a 50dT particle beam bay? The bay does about twice as much dakka, but there are three of them in the turret, and it's 50dT cheaper.

You can get bay weapons you can't turret-mount, meson gun bays obviously having the whole "fuck your armour" thing, but fusion gun bays are basically particle beam bays but cheaper, slightly weaker, and a band shorter in range. Oh, and they don't do radiation, OK, you might not want that.

I just don't get why you wouldn't have a triple particle beam turret over a particle beam bay. Are they one per turret? And if so, why doesn't it say that anywhere I can find?

I'm missing something, obviously.

Particle weapons should be one per turret, per older editions, and not even fit into a turret at all until TL15. At TL14 the Particle "turret" is actually 5 tons, not one.

Cepheus Engine seems to be missing that. I remember Particle Barbettes being a thing, yeah, but I'm trying to just go with RAW here and it's not as bad as Mongoose's writing, but it's not exactly great.

>I'm missing something, obviously.

I don't think you're missing much of anything actually.

I found it to be a matter of nuance and, coming from decades of HG2 use, I had to really look for that after unconsciously assuming CE would work like HG2.

Unlike HG2 in which you can group multiple weapons in one turret into a single battery, CE treats each weapon as an individual. That triple turret with 3 particle beams has THREE separate weapons and thus needs THREE gunners. While those 3 beams can be fired at the same target, they aren't fired as a UNIT as was done in HG2. You can't "sum" similar weapons into one attack and - importantly - one attack ROLL.

In I pointed out how even high odd rolls become low odd sucker bets IF you must perform enough of them. That triple turret requires 3 rolls from 3 different gunners while the 50dTon bay only requires one roll from one gunner.

Because CE (so far) only deals with ships under 5K dTons, it's ship combat system and the weapons used in the same have more of a RPG/PC focused than HG2's huge #s of huge ships with huge #s of huge weapons fighting huge battles wargame focus.

I opened CE unconsciously expecting to find HG2's exquisitely balanced battery ratings which blended tonnage, TL, numbers, and other factors. CE is more like Classic's Book 2 with it's PC focus.

>Particle weapons should be one per turret, per older editions, and not even fit into a turret at all until TL15. At TL14 the Particle "turret" is actually 5 tons, not one.

That's HG2 and I assumed HG2 too when I first read CE.

CE is slightly different and it "penalizes/prevents" turrets with multiple particle weapons in a different way.

A few more random generator links and resources that might be useful.

story-games.com/forums/discussion/13263/resources-for-solo-play

Thanks for the link.

SWN also has a bunch of random generators that can be use for Traveller.

SWN is great for traveller in general

>>SWN is great for traveller in general

Quoted for truth.

The Faction system in the core book is a game in itself.

Obviously, most of the military careers aren't much different from your average Imperial Guard regimen (though perhaps being in the Guard is about ten times more lethal). My biggest concern is over how weapon damage in WHRPG weighs against weapon damage in Traveller, or the exact traits of each universe's power armor. That's not even getting into the relative stat differences between an unarmored space marine and a regular human, or something like a chaos deamon or eldar (though darians may come close with some tweaks).

>or something like a chaos deamon or eldar (though darians may come close with some tweaks).

You know absolutely nothing about Traveller if you think the Darrians are only a few "tweaks" away from being WarHamster's Eldar.

The Darrians are a fairly nondescript Human Minor Race, with a different pelvis, a more easily modified metabolic rate, melanin that protects from UV without darkening, and a somewhat higher resistance to ozone.

They don't have spooky psionic powers and they're not stronger, faster, nimbler, or have more endurance than the Vilani, Sollies, or Zhos.

As for battledress, each version of Traveller has a different take on battledress and none even remotely resemble WarHamster's power armor.

I know little about the lore because the crunch is more important to me, yes.

Okay if you need crunch, use the crunch, but don't jump to conclusion about the fluff.

Also i have to put the breaks on you about psionic powers in both systems. Compared to WH brain-dimension-magic traveller psionics are like a flamethrower versus a wet matchstick.

not him but could you explain some of the different takes on battledress? (I really like the name in any case)

>I know little about the lore because the crunch is more important to me, yes.

You don't know shit about the crunch either because the Darrians have little that is "special" in the way crunch.

In chargen, their STR and END scores get slightly nerfed - 1D+3 vs. 2D6 - while their EDU gets a slight buff - 2D6+1 vs 2D6. Their career tables have slightly different stat/skill results than the basic tables, but nothing that stands out too much.

Also kindly cautions you about psionics with: "Compared to WH brain-dimension-magic traveller psionics are like a flamethrower versus a wet matchstick." and he's absolutely correct.

Psionic powers in Traveller are subtle with limited duration at short ranges and lengthy recovery times.

Psionics are seemingly weak because in nearly every version of Traveller psionics isn't career. Instead it's something a PC develops after their career. This means psionics are just another skill instead of the primary reason a PC exists in the game; i.e. your PC is an ex-scout medic with limited telepathic powers and not a Telepath!!! who can hand out band-aids.

Sure.

In Classic, battledress (BD) was upgraded combat armor combined with a vacc suit. It doubled your STR and gave you unlimited END for encumbrance and melee. While it increases STR and END, it does not increase them with regards to taking wounds. BD also allows you to fire the supremely nasty PGMP and FGMP weapons without penalty or risk of injury.

In MT, BD got a huge boost because MT added lots of equipment to the game plus rules to use it. Along with buffs to stats and the ability to fire the PGMP/FGMP, BD suddenly had built-in sensors and comms of various types and flew thanks to an integral grav belt. BD was also slightly harder to penetrate and damage. In many ways, the MT version of BD was/is the toughest.

TNE dialed things back somewhat. It included sensors and comms, just not automatically like MT. While you could use a grav belt with it, such a belt wasn't built-in. It still allowed you use the PGMP/FGMP.

T4 returned to the Classic version albeit tweaked for the T4 system. BD provided stat buffs, had little in the way of embedded system like the MT version.

I've yet to use MgT or personal combat, or for much of anything realy.

CE seems to split the difference between Classic and MT. You get stats buffs and can use the P/FGMPs. Because CE has nice personal computing rules, it's BD has a built-in computer with specific programming. CE also mentions that BD is "commonly" personalized with "numerous upgrades" meaning you can mix & match whatever kit you and your referee agree on.

What's religion like in your Traveller universe? Or if you use the OTU, have any religions been prominent in your games?

I haven't found much about religious belief in the Third Imperium, is it the case that there aren't many religious movements spanning more than a planet or two?
I know about the Vilani Star Chorus thing, but apart from that are there any beliefs that are common across big regions of the Imperium? Do Solomani settled worlds still practice Earth faiths? Is religion largely just beneath the scope of Traveller to mention?

I'm doing my own thing at the moment, but I just thought it'd be interesting to ask

I take it ya don't like warhammer, eh user?

Thanks. I really liked the CE computer rules, for everything; personals, built in, ship comps. They really modernized things while maintaining the general Traveller flavor.

Although I might disagree with old-user over there, the WH40kRPG by FFG is actually really good for what it is supposed to do. Firstly the level of 'crunch', as it were, is actually fairly minimal, and while certainly more than Traveller, does a good job of portraying the setting (Paranoia is a great thing to have, for example). Also, a lot of the rules, especially for Rogue Trader, are part and parcel of the continuation of rules from tabletop, including Battlefleet Gothic. Also, WH40KRP is based in large part on the old 2e WHFRP system, so there's lots of holdover material there.

More to the point, Traveller's mechanics don't match the setting of 40k. For instance: psionics. You could try using a 2x or even 2.5x modifier as MgT Psion 1e suggests for varying settings, but it doesn't replicate the mindfuckery of maybe accidentally summoning a Khorne berserker because the primaris psyker was stupid enough not to flagellate himself in the morning. Or the ships. 40k ships are deliberately stupid and unwieldy. They have a distinct 18th century ships-and-iron-men feel, with broadsides and whatnot.

So it doesn't fit. Don't get me wrong, you can adapt Traveller to lots of things with more or less difficulty. Star Trek, to some extent Star Wars, can be done. Firefly and Mass Effect are pretty easy conversions. But 40k? Just stick with WH40kRPG. It's a good system for what it needs to get across.

>I take it ya don't like warhammer, eh user?

WarHamster is less a war game and more a con game run by GW to sell books and figs to clueless idiots besotted by the baroque nature of the minis. It's the MtG of wargames; the more you buy the better chance you have to win.

My minis group meets in a FLGS which also host WH40K matches, Not a week goes by without some poor soul wandering over from the tedious, never ending, throw a 55 gallon drum full of dice, WH "games" to sit in with us as we push Roman legions, Wild West gunfighters, 74 gun SOLs, T-34s, or Napoleonic grenadiers around our tables is historical battles that we actually finish.

>They really modernized things while maintaining the general Traveller flavor.

Yup. The CE computer rules are a nice update.

Threadly reminder that (almost) all CE rules are MgT 1e rules, and are, for the most part, at least for personal scale stuff, the same as MgT 2e rules.

>Is religion largely just beneath the scope of Traveller to mention?

No beneath the scope as much as wisely left up to the individual referee. Traveller does mention religions and use religion in a few adventures.

GDW, however, know that one man's view on religion was another man's heresy and yet another man's joke. Accordingly they left it all up to you to do what is best for you and your group.

>dat Empress
What stops high-ranking Imperials from just taking anagathic drugs to stay in power without having to retire?

>What stops high-ranking Imperials from just taking anagathic drugs to stay in power without having to retire?

Supposedly societal and/or cultural pressures. And that's a BIG supposedly. Later versions fiddled with anagathics somewhat dialing back Classic's claims. TNE especially put what acted as a "hard" limit by imposing ever increasing risks for cancers and/or psychiatric damage.

Some of the early emperors, however, had long reigns and even longer lifespans. Like lifespans upwards of 100+ years. Miller at COTI has broached the idea that those long-lived emperors may have been clones of some sort, but that's just speculation and not official - yet.

Nothing, really. Other than cultural acceptance and economic capability.

That being said, the way anagathics are described sort of rustles my jimmies, in that they're kind of a holdover from the idea of the 'impertinence of magic'. Just as a magic castle may crumble when the evil king dies, anagathics are presented first as a method of maintaining cellular senescence, but then also described as having deleterious side effects if one goes off of them (sometimes including rapid onset aging).

The problem is that these two effects simply don't have much backing in reality. A cell doesn't magically 'remember' how old it actually is and immediately revert to it after it's off magic science pills.

If a pill created in an 20 year old individual a biological milieu in which they had 'negligible senescence' in the way of, say, a lobster, then coming off of the pill 30 years later doesn't make him magically 50. He'd still be 20.

>That triple turret with 3 particle beams has THREE separate weapons and thus needs THREE gunners.
That's a special kind of stupid.

>anagathics are presented first as a method of maintaining cellular senescence, but then also described as having deleterious side effects if one goes off of them (sometimes including rapid onset aging).

Which version(s) does that?

In Classic, anagathics simply void aging rolls and, if you stop using them, you pick up at the age where you began them off and not the age you currently are.

MT is more complicated. 1st, anagathics only 'protect" 2 of 3 physical stats. 2nd, you still age a term after beginning them because it takes while for them to take effect. 3rd, when got off them, you face extra aging rolls initially to model stopping the drug regime, but you begin aging from the age where you began.

>That's a special kind of stupid.

While it's straight from Classic, Mayday, and the other PC-focused ship combat rules, there's nothing stopping you from changing it for your game.

Once again, do what you want.

>What's religion like in your Traveller universe? Or if you use the OTU, have any religions been prominent in your games?
In a world, "localized", which means the answer to the second question is "no". The Church of the Stellar Divinity pops up occasionally.

>What stops high-ranking Imperials from just taking anagathic drugs to stay in power without having to retire?
>Supposedly societal and/or cultural pressures.

Specifically, the sitting Emperor or Empress has complete control over an Imperial title. If the Emperor wants Nobles to cycle generationally, then they *will* cycle. They risk being forcibly retired, or having their long-suffering heirs given a title elsewhere resulting in their jealously held title being denied an heir, or any number of other enticements.

> you face extra aging rolls initially to model stopping the drug regime
That's it. Also, MgT has aging shocks when coming off of the drug regime. That may very well replicate the effects of withdrawal from an addictive drug, to be sure, but doesn't really mesh with what is presumably necessary to slow aging (i.e. affect DNA methylation rates, histone wrapping tightness and/or telomerase efficiency in affected cohorts, etc. etc.).

In fact, I find that it's a slightly big jump to think that you'd have to continually be on anagathics to maintain this biological immortality; the necessary changes would be on an epigenetic level and thus would be more or less permanent. You'd take the medication and voila, you're biologically immortal. The idea that you'd have to 'maintain' it is a bit off to me. Certainly you'd still be prone to DNA damage, much as anyone else would be, but that could be treated much more akin to radiation damage than as aging rolls.

>That's it.

But you only face them once and then pick up where you left off. I see it as more of a game balance thing, there's a penalty for stopping, than a some insult to my understanding of the biological and medical sciences.

>>Also, MgT

I don't care what Mongoose does.

>> doesn't really mesh with what is presumably necessary to slow aging

Presumably necessary? You know how to stop aging?

>>The idea that you'd have to 'maintain' it is a bit off to me.

Please. The fact that you have to keep buying anagathics is purely a game balance mechanism. If it were a one time purchase your players would do nothing but work towards the goal and then do fuck all.

You're definitely overthinking this. It is make believe after all.

bump

Has anyone saved Vast Imperium, Bold Travellers from JTAS?

That was from the on-line SJGames version of JTAS, right?

Yeah. It was a conversion to use BESM for Traveller.