Traveller General: A day late and a credit short edition

New stuff up in the Library Archives this week:

MGT2:
Referee's Briefing 1-4
Spinward Marches Map
High Guard Deployment Shuttle
Pirates of Drinax Theev Cluster

MGT1 Sheets:
Mongoose Traveller - Character Sheet.jpg

MGT1 Settings/Twilight Sector:
A new smaller scan of Into the Star

MGT1 Third Party/Worlds and Adventure:
Foreven Worlds: Prelude to War, Player's Guide
Castroblanca: City of Aliens

>>50748349
This game is so fucking cool & I have no idea how anybody plays it.

This is the raddest. I wish i knew people who were interested in scifi so i could play.

Not seeing the new MGT2 stuff in the Library yet. Definitely interested in checking out Referee's Briefing #3, if anyone has it available.

>>50748880

That's weird, I don't see them either. It looks like Mega is being screwy, because it ate them.

I'll upload them again, and from now on I'll have to be careful to check when I use Mega's move files function, because those were already uploaded when I filed them, and now they're gone.

>group likes scifi
>they are lazy/distracted as all fuck
Rules Lite/Pick up and play has ruined them.

>>50748972
Looks good now, thanks. Really appreciate it.

You know, next time there's a Friendly Virtual Gaming thread up, I think I'll try to talk to the Battlebox 3D dev and pick his brain about doing some Snapshot counters and maps for his program.
Then maybe we can do some pickup games of Snapshot.

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Being a new player which MGT1 sheets are needed for a full character?

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>>50751939
It's funny cause its true
>Looks like we're spending the weekend here
>okay let's topple the government

>>50753626

Good question. I haven't played much MGT1, but if somebody can suggest which character sheet is the best, I can move it into the main folder of the archive and leave the subpar ones filed under Sheets.

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What are the strengths and weaknesses of this system? I'm considering using it if I can find enough of the books.

>>50758062
Strenghts:

-Qucik and fun character generation, best with the whole group.
-Fast paced immersive combat
-Solid space ship rules
-Easy to learn, without sacrificing mechanical depth
-Great character balance

Weaknesses
-"leveling" might be kind of slow
-The editing of MTraveller 1.0 is messy
-the gear's technology level value shows that it was written before 2000.
-Trading rules are easily broken by characters with high social standing.

>>50758516
*Strengths

>>50748349
is there anything worth salvaging from T5?

>>50748349
This will be a shitty but very Traveller question.

Lets say you have a world that the population dies off due to a plague (Lets call it a designed plague so its 100% death), and now you have groups racing off to loot all that is on that world. (Think Markab race from Babylon 5.), how much crap would be on this planet as I am trying to figure out how many mega corps would be joining in the looting.

>>50764536
If it has a space port run by the imperium, they will get first dibs if someone does not beat them there.

Now, you would need to determine size of planet and tech level and how close it is to a decent trade route.

If they have tech that does not need upkeep or has massive banks of resources like a mining colony then you could loot quite a bit of stuff. You will have to decide if any of the stuff contaminated and what was used while the population was dying.

On worlds like garden, high tech and the like they would be set upon almost immediately by a government or business interest. You could probably get there in time to run an operation that could skim either a shit ton of cheap stuff or one or two major ticket items like reactors or ship components.

>>50764725
I was thinking of a world that made into a amber zone but smugglers (IE players) are willing to risk the planet to grab all the loot. That, or the planet automated defense systems are left on so its smaller ships running the gauntlet.

>>50764820
Then you could draw a settlement with something in it that players are hired by a patron wants it or they have heard of something there.

Say, they had a source tell them a refining facility on planet sent its mcguffin compound there and if they can get it before another group, payday. Along the way they can risk looting other tech or secure the facility for some time for more time to loot.

>>50758062
Strengths:
— Super rad

Weaknesses:
— Way too fucking complex

>>50765008
>Way too fucking complex

Try Starter Traveller?

>>50765045
>>50765008
Or graduating middle school.

>>50765045
What's that?

>>50765066
lol

Don't get me wrong, I think Traveller's awesome. But it's the only game I've ever run where I had to have multiple spreadsheets open on my computer to stay organized.

If I'd grown up with it like I grew up with D&D, that complexity wouldn't be an issue. But these days I feel hard-pressed to justify the learning curve to run it, much less teach it to a bunch of players who aren't great with mechanics at the same time.

If I could figure out how to make it much easier on myself, I'd love to try my hand at running Traveller again.

>>50765128
The reason why you feel it has a learning curve or it is time consumingly complicated is because you learned to do less.

>>50765128
I found Gurps to be more complex then Traveller.

>>50765180
I never even bothered with GURPS after skimming the rulebook, so you could be right.

>>50765159
I know, man. I literally said that myself:
>If I'd grown up with it like I grew up with D&D, that complexity wouldn't be an issue.

I can still remember obscure rules from D&D I probably never used, just 'cause I got the books while I was in middle school and got to spend so much time with them. If I had the same relationship with Traveller, it'd be a piece of cake to run.

But since that's not the case, yeah, there is a lot to pick up. Traveller's a cool game, but you certainly can't claim it's an intuitive one. The basic mechanics are fairly straightforward, but there are so many modifiers and sub-systems that it takes a lot of effort to keep it all straight.

If someone's willing to make that investment of effort, more power to them. But at the time I ran Traveller, with the group I was running for, the payoff didn't seem worth it.

>>50766245
From what little I've played of Traveller, the only hard part is figuring out how much money you need to keep the ship flying, and how much cargo / people you'd have to move per month to make that number add up.

Smart GM's will always have this number be "less than you want" so you have to go on wacky adventures for shady patrons.

>>50766294
I think the main point of complexity for me was trying to handle the details off all the planets the players would be visiting. I had spreadsheets with notes on the universal world profile (or whatever it's called) for each of the planets in the sector, so I could accurately figure out trade costs and whatnot. It was way too much to keep straight in my head.

Other than that, I had some difficulty running space combat because it involved quite a few specific mechanics that don't come up anywhere else, and I wasn't intimately familiar enough with spaceship stats to be able to judge at a glance how effective a given ship might be in combat. Even when it ran smoothly, I felt hard-pressed to make it interesting for the whole group.

Ultimately, though?

I think the biggest issue when I ran it was player engagement. Traveller requires so much effort to run well that you want a decent payoff to justify that effort. But I didn't have a group at the time that COULD justify it.

I could run something like FATE or Dungeon World for them because the level of GM investment in those games is fairly low. But when you put in the work to set up a Traveller campaign, and it doesn't quite come together at the table? That feels like a lot of wasted effort.

I'd still be down to tackle the complexity of Traveller some day, but I'd need the right group for it, I guess.

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>>50766558
What other sci-fi system that is similar in feel to Traveller would you recommend for a "simpler" group? I'm just not confident enough that my players will stick with the complexity that you have mentioned, so that is why I ask for alternatives.

>>50766558
The scope of a possible Traveller game should be set out from the start. The game is designed to use your own home brew universe, and the amount of stuff for the 3rd Imperium is daunting. My advice is to either limit yourself to a subsector to start with, or make a small solar system yourself and keep things contained there. After all, you can always make the universe bigger, but it is very hard to make it smaller.

>>50766558
The problem with the planets codes can usually be avoided with the fact that in 9/10 times the players won't even need to leave the spaceport. Those things are usually small towns or even huge cities on the richest worlds and then they will have an "up" port, a space station which works together with the people at planet-side.

Player engagement is the trickier one of those two. But by experience there are a few "styles" which are more engaging than others. One would be to run a few adventures as members of a standing army and let them play as freelancing mercenary later. Since they start to bond with the faction they worked for (or start to hate it, depending on how you run it) and will more willingly engage with it and give them a standing to the factions in the world.

Another thing that worked well for me was giving the PC's a fief to manage. There us almost always a Noble PC or as an reward for doing something heroic. The book "merchant prince" (or something like that) has rules for running your own company and some of my players had a really good time by making their piece of border world land grow and prosper.

>>50768901
Those are excellent ideas.
Thanks!

>>50766906
Traveller is complex? Seriously? It is a D6 system.

You could go with star frontiers

>>50773241

Well, it has a fair number of subsystems, and there's a lot of prep for the DM to do.

>>50768901
>>50771782
Also soures for inspirations are shows like captain harlock, gundam I.B.O., Firefly, the expanse, cowboy bebop and obviously staw wars and star trek are good sources.

Also steal what you can, doesn't matter where you steal from, only where you take it to.

Do any of the editions have guidelines for making weapons at TLs higher than what's listed? Specifically, I'm looking at the melee weapons in Mongoose Traveller and while I understand why your swords and maces have such a low TL for being "primitive" weapons, it feels like anyone who'd be a Traveller AND carry a melee weapon around constantly would probably have one made with higher-grade metals than some planet stuck in the medieval times.

I don't necessarily need fancy lightsabers or vibroblades, but you'd think some weapons manufacturers out there would have perfected a broadsword so it retains its power (or improves upon it) without it being like 8 kg to heft around.