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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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Panzeh posted: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.
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Feb 15, 2022 15:19
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T5 leans really hard into the (essentially endless) crunch you can find when you want to simulate a space game with really fine granularity. There are pages and pages and pages of tables that don't (imo) add anything to the experience. It creates systems where they really aren't needed. If you compare the direction it went from earlier editions vs that taken by Mongoose, for instance, T5 takes you deep down a simulationist rabbit hole while Mongoose (while not without its flaws) does a pretty decent job of painting the world with a broad brush and letting random rolls fill in the details.
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Feb 16, 2022 06:09
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So I'm likely going to be running Traveller for the next several years with a player group that is half in their 30s and caught the d&d bug in 5e's ascension and half in their 50s who played the OG Traveller in high school. We've been playing 13th Age for the last 3 years (Stone Thief campaign) as a compromise between old school dungeon crawling, 5e whatever, and my own preferences for "lets just play Death School or Lasers and Feelings." So the obvious next step is to jump to the Pirates of Drinax campaign in Mongoose 2E. This is all in roll20 where the character sheets frankly loving suck so I'll fix that up... Is there anything else to watch out for with this weird mix of a group?
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Feb 16, 2022 06:28
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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. That’s a pretty tough image to let go of as a player and a GM and I imagine your players might have a similar memory of the game. However you want to run Drinax, you need to be clear up front to them if you are running a spreadsheets-in-space campaign or Buck Rogers. E: the spiffy T5 book is sitting on my shelf, unplayed. I have a huge boner for all things Traveller and speak with Marc Miller in person from time to time as a Big Fan. so I’m curious to hear more about the unplayability of T5. I would think the charty-ness of the book would appeal to the turbo nerd who enjoys the hard sci-fi genre. But it sounds like they took it too far? Agrikk fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Feb 16, 2022 |
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Feb 16, 2022 07:05
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fosborb posted:So I'm likely going to be running Traveller for the next several years with a player group that is half in their 30s and caught the d&d bug in 5e's ascension and half in their 50s who played the OG Traveller in high school. Make your Party Together, going round the "table" doing one term at a time. I can't stress this strongly enough. It's loving hilarious, but also really helps people get into the system, establish connections and work out their shared backstory. also there is nothing funnier than everyone watching someone try to make a hardened space marine and end up with some kind of one-legged interstellar sous chef. luckily there is a clever 'package' idea that lets everyone be a little competent, and a big part of the game is recruiting pirates (there's a pirate name generator that also provides Dark Secrets from their Past!) so if they die you have replacements on tap. every mission comes with a bunch of great adventure hooks, there's basically one for each planet in the Trojan Reach, these can become extremely involved if you let them: i support this 1000%. i found space combat a little confusing so make sure you have read the rules carefully; your players can start the game with an absolute shitkicker of a vessel, so lean heavily on threatening and blustering ships into surrender rather than loads of space brawls until you get the hang. honour among thieves and treasure ship are both outstanding, after that I'd pick and choose the order you want to do stuff; there are a couple of the ten missions that involve loads of chasing people from star to star which i'm not sure I'd have run that way if we had got that far in our own campaign. Exciting, I hope your guys dig it! e: ^^ 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 also you're going to be using this link a lot: https://travellermap.com/?p=-93.346!15.848!8.3
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Feb 16, 2022 07:16
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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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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.
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Feb 16, 2022 15:58
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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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2e is just a refinement, you should be fine. They added a sort of advantage mechanic, that's the only big change I noticed.
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Feb 16, 2022 19:23
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Awesome! Thanks!
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Feb 16, 2022 19:29
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12 lbs of Traveller arrived today  this poo poo is already incredible  4' of sector map lol e: holy poo poo these Pirate books are beautiful. all 3 have a metallic finish that's going to be impossible to capture on a lovely phone camera, but wow fosborb fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Mar 15, 2022 |
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Mar 15, 2022 03:51
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That looks amazing! Say what you might about Traveller, the current product quality is top notch and looks great on a bookshelf. Which is where all mine go because we don’t play Traveller anymore since our last campaign ended but I can’t not buy the new stuff as it comes out.
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Mar 15, 2022 06:40
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I'm about to run an episodic Traveller (Mongoose 2nd edition) game for one of my groups when the regular GM is unable to run. I have a lot of experience with MongTrav 1e, and I generally like the system, but I remember having all sorts of problems with the supplements. Central Supply Catalogue had a particularly pernicious version of the "these guns are bad, use the good gun" problem for fighting characters, the various career books were wildly varying in quality, etc. So, beyond the core book, what's particularly good to pick up for MongTrav 2e? I tend not to bother with the 3rd Imperium as a setting, mostly just taking its rough shape and procedural generators instead, so I'm probably not looking at any of the setting-specific books, but are there gems out there that I'm missing, or anything that's just too useful not to have on hand?
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Mar 16, 2022 23:09
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Pirates of drinks is great, central supply catalog was ok I thought, armor is very powerful but a lot of places you can't wear much because its gated by law level.
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Mar 16, 2022 23:47
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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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sebmojo posted:Pirates of drinks My favorite booze distributor! Just don't ask how they maintain these low, low prices.
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Mar 17, 2022 14:27
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Absurd Alhazred posted:My favorite booze distributor! Just don't ask how they maintain these low, low prices. It doubles as a completely valid and playable side quest for the campaign 
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Mar 17, 2022 20:36
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i emailed my group that I was going to pitch running Pirates and this was one of their responses lol i'm so hosed
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Mar 18, 2022 03:02
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fosborb posted:i emailed my group that I was going to pitch running Pirates and this was one of their responses You know you're going to have at least one super engaged player. That's a hell of a bonus.
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Mar 18, 2022 03:31
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EverettLO posted:You know you're going to have at least one super engaged player. That's a hell of a bonus. i'm not running Traveller unless i have a Spreadsheet Artist among the players, tbh
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Mar 18, 2022 03:39
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fosborb posted:i'm not running Traveller unless i have a Spreadsheet Artist among the players, tbh Oh gently caress yes that's crucial. Also get someone to really grok space combat. https://www.humblebundle.com/books/...tm_medium=email P sweet humble bundle rn
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Mar 18, 2022 06:09
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Anyone looked at this yet? https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/391143 Anything good, or should I just swipe from SWN if I wanted more universe creation tables and ideas?
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Mar 23, 2022 17:32
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fosborb posted:i'm not running Traveller unless i have a Spreadsheet Artist among the players, tbh For my current MGT2E game I made a nine-tab accounting sheet for the ship/crew/jobs/cargo/etc that does a lot of autocalculation and formula work. It was extremely fun. I think there's something wrong with me.
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Mar 23, 2022 18:11
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Rip_Van_Winkle posted:For my current MGT2E game I made a nine-tab accounting sheet for the ship/crew/jobs/cargo/etc that does a lot of autocalculation and formula work. It was extremely fun. I think there's something wrong with me.
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Mar 23, 2022 19:13
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Rip_Van_Winkle posted:For my current MGT2E game I made a nine-tab accounting sheet for the ship/crew/jobs/cargo/etc that does a lot of autocalculation and formula work. It was extremely fun. I think there's something wrong with me. Would you mind sharing that?
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Mar 23, 2022 19:40
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sebmojo posted:Oh gently caress yes that's crucial. Also get someone to really grok space combat. Cool stuff here, but the CT PDFs I've looked at so far appear to have been scanned at very low resolution and then run through some low quality jpeg compression a few times. Readable, but a bit unpleasant to look at.
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Mar 23, 2022 20:25
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sebmojo posted:Would you mind sharing that? Sure, here it is. If anyone would appreciate it, this thread would. It's a little janky in places, and I don't think I finished making sure calculation cells have formatting last time I checked. It started as just a sheet to track our cargo and I just slowly tacked on features from there. I work on it in downtime during the game so some things aren't functional right now (the cargo space automation, for one, isn't working) and I think I might have broken some of the bookkeeping formulas? I know the cargo space calculations have never worked quite right because there's no easy way to make a single type of cargo "overflow" into concealed space. That kind of thing. It's been a bit. Our group does one arc in our GURPS game, then one in Traveller. We're mid-GURPS right now but I'll be cleaning it up and refining it again when we pick back up. It's just a nice little project. Rip_Van_Winkle fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Mar 24, 2022 |
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Mar 24, 2022 02:18
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LaSquida posted:Anyone looked at this yet? I bought this because I was curious and I'm bad with money. So far, I've only skimmed it, but first impressions are that it's quite expensive for what it is, but there could be useful info in there. The actual book content is only like 60 pages if you exclude the maps and charts and such, and it's (IIRC) the same price as the full Highguard pdf. There's some restating of the generation rules in the core rulebook and ideas for tweaking them. It's got some ideas on creating a sector as a coherent whole rather than the random assortment of planets you get if you just generate a whole bunch of planets using the core rules. There's some information about translating the system profile into what it could mean for the biology and society of the planets. All in all, I'll probably use the info, but it should be much cheaper.
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Mar 24, 2022 02:27
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Rip_Van_Winkle posted:Sure, here it is. If anyone would appreciate it, this thread would. that's great!
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Mar 24, 2022 04:03
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Rip_Van_Winkle posted:Sure, here it is. If anyone would appreciate it, this thread would. this is amazing, thank you. lolling at the analytics tab and so are the players.
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Mar 25, 2022 01:23
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Hey was the Explorer's Edition always due for physical release in July, or did Mongoose just quietly update their release schedule page? 
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Apr 2, 2022 14:28
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Lmao well now it's due out in September. Rip in piss, global shipping.
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Jul 28, 2022 13:17
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we finally got to our first session of character creation! will need another session to actually wrap it up. after 2.5 hours we got through 3 terms (12 years), and lots of scene setting about Pirates of Drinax and where the players are taking their characters to meet in the middle at the beginning of the actual campaign We went with 3d6 keep 2 highest for the characteristic rolls. they definitely have very good stats out of that, but I think that's okay. The group isn't really in the mood to roll lots of mod 0s for every stat, and the keep highest rule from the Traveller companion book helps with that. Not super heroes, but also much more able to stay within their careers, if they want to The roll20 character sheet is kind of poo poo, tbh, but I think it will work okay for our group once they get used to it. Spoiled by the 13th Age roll20 dev supported character sheet, I think. Everyone else in the group legitimately bought at least the PDF copy of the rules. I'm super impressed, but definitely going to set up affiliate links ahead of the next campaign
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Oct 25, 2022 04:51
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Exciting! And yeah high stats are not a big deal at all, they will still die like flies. The pirate generator table is great for making replacements.
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Oct 25, 2022 04:59
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Are you doing the standard opening? The ten chapter campaign is p huge, we had a bunch of side questing and only every made it to chapter 3 after a couple of years...
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Oct 25, 2022 05:04
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sebmojo posted:Are you doing the standard opening? The ten chapter campaign is p huge, we had a bunch of side questing and only every made it to chapter 3 after a couple of years... yep! Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan fans forever. our Stone Thief campaign in 13th Age hit every floor but the Flesh Tailor and Dungeon Town. we're going to see just how much content there is here in the Trojan Reach.... one of the players spent an inordinate amount of time at the Pelgrane booth at gencon this year, so I feel like it's my responsibility that we at least get to the imperial train heist chapter in our own campaign, to make up for that awkwardness. I know Pelgrane isn't Mongoose, but still..... the character gen system is truly special. I ran it with my 10 year old this weekend to practice and his character got into psionics at Uni but didn't graduate, drifted as a belter for 12 years, had a break up with a lover so bad he made a life long rival, before finally joining the merchant marines, gaining an unexpectedly influential friend, and mustering out with a pretty drat good cargo ship. the parallels to my own life will remain blissfully unexamined until he is at least 22 (2nd term) irl
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Oct 25, 2022 06:38
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Treasure ship is an incredible adventure. So, so good.
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Oct 25, 2022 08:33
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In a few weeks after a long hiatus from Traveller. I am going to introduce my playgroup to the game. Already bought Secrets of the Ancients.
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Nov 7, 2022 14:51
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Famous for the phrase "Chekhov's FGMP"
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Nov 7, 2022 20:09
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