Quote from: Imperator;531697Awesome. Anyway I will bring kleenex to the game so the tears won't drown me.

You have to understand them, they just came out of a 34 - session 7Th Sea
campaign and they're used to getting XP and regularly gaining dots in stuff

The GURPS: TRAVELLER campaign I ran went to over 50 sessions. Sincer it was using GURPS mechanics the players earned Character Points ("XP") with every game session.

It was still the mostly regular Third Imperium universe that I was running.


- Ed C.

A lot of players who are used to D&D, and other games with starting characters who are young, don't realize that not all games do the same thing. Some games, like Traveller are designed with the concept of starting characters who are Professional Adults, instead of Youths just out of Training like D&D. Therefore those games don't have a rapid XP/Training cycle.

Explain to your players that their characters are already skilled, professional Adults...


...or just tell them that stop whining!

Remind them that a medical doctor that specializes in surgery has Medical III.  It takes at least two years to gain 1 skill level.  Traveller just isn’t D&D or one of its direct children.  One could run a Traveller campaign over greater periods of time like Pendragon or Ars Magica, if they feel skill advancement is the main focus.  This could be done for a scientific research group, a group controling a government or a large corporation , with scenarios that are set to span decades.  However, that isn’t the main focus of Traveller.

Quote from: Imperator;531697Another Trav question!

Am I a bloody heathen if I ever consider running MegaTraveller? Which are the differences between CT and MT? My only contact with MT was through an old videogame called MT: The Zhodani Conspiracy a million years ago. Can I find useful things in MT to mine for CT? Am I dumb?

Go for it. Yes, the experience system and the task system were solid; the massive amounts of errata weren't so great. Also, things actually happened in the MegaTraveller background. There was a war on, there were great causes to fight for, heinous villains to fight, huge space battles, plot twists galore (Strephon wasn't really dead...) and the PCs made a difference.

And if anyone tries to tell you that you're running the "wrong" version of Traveller, tell them to shove it. We've been listening to that argument for 25 years already (MT came out in '87); enough is enough.

Quote from: jibbajibba;531675ii) Combat skills get up to 3 or 4 very fast and thern sucess is really easy so you have a feedback.... so we restricted increases to per combat (rather than per sucess) and that kind of fixed it.

In real life combat is very dangerous. In real life if you don't get really good at combat really quickly you die sooner rather than later.  That and most 'combat skills' are actually pretty easy to learn/do... its just so hard to practice them in realistic circumstances (IE combat) without dying that makes them seem harder.

RPGs give us the idea that you can realistically go into life or death circumstances every other day with only a minimum amount of training and thrive, taking years to learn which end of the gun the bullets come out of.

Just sayin'.

Quote from: Xavier Onassiss;531870Go for it. Yes, the experience system and the task system were solid; the massive amounts of errata weren't so great. Also, things actually happened in the MegaTraveller background. There was a war on, there were great causes to fight for, heinous villains to fight, huge space battles, plot twists galore (Strephon wasn't really dead...) and the PCs made a difference.

And if anyone tries to tell you that you're running the "wrong" version of Traveller, tell them to shove it. We've been listening to that argument for 25 years already (MT came out in '87); enough is enough.

Well, at least I can peruse the books looking for ideas to mine. It seems that we will be playing the OTU borrowing plenty of elements from other sources, and anyway, I'm totally into getting stuff and ideas from everywhere, so there.

Quote from: greylond;531767A lot of players who are used to D&D, and other games with starting characters who are young, don't realize that not all games do the same thing. Some games, like Traveller are designed with the concept of starting characters who are Professional Adults, instead of Youths just out of Training like D&D. Therefore those games don't have a rapid XP/Training cycle.

Explain to your players that their characters are already skilled, professional Adults...


...or just tell them that stop whining!

Being 17 and having to start out with a character that was 50.  I thought he would die at any moment from being just so dam old.

Quote from: Imperator;531880Well, at least I can peruse the books looking for ideas to mine. It seems that we will be playing the OTU borrowing plenty of elements from other sources, and anyway, I'm totally into getting stuff and ideas from everywhere, so there.

Also check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_(role-playing_game) for comparisons of the task systems used.

A good task system document one can use across editions is the one by BITS.  It helps with conversion between systems too.

The document in pdf direct from BITS

Quote from: Spike;531874In real life combat is very dangerous. In real life if you don't get really good at combat really quickly you die sooner rather than later.  That and most 'combat skills' are actually pretty easy to learn/do... its just so hard to practice them in realistic circumstances (IE combat) without dying that makes them seem harder.

RPGs give us the idea that you can realistically go into life or death circumstances every other day with only a minimum amount of training and thrive, taking years to learn which end of the gun the bullets come out of.

Just sayin'.

I agree with you.

If you look at how that experience model actually works you need to be in and survive 12 firefights to get a chance to put your skill up 1 point.
If you have ever played in Traveller and been in a firefight you will see how unlikely a situation that actually is

One of my traveller gripes is that on a high tech say E or F world I can't get un-aged. I would expect to be able to visit a clinic and walk out looking and feling like a 25 year old. One of Traveller's features is that the tech items feel like they come from 1975 extrapolated to 2975
Still a fun game but quite amusing compared to say reading an Iain M Bankes novel.

Quote from: jibbajibba;531908I agree with you.

If you look at how that experience model actually works you need to be in and survive 12 firefights to get a chance to put your skill up 1 point.
If you have ever played in Traveller and been in a firefight you will see how unlikely a situation that actually is

One of my traveller gripes is that on a high tech say E or F world I can't get un-aged. I would expect to be able to visit a clinic and walk out looking and feling like a 25 year old. One of Traveller's features is that the tech items feel like they come from 1975 extrapolated to 2975
Still a fun game but quite amusing compared to say reading an Iain M Bankes novel.

If you agree then why have you made it so hard to level up those skills?  I doubt you could find many professional soldiers (through the history of firearms even) who survived twelve firefights.... much less the 24 or 36 that they would conceivably need to be considered experts under your system. *

I think the answer is that in RPG terms those skills have a high utility, which makes them disproportionately valuable.




*out of curiousity I looked up Lord Nelson given that Naval battles are much easier to track that the occasionally amorphous nature of land battles. By my count (wiki) he only fought in nine battles, dying in the last.  Presumptively, there may be subdivisions and skirmishes that my admittedly sketchy overview.  By your count he would not have been able to advance even one skill point based on combat experience in his entire career.

Full age countering has been around since Traveller's first release in book 2.  

"Anagathics are drugs which counteract the aging process. A regimen of regular monthly doses enables an individual to ignore the aging die throws and their potential for debilitation. Because of the rarity and demand for anagathics, they are quite expensive, and are often unavailable at any price."

Complete counteraction of aging is available at tech 15, which means lesser forms of age countering are available at lower tech levels.  The rarity comment in the description is just a bit of campaign advice.

The other thing that is often mentioned as dated are the computer rules for starships, but I have always felt that the majority of the effort needed to achieve jump drive and the high energy aspects of starships were provided by incredibly advanced computers with applications far beyond such a term could be used in our understanding today.  So, the operations a computer must perform are called simply programs, but it is just a term used as a placeholder for some future incredible synthesis of engineering and science, which is why computers require so much power and why computers and programs in computers require so much space.

Combat skill level in Traveller is a measure of how close the character is to their peak of effectiveness, which is a combination of training and experience.  A combat skill III is nearing the very peak of capability of a veteran in his ideal level of physical and mental conditioning.  It is an abstraction of effectiveness not simply a scale of marksmanship or other narrow aspect.  A character with skill level III in an academic skill has a PhD.  Skill level I is a lot in of itself.  Traveller is a game of small stacked modifiers using 2d6 for resolution.  Also, recall that Tactics and Leader are separate skills from the weapon expertise skills.

All of this pertains to Marc's three books, rather than the alternative rules in the later books or other editions.

Quote from: Spike;531910If you agree then why have you made it so hard to level up those skills?  I doubt you could find many professional soldiers (through the history of firearms even) who survived twelve firefights.... much less the 24 or 36 that they would conceivably need to be considered experts under your system. *

I think the answer is that in RPG terms those skills have a high utility, which makes them disproportionately valuable.




*out of curiousity I looked up Lord Nelson given that Naval battles are much easier to track that the occasionally amorphous nature of land battles. By my count (wiki) he only fought in nine battles, dying in the last.  Presumptively, there may be subdivisions and skirmishes that my admittedly sketchy overview.  By your count he would not have been able to advance even one skill point based on combat experience in his entire career.

Because in RPGs combats are far more common than in real life. So over a 6 month campaign I would expect PCs to be in 20 - 30 combats, but Traveller is still a system where,as has been said, rank 3 in a skill is really a genuine master of it and should be rare

I'm still wondering if the players notice the game uses 2d6.  That would help explain the seemingly low numbers used for skill levels.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;531920I'm still wondering if the players notice the game uses 2d6.  That would help explain the seemingly low numbers used for skill levels.

Ya, the players will appreciate their characters' skills as they are written in game.  This talk of Traveller will make me work on a new Traveller campaign during the next few days, which is cool.  When I mentioned the aging curatives jibbajibba, I was clarifying a bit that you must have meant or had slipped your mind.