Biggest GMing Mistake

[Ben W Bell]

What was the biggest mistake you've made while GMing Traveller? I mean error not playing with people you shouldn't have.

I ran The Pirates of Tetrini from a Traveller's Digest once. I did a copy of the map and then an editted copy. I proudly laid it down in front of the players and asked them what they were doing next.

One player suddenly announced "We'll go to the Secret Pirate Hanger" and pointing to the map.

Doh!!! Wrong map.

 

[TheColonel]

One time I was running a Traveller game with a group of pirates. They ended up on a low grav/low tech world. They had a few "tons" of high tech swords in their hold from a pervious raid. To make money they sold these very good, very sharp swords to the locals. The planet was resource rich so the the currency was precious metals like silver, gold, and platinum. I determinded the swords would sell for about 50 (long time ago) pieces of silver. The silver coins weighing about 10 grams each. One player then spouts up asking how much would they weigh in a 1G enviroment. Being so impressed that he thought of that before I did I had to say "Well, I guess 10 times more!" The player just increased the profit margin by 10!

 

[Liam Devlin]

Error Number 00001:
"Starting to GM after reading the books overnight, & having played three times."
--Needless to say, I learned Gming isn't as easy as it looks.

Error No. 00112:
"Sending High Gravity world PCs to Low grav world (superman ring a bell?), trashed the local Pirates in a bar fight so bad, none were able to man their ship (way below even a skeleton crew for a Nishemani). Police (bought off by Pirates) didn't last long either.

Error 01124:
"Allowing PC's to "upgrade drives" to M4.
Outran everything but the friggin Navy, and they behaved when they were about(durnnit!).

 

[Shadowdancer]

I made lots of mistakes when I first started, but the biggest was not thorougly reading the trading rules for speculative cargoes. In the books, it says to roll once to see what cargo, if any, is available. I thought all of the cargoes listed were available on every planet. So naturally the PCs would pick the cargoes with the best modifiers based on the world they were on and where they were going next. They made a ton of money in a very short time loading up their cargo holds with min/maxed speculative cargoes.

Also, in hindsight, allowing them to find black, non-sensor and radar reflective paint for their ship on the black market also was probably a bad move. They said they wanted it to help them avoid pirates. Trouble was, it made them invisible to the authorities as well. Which came in handy when they turned to smuggling. Good thing that ship "accidentally" stumbled into an "unmarked" mine field in which the mines were also painted with a black, non-sensor and radar reflective paint.

 

[Liam Devlin]

Paraquat, those for me were mistakes 00022 (Merchant tables -open ended -egad, was I mad or what?)
and error 00180, (radar black reflective paint)! Doh!