Classic vs Mongoose vs 5th ed

[Supplement Four]

Prison Planet was almost nothing BUT guys to be overcome by fight or flummox.
Many of the adventures are kill stuff... Shadows, Werewolf, Marooned, Horde, Chamax Plague, Mission on Mithril... all gave stuff to kill, and random or programmed encounters.

I've never read Prison Planet, so I can't comment (although I do own it). And, I stated above that there are exceptions. There are always exceptions.

But, I can see from your list that you don't "get" what's being said here.

Shadows is pretty damn boring if you run it without adding anything to it. You'll knock it out in a night, and the players won't remember it very fondly. It is designed to be "added to".

The same thing goes for Mission on Mithril, although that one gives you a bit more than Shadows. You could probably run Mithril as written and have a pretty good time. It's one of those discover-as-you-go adventures, all made up with random encounters and events.

It also lends itself to adventure building, though.

Rob was correct in saying that GDW adventures are more like supplements than they are adventures. What they do give the GM and environment in which to run an adventure. The actual adventure is up to the GM.

 

[Supplement Four]

Considering aramis' list, I think it's fair to say there's a mix.

Not as much as one would think.

When's the last time you picked up a GDW adventure that had everything you needed to run the adventure right there in black-n-white.

Heck, at the very least, the GM has to provide the bad guys. NPCs are rarely detailed in these adventures.

Now, compare that to a AD&D style adventure that will almost always give you all the enemies the PCs will fight plus their stats.

But I gotta say, my favorites are the "resource" style adventures like Kinunir and Murder on Arcturus Station.

The GDW adventures were designed for the creative GM who enjoyes tinkering with his universe--the same as the rest of the game.

AD&D brings you a book of weapons. Classic Traveller brings you some basic weapons and then expects you to design your own if you want/need something different.

AD&D provides books of monsters. Classic Traveller gives you an animal design system--the acutal animals are up to the GM.

AD&D adventures will give you all the stats for the NPCs and bad guys. Classic Traveller adventures usually make the GM create the NPCs, equip them, using notes from the module.



AD&D gives you stuff...completed stuff. Just look it up and read about it.

Classic Traveller gives you the tools to design your own stuff. And, this is true of the adventure modules too.

 

[saundby]

Cyberpunk with Traveller was mentioned...

I've run several one-off cyberpunk adventures using CT. I used pretty much a Neuromancer/Count Zero type environment, at the edge between TL9 and A. Cyberspace was there, along with implants, decks, and so on. But the new tech didn't change the game any more than advanced weapons (which were a plot element in one adventure, along with something like the blue force tracking we have now.)

Adding the new tech items was no tougher than adding other new equipment to Traveller. I added risks for using implants for skills, e.g. if you tried to use a standard commercial "How to Garden" crystal it'd give you skill-0 while it's jacked in. If you socketed a crystal for, say Surface Ship Navigation-2, you'd probably be able to interface with it, but when you removed it you'd be taking a chance of losing some natural skill or other. If you plug in a "hot" JoT-5 crystal, you'd be taking a chance at smoking all your skills aside from drooling and needing to use the fresher, and you were unlikely to get the JoT-5. Would -you- stick software d/l'ed off a "l337 hax0r5" site into your head?

You get the idea.

Throw in lots of trade names and tech terms, a bunch of modded weapons, cover everything in a sauce of mistrust and suspense, and you're off.

 

[howardfanatic]

At last! Some one answers my cyberpunk query! Thanks.

 

[Maladominus]

Sheesh. I didn't mean to start a war...

CT the Beatles of RPGs... I'm afraid now. Almost nothing ever could live up to such hype! lol (Beatles are my favorite by no small margin).

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will go back to playing CT!

 

[Supplement Four]

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will go back to playing CT!

If I win the lottery, I'll try to buy Traveller from Marc. It that happens, you'll get your wish. The only version of Traveller available will be CT.

But, we won't call it CT. We'll just call it Traveller.

Think of it...new CT supplements...new CT adventures...new CT ships and design sequences and...well...all sorts of new an juicy items for your CT craving.

 

[howardfanatic]

I got my first CT stuff today: The Games, Alien Modules vol 1, and JTAS vol 1. Looks promising so far. I could have done with more examples on the vehicle design rules.

S4- If you ever do but CT, I would recommend a compiled format. lol

 

[Supplement Four]

S4- If you ever do but CT, I would recommend a compiled format. lol

I would clean it up a bit, but, basically, it would be the same game. I'd release a book on GMing CT, with mucho examples of how to make the game work for you (and an extensive section on the non-structured task system).

I'd release a lot of adventures, too. Some of them like GDW's old adventures, and some of them complete-GM-read-n-go kind of things.

I'd even focus on different types of games with different numbers of players, from 1 player up to several. Prolly even some solo stuff.

 

[howardfanatic]

It needs more examples.

 

[Supplement Four]

It needs more examples.

Well, you're in the right place, howard. Nobody knows Classic Traveller better than the people on this board.

What do you need help with?

 

[Rev Round]

D20 is a very bad drug. Just say no.

 

[saundby]

At last! Some one answers my cyberpunk query! Thanks.

Glad to. Traveller does it all.

What made it easier for me when I was running these was that I was coding and building for a cyberpunk CircleMUD game. I re-used a bunch of the sets and characters from that. Conversely, I used Traveller-style character generation to flesh out the MUD characters before committing them to code, and brought ideas from the gaming sessions back into the MUD.

Like Call of Cthulhu, much of cyberpunk is atmosphere. I had games where the cyber was just window dressing, it was never used. Dystopian punk pretty well did the job. In other sessions, the cyber was ubiquitous. But the key was still how the characters interacted with it.

Not much different from an adventure using a melange of Admin, Streetwise, Comms and Computers to hack some of the 3I's big iron.

 

[howardfanatic]

I agree with punk being all about the atmosphere. Given that Orwell is arguably my favorite sci fi author (1984 is the most important novel of the 20/21st century), and pretty nasty punk streak is in all my sci fi. I wanted to know how Traveller handled the tech. It seemed so ridiculous in the 70's and 80's, to be so very close to reality now.
I love science fiction.

 

[saundby]

I agree with punk being all about the atmosphere. Given that Orwell is arguably my favorite sci fi author (1984 is the most important novel of the 20/21st century), and pretty nasty punk streak is in all my sci fi. I wanted to know how Traveller handled the tech. It seemed so ridiculous in the 70's and 80's, to be so very close to reality now.
I love science fiction.

The tech wasn't a problem. A lot of the areas where there would be potential conflicts (e.g. spacecraft) just weren't close enough to the characters to be an issue. The world was divided heavily into a few rich and a lotta poor, there was spaceflight but your average character had about as much access to it as you and I have a chance of a trip to the ISS. Even flight was largely inaccessible--the hoi polloi fly, peons do not. An adventure might involve hijacking a light airplane, or meeting Mr. Big in the lounge of his corporate dirigible, but other than that it'd usually be easier to go through the gates of the bullet train with a spoofed ticket or stow away on a hydrofoil with the freight.

All character backgrounds aside from the obvious ones were presumed to come from corporate backgrounds. If the character left their corporation other than by means arranged by the corporation, they were already criminals. Theft of training, skills, and corporate IP, of course. You own nothing, not even your thoughts or knowledge, when you get your employment contract.

I still had most corporate computers as big iron. Why decentralize computing resources in such an environment? But the human enhancement tech of implants was there, and implant comms tech. In game terms the comms wasn't much different than, say, communicators. I've described the skills implants already.

There was also the junk tech of the underground. Bit and pieces strapped together and operated by skill rolls and good fortune. Imagine a system built out of C-64s and 286's recovered from an illegally mined landfill with a homebrew interface to a stolen untested lab fab biochip and you get the idea. The capabilities may be amazing in that chip, but how do you get at them?

Since I was doing these as short term "throwaway" games to be filler when our regular CoC ref wanted to be spelled I didn't have to be too rigorous in setting up the game's systems. This actually had a good effect on the pacing of the games and driving the action. If a game didn't finish tonight, it might never be finished, so there was more focus on the plot than on working the system to get advantages to characters that would last a year or more in a regular campaign.