Do you play TNE straight?

[gcbright]

Hi,

I play with a group that is normally very serious in gaming. But when we play TNE, we get into humor.

In our TNE games, we try for a mix of Star Viking types, regress world characters, and a few cold sleepers from better times.

When we start a game, each character gives a short tag to describe themselves.

Examples:

My character is as handsome as he is stupid.
My character is as much a schemer as he is a coward.
My character isn't very smart, but he's a giant in the bedroom.

The regress world characters provide the humor.

Example, a regress world character ends up in the bed chambers of the evil overlord (female) with a cold sleeper character. While searching the room for intel, the regress world character finds an odd vibrating device under the pillow on the bed. Before the cold sleeper can tell him what it is, the evil overlordress is returning to her chambers.

The cold sleeper hides under the bed, while the regress character hides behind the door with what he believes to be a vibro weapon (since he read the great book ama world by gax,

When the overlordress enters, the regress character puts the vibro device to her neck and proclaims, that he is here to give her what she deserves.

Needless to say they end up havng rough sex on the bed the other character is hiding under.

And it just keeps rolling like that thru all our TNE games. We take all the other Traveller settings serious, but with TNE we go the route of mythadventures on acid.

Thanks

 

[epicenter00]

I can certainly see how the silly artwork in TNE would lead to the game being a farce (an entertaining farce, but still a farce) - those bad Flash Gordon RCES bodysleeves really are too much. It doesn't really help that Nilsen always seemed to be so condescending towards the reader in much of his writing in TNE (I've never been able to shake the feeling he was smirking the entire time thinking "Man, these nerds without a life will buy anything with the Traveller name on it, let's see if this buy this "Santa Claus" goodness, I'm so clever...") and now that the early 90s are long over (thank God), his writing and a lot of his references are also laughably dated.*

It's often been a joke amongst my players we'd all one day make party of blond beefcake characters named things from that one MST3K episode like "Dirk Hardpec", "Bolt Vanderhuge", "Punch Rockgroin", and of course "Big McLargehuge" and play TNE the way it was "meant" to be played.

But we never have - I just found a lot of the basic elements of TNE to have the potential to make a much more urgent and darker game of Traveller, which is how I've played it, through successive background revisions and tweaks to the original TNE universe. Right now, the RCES doesn't even exist because Vampire Fleets have overrun the RC and are right now scourging the Hive Federation. The players are trying to keep the spirit of the RC alive in the wake of groups of RC personnel seizing power on a variety of planets in the (former) AO and setting themselves up as TEDs (some for "good reasons" others as just naked power grabs). To be fair to these groups, the majority of RC planets are silent and dead or in complete disarray, so there's no much to go home to with the most populous and advanced memberworlds getting hit the hardest.


* Let's not even get started with the fact that everyone in RCES has like Top Gun style callsigns, that they turned 2001 into their version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and so on.

 

[gcbright]

Yes, TNE does deserve bad scifi plot devices!

Hi,

Also with TNE, one house rule we added is cold sleep characters have the legendary appearances of rock stars (In other words, regress characters and star vikings just don't have those great healthcare packages with plastic surgery and such).

Bad cliches from our TNE campaigns.

A world ruled by vampire machines and a time machine that sends you back into the past naked.

A world where the psi institute went public as a sorcery academy. (Ahhh, princess Ariel I presume).

A world where a biological agent killed all people above puberty.

A cold sleep character who just had a boob job.

A cold sleep character who did ⌧o, but just enough of the vid survived for people to mistakenly believe that she is a powerful military commander from the past. Great lines to Star Viking commanders include: Come together we can rule the Galaxy as husband and wife. The ancient god Aries selected me to conquer the Galaxy in his name, want to come along for the ride?

A regress world where vampire ships contaminated the atmosphere and ruined most of land. Now the population lives in domes and must renew at 21.

A regress world where the best food stock is these little green cubes.

A former pharmacy producing world now reduces to mostly desert. Can still supply anagathics from large radiated worms, but the stuff is not only addictive but can cause serious hallucinations and delusions of grander.

Thinks MST3K but on drugs.

 

[aramis]

For me, the TNE setting was a hard and bitter pill to swallow.

I've run it twice as combined setting and rules. One ended with everybody dieing due to lack of fuel on their donosev. (They lost the engineer and the hiver and the subcraft frontier refuelling after a misjump.)

The other ended with players going "WTF?!? It's wanting to take over the ship? We blow the computer core, manually aim at the sun, and make a max burn. Game Over." The players rejected it outright.

Now, mind you, I had one classic era TNE rules campaign that definitely wasn't "Straight"... due to a Scout Brew mishap, two PC's wound up married... both characters male. Both players straight. Played it up to the hilt. Then again, that game had all sorts of silliness. Ship's Cat was a PC. Vargr Cook Maj. Vilani Maj Gen specialist in HTH... 10D damage... it felt very... anime-esque.

Yeah, the ilos set the tone as humorous and none-too-serious. Dave N. pushed it further with his ill conceived diatribe in Aliens of the Rim and with the Ithklur. That tone difference was totally alien to the other "Traveller" games of the time (including T:2300). (Yes, pun intended.)

TNE Rules don't appeal to me nor my players. The setting is unacceptabe to us, too. And the poor illos and blatant unserious tone of certain books was not appreciated by us.

 

[Gallowglacht]

And almost the exact opposite for me. TNE was the first Traveller I cared about. The spinward marches seemed full of fantasy knockoffs like elves (Darrians) dwarves (geonee) cat people, dog people, lizard people and wizards (Zhodani). The adventures I saw in magazines all seemed to be stealing, killing people for money (mercs) or accounting (free traders).

TNE gave me Hivers, Schalli (not fantasic but a big improvement on how we saw the marches aliens) and the desparate survivours of 20 shattered worlds trying to unite for a greater purpose. A universe where the characters could make a difference instead of a quick buck. As for Virus, I love it. A psychic sentient virus was as easy to believe as psychic humans and convergent evolution samurai cat people. It was SHODAN and cylon with a dose of beserker, and has been part of traveller since kuniniir and sci-fi forever (Frankenstein).

Yup I play it straight. In fact I'm running it tonight.

[Note that isn't intended as an arguement, disagreement* with Aramis or the spark of a flame war. Just an example of a different group who see the same games very, very differently.]
* well clearly I disagree with him, what I mean is I'm not saying "Aramis is wrong".

 

[Vargas]

I've never been able to shake the feeling he was smirking the entire time thinking "Man, these nerds without a life will buy anything with the Traveller name on it . . .

Sorry, not even close. While I'm not sure what exactly was going through his mind with the Hivers book, Dave was very serious about Traveller and supporting the customer base.

 

[epicenter00]

Gallowglacht - From reading Nilsen's later commentaries (and Wiseman's comments in the sidebar of GURPS Traveller) I think you did "get the point" that Nilsen was, however clumsily, trying to get across. I remember him writing some commentary pretty much about how the Traveller universe didn't really have a point and how Traveller games were pretty much as morally bankrupt as most "darker" cyberpunk type RPGs - they were pretty much about contract murder for money, theft, and pillaging "natives."

I'd also have to agree with you that the Spinward Marches really weren't helped by various earnest members of the Traveller community who were really interested in seeing Darrians become Space Elves, the Geonee become Space Dwarves, the Zhodani into evil Space Arabs, and Solomani Space Nazis.* MT was the first "serious" Traveller setting for me - I love the imagery of the tragedy of the assassination, the imagery of Dulinor the Black as idealistic visionary who saw further than the rest of them but not far enough, and my favorite Margaret (it's why I use her heraldry for these boards) who thought if she held the pieces of a shattered mirror together and hoped enough, it'd heal itself. It also had wonderful supplements like Hard Times. Of course, it also had the too-perfect Norris and that Avery nonsense which sort of dulled its allure to me.

TNE, despite all of its warts (and there's a lot of them) really had the impetus for players to try and do the "right" thing for a change, instead of grubbing in the mud for that next credit which I really thought was fantastic. I love stories about idealists who run headlong into a dark, terrible place where their principles are really tested. How many compromises are you willing to make, what will see pared away before it becomes meaingless, and what principles will you always hold on to? What happens when such firm idealists disagree? The RCES held a wonderful basis for exploring all sorts of questions like that. Sadly, Nilsen buried it under so much kitsch and then obnoxiously put his own personal political soapbox on top of it that I really can't disagree with old-time Traveller players who hate the setting.

I've made so many changes to the TNE universe that it's really more of my "Traveller-Derived Universe" than anything else, but now I'm pretty happy with it. But I salute you for sticking with "straight" TNE.




* It took me many years to realize that it wasn't entirely the fault of the players that such things came out - I remember reading T4 and how a lot of the "official" minor aliens in there were just laughably bad, I mean obnoxiousness as an alien racial trait? Goodness. Back to the rocket ship, Dale! Perhaps a lot of these bad generalizations were encouraged at some level by GDW themselves.


EDIT:

Sorry, not even close. While I'm not sure what exactly was going through his mind with the Hivers book, Dave was very serious about Traveller and supporting the customer base.

Yes, I'm aware of Nilsen's statements on the matter after the fact, in fact on these boards themselves, I think. It may not be how he wanted to come across, but that's the impression I got reading his stuff. As a customer, in the twilight (heh) days of GDW, I no longer felt that GDW really valued me - there was too much of this odd self-indulgent humor vibe that ran through GDW (especially in Challenge magazine). I really felt alienated by the tone of GDW's products in the end (to this day, I refer to FF&S as FFS - as in "For F**k's Sake" because it was such an over-engineered monstrosity with too many charts and tables with arbitrary numbers) and to this day, I can't really mourn GDW going away as much as I'd like to because of that vibe.

 

[Scathsealgaire]

And here I thought that the title of this thread was asking if I didn't play TNE drunk....New Zealander, what do you expect.

I liked playing as both GM and player in TNE. I don't get to play TNE any more.<weep>
We tended to be straight in terms of general play, but the humour always creeps in. It's not TNE which leads to it, its just the nature of role-players in general. Except for maybe goths playing Vampire-the masquerade, most gamers I know are very funny people. Even some of the goths were funny.

 

[gcbright]

Iconic!

Hi,

I just wanted to say that the original Traveller material, the little black book series is to me the most iconic role playing system ever produced.

I have always wanted to know who designed the original marketing concept of the little black books. Those books were so iconic from a marketing standpoint. They gave Traveller a marketing identity that nothing else produced at the time ever came close to matching. (Yeah, I know TSR started with little brown books, but that identity got so wiped away by AD&D).

But something went ways wrong with the marketing aspect when the little black books got republished as the larger Traveller Book and Adventure book. It was like part of the cool went away.

From a game design point, the removal of certain technologies from Traveller kept the flavor of the game unique and prevented it from becoming just a vehicle for emulating pop culture sci-fi.

Without teleporters, Traveller never became the poor man's Star Trek.

Without lightsabers and blasters, Traveller didn't devolve into Star Wars.

I do think that starting with Mega-Traveller, that enough material wasn't produced to fully engage groups with the new Traveller setting. (What was the count like 8 books, 13 supplements, 20 adventures, 5 boxed games for T1 vs MT (GDW) at 5 books, 4 supplements, 4 adventures).

I also think that starting with Mega-Traveller the packaging went from iconic to just another game in a flooding market. (Oddly enough at the same time, the packaging for Twilight 2000 was iconic and offered a strong brand identity)

I have always thought that the move from MT to TNE was executed too early , I don't think the potential of the MT setting was ever fully tapped before it was shutdown in favor of the New ERA.

But from a marketing standpoint, I fully understand why it happened.

MegaTraveller material from DGP was far outselling the material from GDW. Licenses to produce material have never paid as well as publishing.

Not only that, but somehow along the way DGP had become known to the big gaming distributors (Armory, Windmill, Greenfield and Hobby Games) at the time as the Traveller People. To the extent that when new ERA was coming out, every distributor was delivering verbal warnings to be conservative on orders because GDW had fired the Traveller people (DGP).

I think new ERA lost a lot of Traveller fans because it wasn't what they were expecting. I think the build in MT was that the Rebellion would end and things would go back more towards normal.

Instead, the New Era product descended into what was described by several players in our Group as grunge sci-fi (dystopia).

But our original transition game from MT to New ERA was probably one of the all time favorite scenarios we as a group ever played. (Our supporting material players book went well over two hundred pages vs about 50 for an average campaign.)

Note, for every Traveller game, we produce player reference books, ship designs, stations, summary nots on contacts etc.

The transition campaign was made up of characters jailed by Dulinar within his realm of influence who managed to escape.

(House Rule)
They acquired a ship so old that instead of having a real computer it had a hardwired jump system (similar to old early sixty computers where you programming was handled by jumpered relay boards). All the calculations for a jump had to be manually computed for a single point within the system and punched onto papertape. In some cases, hardwire boards had to be swaped prior to a new jump.

This labor intensive process served a very specific purpose. To make Jump a difficult proposition, since the ship had to engage a specific point in a system at a specific velocity before engaging the drive.

Although the ship was armed with a large number of concealed turrents, they were fixed (like solamani ships) and had to be fired from the bridge (and without computer control were like -5)

For most of the MT time, our group worked against the will of Dulinar, being extremely discrete since the ship could never hope to engage forces and survive.

Due to supply problems in the realms, the group never got a computer and continued to work in an almost mission impossible style.

Our last scenario in MT with the group ended with them captured and awaiting the arrival of one of Dulinar's inner circle to oversee the execution of the rebels who had caused so much trouble.

That was going to be the end of play for that game.

Then about six months later out came New ERA. Our group immediately remembered our group with the S-WORD ship. And play resumed with the scenario opening with our characters on the bridge of their ship. Surrounded by Dulinars Naval and Marine people awaiting to be tied up and helpless while going down with the ship for pure proganda purposes.

The ship arrived and the small armada present suddenly all turned and flew into the sun.

And with that, our new ERA game began. (The only serious one we've ever played).

It was a blast.

Suddenly the bad ship with no automation and no real computer that was little more than a plot device to keep the players in a mission impossible mode turned into the biggest asset in the Galaxy. The same with all the dated equipment aboard that were also just a plot device to keep players thinking instead of blasting their way thru scenarios.

The strain of operating the ship due to lack of NPC's was handled by taking the former antagonists (stranded aboard when their ships flew into the sun) from all the MT scenarios and turning them into crew.)

The entire dynamic between the forces and the captive changed with the speech below.

The whole universe just changed, and you are lucky enough to be aboard the only ship that has a chance to survive. But you can't do it without us. We have ten years experience with this vessel. We have mastered skills to operate it that even the best amongst you has no chance of emulating. You have lived your entire life in a high tech cocoon, separated by computers from the real work of space travel. Can anyone amongst you calculate visually our position and then compute the manual thrusts required to take us towards the planet without a computer? Do you know the jump formulas well enough that you can pick a point in this system where the influences of gravitational forces are low enough they lower the complexity of the jump equation that you stand a chance to manually generate the jump calculations and punch them onto paper-tape?

Despite being one of our groups all time greatest games, it burned us out on being serious with TNE games.

Each week took the PCs to a new world often brought low by the most devious of means.

Computerized food production on one world ceased to filter out contaminated food and even went so far as to spread the contamination to all food produced for consumers (Hydroponic garden time for the ship).

On another world, computerized vaccine production sent out live virus instead of dead virus to the people of the world. (okay, time to setup our own pharmacy while we can still find good medicine).

Despite being engaging for a game, a replay would have just been a massive downer.

Thanks

 

[mike wightman]

gcbright that is brilliant, simply brilliant.

Now a comment about TNE.

Love the setting and the possibilities for adventure, hate the rules with a passion (indestructable characters being able to shrug off a couple of fusion gun blasts? that's not my idea of Traveller).

 

[Vargas]

I do think that starting with Mega-Traveller, that enough material wasn't produced to fully engage groups with the new Traveller setting. (What was the count like 8 books, 13 supplements, 20 adventures, 5 boxed games for T1 vs MT (GDW) at 5 books, 4 supplements, 4 adventures).

. . .

I have always thought that the move from MT to TNE was executed too early , I don't think the potential of the MT setting was ever fully tapped before it was shutdown in favor of the New ERA.

I agree that the full potential of MT was not realized but DGP was already going bankrupt by the time TNE was being planned.

MegaTraveller material from DGP was far outselling the material from GDW.

I can't recall ever hearing that before, I'd be interested in hearing the actual figures.

Not only that, but somehow along the way DGP had become known to the big gaming distributors (Armory, Windmill, Greenfield and Hobby Games) at the time as the Traveller People. To the extent that when new ERA was coming out, every distributor was delivering verbal warnings to be conservative on orders because GDW had fired the Traveller people (DGP).

DGP wasn't fired, it decided not to pursue TNE (and was going broke). Ostensibly DGP wanted to publish its own game, AI, and get out from under being a licensee. (Except for the parenthetical comment above, all of this was detailed in MegaTraveller Journal #4).

I think new ERA lost a lot of Traveller fans because it wasn't what they were expecting. I think the build in MT was that the Rebellion would end and things would go back more towards normal.

I agree on the first point but I think the second will never be known for sure.

 

[mike wightman]

Charles Gannon who was sort of in charge of MT in the latter days has detailed on this very site his proposed future for the MT setting.

 

[Vargas]

Charles Gannon who was sort of in charge of MT in the latter days has detailed on this very site his proposed future for the MT setting.

Ah, sorry I was focusing more on what DGP did or did not have planned for the end of the Rebellion and didn't factor in Gannon's part. I'm not so sure how much authority, real or otherwise, he had though. If memory serves, Marc was still quasi-product line manager up until around 1991 or so and was then followed by Dave Nilsen who basically stayed right up to the end of GDW. I know Gannon has posted his proposals but since they were never followed up, I'm not aware of how much weight they might have carried at GDW.

 

[gcbright]

I can't recall ever hearing that before, I'd be interested in hearing the actual figures.

Where I was working, our 1st week were for 8-10 GDW MT and 20-30 copies of DGP product.

DGP wasn't fired, it decided not to pursue TNE (and was going broke). Ostensibly DGP wanted to publish its own game, AI, and get out from under being a licensee. (Except for the parenthetical comment above, all of this was detailed in MegaTraveller Journal #4).

I do not know where the spin on this one came from, I only know that four for four our reps warned us that DGP was not involved with TNE and we should be careful while ordering. Two reps gave a very negative GDW spin and a very positive DGP spin to their statements.

I agree on the first point but I think the second will never be known for sure.

I should have said the expectation for the conclusion was a return to normal or maybe a group of different states, not a long night.

Also, TNE was the first traveller edition we did not have to reorder after the first week. The people who came in, picked it up and put it back. I think it took them some time to get used to the idea of the new setting, because they did end up buying it(like in the second or third week of release), just not as quickly as normal.

 

[gcbright]

gcbright that is brilliant, simply brilliant.

Thank you for the kind words. It was a great basis for the scenario. You could let characters get their hands on everything they ever wanted, but due to the tech restrictions they didn't dare use it.

Now a comment about TNE.

Love the setting and the possibilities for adventure, hate the rules with a passion (indestructable characters being able to shrug off a couple of fusion gun blasts? that's not my idea of Traveller).

As a group, we tend to use settings, but stick with the LBBs for our game mechanics.

 

[Vargas]

Where I was working, our 1st week were for 8-10 GDW MT and 20-30 copies of DGP product.

Purely out of curiosity do you remember what the individual titles were?

 

[gcbright]

Purely out of curiosity do you remember what the individual titles were?

Nope, but I still have the data and can look it up. Just Give me a day to get it hunted up.

Thanks

 

[gcbright]

Compiled sales statistics

Purely out of curiosity do you remember what the individual titles were?

Hi,


Sorry it has taken a while to put these together, the data was spread across numerous pieces of software. This is a quick manual compile, if you are interested in a particular item, I will be happy to pull it out for you.

(Note the store I was working at wasn't open during the release of Traveller the original, so these are the stats from when we started till when we stopped handling the item)

Traveller Box Set Original Cumulative Sales 163
Book 4 Mercenary 91
Book 5 High Guard 132
Citizens 82

Mega Traveller Boxed 129
Mega Traveller Players 239
COACC 42
Knightfall 28
Hard Times 17
Vigilantee 12

Starship Operators 53
101 Vehicles 94
World Builders 47

Traveller New ERA 43

Never carried FASA product due to initial poor quality on printing and very low interest.

Some stats on other products:

Battletech (Original boxed set) 271
(This isn't a good stat to quote, going into Christmas the first year, FASA ran an ultru deep discount on Battletech retail $12 wholesale to shop $6 instead of $7.20) We got close to 200 copies purchased on the special and it was during this time that Fasa chose to increase the price first to $15, then to $20. We kept our stock at the original price of $12 when the competition in town was at $15 and $20. We went with such a large order because of Robotech Comic being so hot at the time.

Villians & Vigilantee Rulebook 92

Twilight 2000 Original Boxed Set 294

This game was incredible for us. People who had never been in the store came in and purchased the boxed set. We stocked heavy because we were in a military town.

Thanks

 

[mike wightman]

Twilight 2000 original was one of my favourite games. I always wish GDW had based thier house system on that. T2300 and TNE run using the T2K rules is actually a fun way to play (still had to make combat a bit more lethal though to emulate Traveller).

 

[Gallowglacht]

OK I know TNE was based off later T2k*, what was the original like?
Through assorted housemoves, living with other gamers, I seem to have inherited a copy of cadalacs and dinosaurs. Is that the same as the original T2K?


*also a friend has a copy, and I got a free pdf off one of the online sellers.