Hey guys, new Traveller GM here..

[Icosahedron]

What can I do to make that time not boring? I mean, in most fantasy RPGs, you just say something like "I travel to Winterfell by the main road, camping at night. W, X, Y, and Z take rotating shifts guarding" and then we skip travelling unless something happens. Is that true in Traveller too?

A lot depends on your role-play : roll-play ratio.
You don't have to play out every minute of your transit, but time aboard ship can be used for meeting passengers/crew who may turn out to be useful later, as patrons, hirelings, rumour providers, etc.

As Steven Tirey says, stowaways and hijackers will only work a couple of times, as will breakdowns and misjumps, theft and murder mysteries, riots and mutinies, piracy and customs inspections, etc. But all together, they'll keep you going for a while. And when the PCs are chatting with the passengers they'll never know whether they're going to hear a rumour or get caught up in a hijack.

A lot also depends on the size of your transport. On a city-size ship you can have the same sort of adventures you would have in a city...

Or, of course,

You could just do the "You jump. One week later, you arrive at your destination." That works completely fine.

As for time in real space, approaching or leaving a world, you can use the crew skills to ensure the crew communicate adequately with ground control, keep to the appropriate spacelanes, enter or leave jumpspace at the right coordinates, enter or leave the atmosphere safely, maintain orbit satisfactorily, launch and recover small craft properly, and any number of other things that can get them into physical or legal trouble as you see fit.
There is a Traveller book called Starship Operators Manual (out of print, I believe, but maybe Mongoose will come up with 'something similar' one day). Might give you some ideas for shipboard activity if you can locate a copy.

As with any other RPG, it's just a matter of striking a balance between underdoing or overdoing it. Travel can be glossed over in a sentence, it can create a rationale for an adventure, or it can be the adventure.
Authors have written gripping interpersonal drama just on the half-hour avoidance of a patrol, on the 'silent running' theme. As I said earlier, keep it tight. It'll be easier for you and can be just as much fun for the players.

 

[Icosahedron]

Hi nef,

(Sorry, I'm not going to count and copy all the 'f's)

Depends on what your adventure is going to be. There are plenty of ideas above, but you need to tailor it into whatever your story is about. Who are they working for? Where are they going? What sort of people are they? What places would they frequent? What is about to happen to them?

I usually find that once I have an adventure in mind, the meeting just seems to fall into place naturally (or may have already occurred before the game starts). There are plenty of bars, diners, waiting rooms, hiring halls, starship lounges, corridors, malls, concourses, streets, travel terminals, gyms, etc for people to meet.
Whatever works for the plot.

 

[Elshar]

I actually, uh. Kind of ripped off the start of Firefly. I didn't realize it at first, but my take on how they got together was this: They knew each other (Were friends/contacts) during their previous 'careers'. One of them had a job come in that required the expertise of the other players. The game starts at the end of the job (I never did tell them what it was, haha) with the guy going to meet his 'employer' to report in and pick up his pay. Of course, things didn't quite go according to plan.

Another newbie GM here. I'm having trouble coming up with a way of getting the party together at the beginning of a campaign outside of the old trope of "ye olde space inn."

How do you guys usually get your parties together?

 

[Merxiless]

Hey, new Guy(s).

Completely different advice perhaps.

Before you go any farther with the mechanics of jump, and whether to have money or not;

Back up a second. Next time it is a clear night go outside. Look UP.

Now, imagine you are on a planet, this planet. it is rotating. 1000 MPH at the Equator. Imagine how that is faster than sound, but the air is moving with it. You are in fact looking out from any angle, connected by gravity to this world. Otherwise, you could go Out There.

Imagine what is out there. The dark, the light, the nebulae, the supernovas. All of this you see on this rock, used to be... supernova.

Our atoms come from a place that is now a black hole somewhere. Calcium in your bones once moved at a significant fraction of c.

Remember that, each time you get ready to write a new scenario.

It is in fact a touchstone, for those who will use it, in the same way that movies like Dragonslayer, and Conan are for D&D.

Back to the plotting channel.

I almost always use their prior service or connections. Or I say You haver all worked together before.

I suggest don't write things linearly like it is an hour to the world. Write it in Scenes like Star Wars RPG. You jump in, then you are entering orbit. Yeah it took 3 hours at 1 G. We don't show that. Show what is a choice for PCs or new information.

If you want to spend a good amount of investment dollars, even though you don't like star trek so much perhaps, the decipher book 2 Star Trek RPG narrator's guide is like gold for writing TV show style scenarios, not necessarily star trek. I've used it for Conan, D&D, and Star Trek, and Star Wars, along with Traveller. That is of course if you are looking for something like a TV Show, or film.

Some groups prefer mapping and dungeon bash, because it is old school.

Adventures like the classic Traveller Shadows are just that.. Dungeon in Space.

Classic Traveller Prison planet is what I'd call a matrix adventure. you need to do X task to get X decision box like a flowchart.

One of my favorite adventures of all time is Across the Bright Face...it is a map,m and encounters, and the players choose what to do. Along the way they are chased. Plus the environment is as hostile, literally as hell. Every time I've ran it (3) the group loses more than one PC, and they have said it was "epic" because it is just a raw struggle against so many things, they are tested.

Don't worry about the planets so much. You can generate them, and they are cool but red dirt on a .9 g world and brown dirt on a .8 g world are dirt for walking on.

Dive into the NPCs, their plots, the corporations. The navy or the patrol are they corrupt? Nobles? have a lot of NPCs the players can go to for information for a price...political, social, economic, favors.

Some of the best games I have are when players have to resolve a "favor owed." or work off a debt.

as has been said, don't do a whole sector at once.

do a half dozen distinct worlds, and don't be afraid to ignore the dice and choose. Let your imagination tell you what is what.

Set each world up with about a half dozen interesting places, or sites to check out.

Don't have 4 of the same feeling size 5 mostly desert, poor conditions crap atmosphere mining colony worlds. Do one and make it cool. Think about the miners.. how do they live? why would they EVER work so hard for whatever they are getting paid? What kinds of problems does the world have. That's where your adventures are.

No lie, it's D&D, but with scanners.

Think about that look up at the stars earlier, how weird, crazy strange can this place possibly be?

Then brainstorm it, then write it.

I've been doing this since 1977, and that's what I do.

Now I'm just better at making maps, from practice, and good software tools.

Luck.