How many Travellers?

[Bob Weaver]

I've been looking recently at some published adventures for some old fantasy RPG and I noted that the adventure's description included a note to the effect that "x number of player characters of y power-level should play this adventure. It reminded me of a thread on the Facebook TravellerRPG page, where a player of this fantasy game was asking about 'game balance' in Traveller. The general answer is "there isn't any, and running away is sometimes your best option". The 76 patrons supplement categorized its adventures by number of PCs, but only as a rough estimate, and there's nothing preventing a referee from throwing an adventure written for 8 at a group of 3.
This got me thinking. What is the best or optimal size and composition of a group of Travellers? And how should that group be composed; what blend of skills and abilities make for a powerful PC group? In my own gaming experience, I've rarely had a group of more than four, owing to rarely having five folks able to play at the same time.

Best regards,

Bob W.

 

[Spinward Scout]

What is the best or optimal size and composition of a group of Travellers? And how should that group be composed; what blend of skills and abilities make for a powerful PC group?

I'm going with 4. It depends on what kind of game you are playing.

If you are going into combat, you have the basic 4-man fire team:

Team Leader
Rifleman
Heavy Weapons/Automatic Rifleman
Specialist: Sniper/Squad Designated Marksman/Scout/Demolitions/Grenadier

D&D basic classes are:

Fighter
Cleric
Mage
Thief

Which can be broken down to:

Warrior
Healer
Techno-Guru (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - A.C. Clarke)
Rogue/Guide/Specialist

Basic Positions on a small starship:

Gunnery/Security
Medic/Doctor
Engineer
Pilot/Navigator

You could toss in a Robot or a Beaked Monkey, but they're usually just for show and comic relief.

 

[Quint]

I don't think "best" is really a viable concept...

I've run fantastic campaigns for single characters, I've run fantastic campaigns groups of ten players. It really depends on the type of campaign you want to run, and how much work you want to do as a GM.

You might as well as what the optimal size of group there is for humans. It really all depends upon what you are trying to do.

Keep a secret? One.

Rob a bank? How big is the bank?

Engage in speculative trade? How many part of the trade process do you want to touch with the group?

Have an orgy? No clue how to even answer it.

Do an archeological dig? What tech level? How big? etc.

I try to insure that every player has a character that has a "special thing" that they do, that nobody is redundant, and that nobody is crucial to the overall success (in case they die). If you do this, it doesn't really matter how many people there are.

D.

 

[aramis]

Most of the adventures seem to presume 5-6 players in order to meet the skill needs.

 

[Bob Weaver]

I don't think "best" is really a viable concept...

I've run fantastic campaigns for single characters, I've run fantastic campaigns groups of ten players. It really depends on the type of campaign you want to run, and how much work you want to do as a GM.

You might as well as what the optimal size of group there is for humans. It really all depends upon what you are trying to do.

Keep a secret? One.

Rob a bank? How big is the bank?

Engage in speculative trade? How many part of the trade process do you want to touch with the group?

Have an orgy? No clue how to even answer it.

Do an archeological dig? What tech level? How big? etc.

I try to insure that every player has a character that has a "special thing" that they do, that nobody is redundant, and that nobody is crucial to the overall success (in case they die). If you do this, it doesn't really matter how many people there are.

D.

Quint, I think you've touched on the most important element - that everyone in the group have a specialty, something significant that they can contribute to the group's success. Nothing makes a game more boring to a player than having nothing to do. But what makes Traveller much more flexible than the fantasy game I was looking at is the wider array of skills that enable a broader variety of adventuring activities. No matter your skill set, there's something in a Traveller universe that you can do that can be the critical need in an adventure.

Best regards,
Bob W.

 

[Patron Zero]

Never discount the importance of NPCs to round out a crew or for serving in more 'menial' roles aboard ship.

 

[Quint]

Quint, I think you've touched on the most important element - that everyone in the group have a specialty, something significant that they can contribute to the group's success. Nothing makes a game more boring to a player than having nothing to do. But what makes Traveller much more flexible than the fantasy game I was looking at is the wider array of skills that enable a broader variety of adventuring activities. No matter your skill set, there's something in a Traveller universe that you can do that can be the critical need in an adventure.

Best regards,
Bob W.

Thank you very much! I think that another piece is recognizing that while some (most?) players want to play a major character, other players want to play supporting characters either in a particular campaign or just in general. Discerning the difference between these two types of players can spell the difference between a campaign marked by frustration for the players and GM, and one marked by enjoyment for all.

The other thing is that the "special thing" for a character can simply be some funky character hook that the player really loves but which doesn't have much "in game effect" other than providing local color. Keeping this in mind is useful for GM's because we can get make the mistaken assumption that players are only happy if they are doing something "useful" to the adventure plot - when the player may simply be happy to be role-playing their medic with a drinking problem...

Players who can keep the group amused instead of annoyed with their antics are worth their weight in gold!

Take care!

D.

 

[Aramais]

My view is that most adventures should be written so that the players can find a way to succeed without specific skills. IF a specific skill is needed and not in the player group, the referee has to either introduce an NPC to succeed in the roles, or finda nother way to get around this.

This is one of the things I find interesting about T5's wafers. I haven't run an existing campaign all through in years...but I would love a player to be "the wafer king/queen." Mind you, over-dependence of wafers should have interesting side-effects. The wafer and its ability to impress skills on a temporary basis seems to be a good way to handle the "special skill needed" concern.

 

[sabredog]

What fits in the ship. I have run games with as little as 2 players to 10 and have found the sweet spot for me to be 4-6, with 8 as the absolute upper limit. Less than four makes it pretty risky for players to be in dangerous situations since one wrong step could mean losing half the party with not enough left to complete the adventure. More than 8 makes it hard to keep everyone involved as much as they may want to be. Granted, there are always the guys who just want to sit and watch until it's their turn to bring out the BFG they wanted but most of the time I like everyone to be in an important enough role that they can mean something to the whole.

6 is great since it means pretty much any adventure class ship's most important slots (if not the entire crew) can be filled by players. I hate having to resort to NPC's for important rolls and like to fill those slots with PC's. 6-8 gets you plenty of redundancy among important skills and means the game won't come to a screeching halt because the pilot just got eaten by the whatsit. Yes, those situations can also be fun, but I've found a lot of groups find that sort of thing a real morale killer.

Mongoose has a nifty tool called skill kits in the core MgT book. After everyone has generated their characters the ref lets them pick, one at a time, a skill out of a grab bag of such based on the type of skills that are absolutely need for the game. This way players can still roll up the kind of character they want, but if nobody has Pilot to fly the ship with this makes sure its there somewhere.

In my game I try to always keep these in mind:

No less than 4 and preferably 6 players. If I can't get at least 4 then scale the game accordingly.

Make sure the group can play the important roles on the ship if there is one.

It really, really helps if one or two players know the game reasonably well so they can help the new guys.

Remember that when you are looking forward to unleashing the forces of hell on the players that the game is supposed to be fun and wiping out a party with opponents they were in no way capable of reasonably dealing with is not how to get repeat or new players. Scale the challenges according to not just the characters' capabilities but also to the players'.

Listen to what the players want. It helps to ask them before beginning the game so you can at least throw them a bone once in a while to help keep them motivated to play in the adventure you want to run. Let them run off on side trips and then gently nudge them back again on course once they've done their thing. That isn't "railroading" it's called being a game master.

 

[salochin999]

"This got me thinking. What is the best or optimal size and composition of a group of Travellers?"

I think this is a very important question for Traveller because the combat is so deadly (at least how I play it).

Solutions I've tried or thought of:

1) Lots of henchmen - when I first started running RPGs I gave the players lots of henchmen so 2-3 players might have a party of 12+. This works but the players become more squad leaders than characters.

2) Less henchmen - nowadays i don't like there to be more than one NPC per player in the party (as a maximum) to keep the player characters center stage. There might be a large roster of available henchmen to choose from - a whole ship's crew potentially - but the "away team" is limited to the players and a max of one NPC per player. So if you only have two players then that's a party of four, max, in the current away team.

3) Players dying a lot - this is generally what happened when I tried (2). A party of four was often not enough for a lot of situations because combat can be so deadly - and I wanted it to be realistic. I'm not against player character dying occasionally but it can't be too often imo or they get fed up.

4) Design for combat - have the setup be something like the players are part of a heavy duty investigative salvage crew who go into situations in full battle dress from the start - basically dungeon crawls in space. That works fine but is a bit limiting.

5) Combat as obstacle - this is an idea which I haven't tried out in practice yet. I'm sure a lot of other people have been doing this for years but I didn't think of until recently. If you want
a) a small group of adventurers wandering around kind of games
b) the party size will generally be 3-4 (and some or most of those 3-4 won't even be combat characters)
c) you don't want them clanking around in full plate all the time
d) you want the combat to be as deadly as it ought to be
then the players are likely to be dying a lot when they get into random laser pistol battles in cantinas or bump into a saber toothed dragon in a jungle somewhere.

So instead of thinking in terms of combat as an combat encounter think of it as an obstacle encounter i.e. the aim of the players is to either get around it or defeat it in some clever sci-fi way rather than just blast it.

In practice what this currently means is I am scouring sci-fi RPG books for gadgets - bits of tech, cybernetic implants, robots, psionics etc that could confer an unfair advantage in a fight and I'm going to have that as "treasure".

So in theory if I get it right my players should be able to go through any of the published adventures mostly using brains and gadgets with combat occurring only after the players have given themselves an edge.

I'd be interested if anyone has played it like that?

#

so in an option (5) game the ideal character mix might be from a list like

- leader / secondary combat
- combat
- medical (including drugs and biological implants)
- technician (including gadgets, robots and cybernetic implants)
- psion
- social skills
- stealth/criminal/assassin
- engineering (including heavy machinery)
- pilot / navigator

with some of those probably better suited to allied NPCs rather than PCs

 

[robject]

We had nine players in a game this summer. It was quite fun, but too many people.

More recently, we had five players, and that worked just fine.

Over the last couple years, I refereed a group of three. That works OK, but it's no easier than five.

So, I vote five to six players.

 

[Shonner]

I have NPCs come and go as necessary. But I always have one NPC nearby at any given time. Always. I only role-play with four players these days. No more. No less.