Most Fun with Traveller?

[Doctor Guilty]

Konnichi wa, campers.

I'm been a Travellerophile for many years; I caught the bug with MT, but over the years my collection has expanded to Classic, TNE and GURPS Traveller.

The most fun I've had playing in the Traveller universe, though, was playing the old PC game MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients. It's a fun game in its own right, and I ran through it once or twice with pretty typical PC groups. The next time around, though, I stumbled on something really fun. By accident, I had created a party of two human males, two human females and a male Vargr, trotting across the Spinward Marches trying to solve this big mystery.

Three seconds later, I had the Traveller version of Scooby Doo. It was a blast.

What was your favorite Traveller game, either PnP, computer-based or other?

 

[The Oz]

It'd have to be the Great (Almost) Wine Heist, when I took the tactical scenario from AZHANTI HIGH LIGHTNING and turned it into an adventure for my gaming group. I had them guarding the wine and then try to steal it.

Didn't work, but it was great fun and they did get their revenge.

 

[kafka47]

My players were on the Trail of the Skyraiders when one of them sort of figured out that there was going to be a motherlode of treasure, began to recuit local mercs to assassinate the rest of the party. As she was quite clever and devious about it, I allowed it. Then proceeded to find the treasure, at which point, I allowed the former party members to assume the role of previously NPC mercs. Needless, to say, there is no honour among thieves or merc when there is clearly a larger ticket. Think of Baltar when the Cylons landed...

 

[Rover]

The most fun I ever had was doing a character background write up for T20, a Belter/Marine. At the end of the write up I included a bit about the character liking - Salmon Smoothies. I went so far as to write up a recipe. The GM and the other players were really impressed. They still talk about it and I haven't played that character in years

During play (same character as above) we chartered a ship, got suspicious of the captain and did an armed take over. All the other players were saying something like "I can't believe we mutinied." I had to keep reminding the it was not mutiny but piracy, we weren't part of the crew.

 

[Darkhstarr]

There's several but I feel my favorite is the game based off a FASA Star Trek module. The players were suckered aboard a satelite munitions factory of Beaumonde Industries (the CEO was getting revenge for the biological warefare factory the party destroyed for the Imperium) to used as guinea pigs for teleportation experiments. The party arrived to find most of the station's personnel disappeared (result of a teleporter accident) & the rest being devoured by space-going organisms. After taking over the factory's computer system & holding the creatures at bay with 'liberated' plasma guns, the party initiated a meltdown of the fusion powerplant destroying the station & the monsters. The best part was, while half the party attended to the powerplant, the other half got into the automated sales & shipment systems. They proceeded to have weapons & equipment shipped to the local merc guild via drone shuttle & obtained bills of sale for the items. Some of the equipment they kept, others they sold to mercs at a discount. My vote for most creative revenge against the bad guy. The upshot of this adventure was the party being hired several games later by Beaumonde's Board of Directors to whack their CEO.

 

[GypsyComet]

The anecdotes run thick in our group, due largely to a couple very active players who don't gravitate to the big guns automatically.

So we had a Zhodani "undercover" noble, rather lost and desperately trying to fit in with the ship full of loony Imperials he's found himself attached to. Ultimate straight man, and despite a very on-the-ball player, good for the occasional blind-siding ("Did you scan that restroom stall before you 'ported in?" "Uh, no." Pause while the ref rolls for "occupation"...).

Then the midget Vargr with the ever-climbing self-induced Charisma. ("You're surrounded by men in Battledress, with guns pointed at you." "Grrrrrr. I can take 'em!")

And the ex-Marine with his suit of Heavy Battledress who took so many headshots one combat (in armor, but under TNE) that he spent the rest of the session quite deaf and shouting "What?" whether addressed or not.

 

[Icosahedron]

Then the midget Vargr with the ever-climbing self-induced Charisma. ("You're surrounded by men in Battledress, with guns pointed at you." "Grrrrrr. I can take 'em!")

My favourite game (present game excluded, of course, with a nod to my current players) was back when I first started playing. The group was on an extreme law level totalitarian world and initially none of the characters knew each other. Their mission was simple - to get off-world, but they could trust no-one, not even each other. Government spies were everywhere, any of the characters or NPCs could be a plant, surveillance was ubiquitous, and the interdicted starport was fenced off like the Berlin Wall. Weapons and information were limited to whatever could be found or bribed and cash was limited to pocket money and whatever mightn't be missed by the bank account monitors.
The atmosphere was electric at times.

 

[otherles]

At a gaming con I ran a Traveller session where the players were investigating the bombing of a newspaper office. I had thrown in elements from the novel Illuminatus! by Wilson and Shea.

Before the session ended someone had used the convenient blackboard in the room in an attempt to flowchart a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory and Emperor Strephon's place in it.

(Think I still have part of the rumors list for it somewhere...)

(Fnord!)

 

[NightRaven]

The one I enjoyed the most was a campaign around a Solomani terrorist group, trying to control the resources and black market in a system. The players planned to rob a bank but, as usually happens, in the field everything went mad. The player suppoused to "reduce" the policeman killed him instead, the cold blooded leader ended shouting to the bank director and so... None has forgotten that campaign!!

And the one my players have proved to be unable to forget/forgive was a very similar one, designed for a game con, but with a clear target: bomb a factory that Archduke Norris was visiting... When one of the players prefered sacrificing herself to give a minute or two to the rest of the party for installing the rest of the detonators I told myself "they are really enjoying!!". That was their first Traveller session and this year in the next con I hope to be back with a new adventure for them.

 

[The Thing]

In my first game of GT one player shot an insane doctor (driven mad by a bad jump) with a laser rifle, rolled a critical hit and max damage, literally blowing the doctor to pieces.

I was playing a doctor and said that out of respect to a fellow medical professional I was going to reach down and close the corpse's eyes.

The GM told me that I'd have to cross the room to do it as one was in this corner and the other was in that corner.


:rofl:

 

[Plankowner]

The most fun I had in a game was when my Merchant character hit it big on a couple of Speculation Trading and he wound up being a Merchant Prince (this was before that book came out) with 3 ships to his name (free and clear).

Suddenly, he was negotiating contracts with companies, dealing (bribing) the local nobles to allow his fledgling company the room and resources needed to expand. The other players became significant employees of the company and most had their own ships. It fell apart pretty quickly because each character ended up adventuring by themselves as they ran their own ship, but there were a couple of months real time when everything was falling into place where we really had to think and plan and ROLEPLAY, not just roll and shoot and collect the cash.

Eventually, we agreed that the Merchant Prince needed to be retired as a character and he became the Patron for the group of characters who took over 1 of his ships. I played that character on the side a bit with the Referee, it led to several adventures for the group and eventually, the guy married the daughter and heir to the Count of Lunion.

My second favorite started out with the PCs waking up in cryoberths, no memories AT ALL. I was the Referee and I gave them BLANK character sheets. They had to figure out what skills they had, why they were where they were etc. In one scene, they were hiding in a closet and found a monkey wrench. They passed it around to see if they might have Mechanical as one of there skills. The visual of that happening had us all in stitches for weeks. I even brought a real wrench to our games and when things got tense between players (like they always do from time to time) I would pull out the wrench, we would all laugh and life would be good again.

 

[pendragonman]

That monkey wrench closet thing sounds like a scene from 2001.

 

[Plankowner]

There were several scenes like that...

They all sat down and messed with a computer to see if they had computer skill.

They all climbed into the pilot/navigator/sensor/communications seats of the Armed Gig they stole to see if they had those skills. They all trekked down to Engineering to check out Gravitics/Engineering etc skills. Passing around the gun/knife to see about that stuff.

Finding out the LEVEL of each skill was something they never quite got around to. I kept most of that info to myself.

Ah the fun times in college...

 

[Darkhstarr]

A close second was one of my early sessions based on The Trail of the Skyraiders. The party was headed by a character playing a 'gentleman thief' Rogue, a sport Droyne who researching subcultures of humaniti (the beforementioned Rogue), an female Aslan, & mixture of human scouts & marines. They made good use of their equipment & skills to sneak around, jam communications, infilitrate & use a lot of misdirection. They managed to steal the chief badguy's personal gravlimo. The only error they made was on their raid on the badguy's lodge to rescue the archeologist. They sent the droyne in using his psionic powers to pass unseen to take out the main gun tower & its quad autocannon-good idea. However the droyne was armed only with a laser cane-lots of noise, bad idea. Fortunately they took out most everybody in the first round of combat.

Afterwards, having packed their only gunner in an autodoc (their only casulty of the assault) they got creative. Spilt the party in three segments, two with one pilot each sped towards their ships leading the bulk of the enemy forces chasing them. The Rogue with support snuck back where the villain's armed scouts were being prepped for launching. He used his computer & his waldo unit to put one of the scouts to activate its jump drive when the manuver was put into operation.