T20 - revision required! FAO Hunter and MJD

[TKalbfus]

Or characters can be employed by a rich patron/small corp. By the way, it could be very realistic for a character to begins with loads of money, as long as he's got a *REALLY* good explanation, like having SOC 18+ (ie: being Daddy's Girl helps a lot if Daddy's a Duke)

Yep, a small company with a capitalization of Cr70,000,000, a board of directors and perhaps 1,000 stockholders. The company's chief asset is 1 Far Trader Starship, One of the player characters would be chairman of the board and also the ship's captain, the other players are members of the board of directors and also the ship's crew. The stockholders determine who the board of directors are. So long as profits are made and dividends paid out the stockholders are happy.

Well, playing retired characters can be fun if you're not retireing the character from adventure. Also, by definition of every Traveller game systems, it is impossible to survive while doing "Only Legal Trading", meaning the PCs really NEED to go out the beaten path and take risks. Forcing the Characters to find something to have ends meet is one of the basic Traveller Idea. Nobody's interested in playing "Cubicles and Bureaucrats" or "Broker, Distributors and Salesman"

Well, the expense of starships and the high cost of space travel guarantee that space travel is uncommon in the OTU, unlike Star Wars where there are cheap starships. The typical Traveller character stays on his planet most of the time. Traveling to a different planet costs about Cr4,000 in low berth or about $12,000 for us. More expensive than air travel. typically one can travel to another star system or buy a new ground car. For the price of a brand new home in Westchester, NY ($700,000), you can charter a starship for 2 weeks, and travel to the star system of your choice that is 1 jump away.
This explains why there are different tech levels at different worlds. Importing items from offworld is expensive so most goods are produced locally. Only high value goods are profitably transported from system to system.

 

[Falkayn]

Originally posted by Sandman:
I agree that balancing encounters *IS* a real pain for me, since I've only *PLAYED* D20 once and am now reffering T20. Presently, I have no guidelines so I wing it as they go. If an encounter is *REALLY* to heavy for my group, I'll tone it down. If it's the opposits and I want them to have some challenge, they might find that some are Dirty Fighters and have some tricks or pals that were comming in to help them.

I find that sort of on the run balancing to be necessary in any d20 game I've run. Sometimes the players seem realy dumb, and I have to tone the encounter down just to have some of them survive, other times they roll a series of natural 20's and my key 'boss' encounter starts to evaporate before me, so I fudge a few dice rolls, and/or add some tricks on the fly just to keep things interesting.

I tend to either outnumber them with a bunch of NPCs 3-4 levels lower than them, or match them with one or two NPCs a level or two higher than them.

OTOH, in the last game we had the three PCs were confronted with a mob of baddies, four of whom wanted to bully them around (I was ready to vary the number depending upon whether the PCs went out armed for bear, or not). I used 76 Gunmen to generate a bunch of thugs and then armed them considerably past the local law level. The PCs had obeyed local law and were without weapons, which meant there considerable combat skills were greatly lessened (most were brilliant with guns, but not much else).

It ended up being a very interesting fight, the PCs concentrated on disarming the NPC thugs but did not pick up their weapons (they did not want to place their fingerprints on them). The NPCs were eventually frightened off by the PCs combat ability ... and the imminent arrival of the police. Two PCs were left with gunshot wounds that took several days of hospital visits (and Medical drug uses) to heal.

This was from a group of players that normally kill everything in every combat. So I needed to balance things on the fly because the PCs were choosing to keep the combat relatively non-violent, and so I didn't need to use the backup thugs.

 

[Anton]

Hunter and Martin, thanks for the response.

Originally posted by hunter:
That was basically the problem. We really couldn't explain character creation in a book carrying the d20 logo. By my reading of things that really included not being able to give a detailed explaination of how to spend that experience earned from the University and Prior History.

The Player's Book, being OGL and not carrying the d20 logo can have that material. Yes there will be some overlap of material found in the THB and the Player's Book, but there is also a lot of new stuff also.

Really? While I'm not inimately familiar with the terms of the various different licenses, I'm surprised that they contain restrictions that can effectively severely hamper a game.

In any case, the forthcoming Player's Book should solve all the problems I mentioned and I look forward to it. Are there any publication dates in mind yet?

Glad to see that 'end of T20' rumour bite the dust

Cheers,

Anton

 

[clementk]

Originally posted by Anton:
Really? While I'm not inimately familiar with the terms of the various different licenses, I'm surprised that they contain restrictions that can effectively severely hamper a game.

They usually don't IMO. t20 doesn't make as many changes as some other d20 games to the SRD but there will be some page/book flipping until you get the game down.

You buy your core book(s) from Wizards of the Coast, keeping them in business and you buy your game book from Company X keeping them in business

Company X also doesn't have to come up with yet another gaming system and they get to put the d20 logo on their books, potentially increasing their sales.

In this case the player's book won't have that logo (being OGL) but since it's tied to a d20 book this shouldn't be a problem.

d20 Main Page
SRD Guide

EDIT: clarified 1st point

HTH,
Casey