We wrapped up our fifth gaming session Friday night and Saturday of last weekend. Three players and me, the referee, and all had a good time. We played T5 for about 12 hours total.
Planning
The adventure was a conscious attempt to keep a good sense of tension in the game, and despite my efforts the game still started slow. The opening scene was a meteoric reentry in drop capsules to a world very hostile to life as we know it -- fluid seas, extremely cold, toxic, with bizarre life forms.
My preparation centered around a floor plan of the base they were invading, a sketch of the surrounding territory, a deckplan of the corsairs parked nearby, notes about events and points of interest, a timeline sketching out unchangeable events (for example, the arrival of another corsair with a captured trader in tow), and a reasonable sketch of the NPC personalities.
Most of my planning beforehand was in designing in as many "oh $#!t" moments for the players as I could reasonably think of, but while leaving all the options open for the players to figure out how to do what they had to do. It turns out that this made the game enjoyable for everyone. I didn't have to railroad them, and they were seldom bored.
Tasks
Traveller5 got out of the way and let us play. The hardest time I had was in assigning difficulty to some of the player's tasks... when is a task difficult versus formidable? I would have this problem no matter what rules I was using. Otherwise it went fine.
Combat
Combat was, thank goodness, smooth and easy -- the players had input on cover and attack stance, but otherwise all the numbers were known. Like previous sessions, combat was also fast - a firefight between the players and nine vargr was resolved in ten minutes. Despite what the T5 rules say, the combat in the firefight felt immediate. Perhaps the "one minute per round" is an average; the players certainly did take some looong turns, but engagements are over quick.
At one point, I felt that we probably needed to track clips (that includes grenades and tube launched goodies), but I didn't say anything, just made a mental note to add that house rule for the next game. However, we never felt the need to track rounds.
Multiple Dice
Rolling five to seven dice for damage is a visceral joy for players, while rolling (for example) five dice to try to hit a suited vargr 1 kilometer away is sobering, to say the least. On the other hand, close combat is fast, where the difficulty is typically not in hitting your target (inside a building, combat is typically just 2D difficulty... i.e. near-automatic hits), but rather, in overcoming armor.
Damage
I was lucky in selecting armor to match weapon damage. I chose armor that was in the upper 25% of the weapon damage ranges for players, and around the 55% mark for the NPCs. Even so, the players found they couldn't just mow down the competition, and had to think through situations enough times to make the game satisfying.
My big mistake was in not rolling hit locations when damage was inflicted -- not only for players, but for the NPCs as well, since they were relatively durable too. It would have been interesting to see someone specifically get a leg wound, for example. The NPC with a wound would behave differently, just as a player with a wound would find himself in another of those "oh $#!t" moments which I was trying to mete out regularly.
Armor damage was a simple house rule: damage above AV damages both the player and the armor. Thus when our psionicist's AV 26 armor was hit for 32 points of damage, the armor absorbed 26 points, then 6 points went both to the player's physical stats AND the armor, reducing it to AV 20.
Psionics
Psionics was also a simple house rule: I simply re-used the Fatigue rules from The Personal Day. When the END check failed, our psionicist's "Psi Fatigue" increased one level. Three strikes, and then he would be unconscious for a day.
Planning
The adventure was a conscious attempt to keep a good sense of tension in the game, and despite my efforts the game still started slow. The opening scene was a meteoric reentry in drop capsules to a world very hostile to life as we know it -- fluid seas, extremely cold, toxic, with bizarre life forms.
My preparation centered around a floor plan of the base they were invading, a sketch of the surrounding territory, a deckplan of the corsairs parked nearby, notes about events and points of interest, a timeline sketching out unchangeable events (for example, the arrival of another corsair with a captured trader in tow), and a reasonable sketch of the NPC personalities.
Most of my planning beforehand was in designing in as many "oh $#!t" moments for the players as I could reasonably think of, but while leaving all the options open for the players to figure out how to do what they had to do. It turns out that this made the game enjoyable for everyone. I didn't have to railroad them, and they were seldom bored.
Tasks
Traveller5 got out of the way and let us play. The hardest time I had was in assigning difficulty to some of the player's tasks... when is a task difficult versus formidable? I would have this problem no matter what rules I was using. Otherwise it went fine.
Combat
Combat was, thank goodness, smooth and easy -- the players had input on cover and attack stance, but otherwise all the numbers were known. Like previous sessions, combat was also fast - a firefight between the players and nine vargr was resolved in ten minutes. Despite what the T5 rules say, the combat in the firefight felt immediate. Perhaps the "one minute per round" is an average; the players certainly did take some looong turns, but engagements are over quick.
At one point, I felt that we probably needed to track clips (that includes grenades and tube launched goodies), but I didn't say anything, just made a mental note to add that house rule for the next game. However, we never felt the need to track rounds.
Multiple Dice
Rolling five to seven dice for damage is a visceral joy for players, while rolling (for example) five dice to try to hit a suited vargr 1 kilometer away is sobering, to say the least. On the other hand, close combat is fast, where the difficulty is typically not in hitting your target (inside a building, combat is typically just 2D difficulty... i.e. near-automatic hits), but rather, in overcoming armor.
Damage
I was lucky in selecting armor to match weapon damage. I chose armor that was in the upper 25% of the weapon damage ranges for players, and around the 55% mark for the NPCs. Even so, the players found they couldn't just mow down the competition, and had to think through situations enough times to make the game satisfying.
My big mistake was in not rolling hit locations when damage was inflicted -- not only for players, but for the NPCs as well, since they were relatively durable too. It would have been interesting to see someone specifically get a leg wound, for example. The NPC with a wound would behave differently, just as a player with a wound would find himself in another of those "oh $#!t" moments which I was trying to mete out regularly.
Armor damage was a simple house rule: damage above AV damages both the player and the armor. Thus when our psionicist's AV 26 armor was hit for 32 points of damage, the armor absorbed 26 points, then 6 points went both to the player's physical stats AND the armor, reducing it to AV 20.
Psionics
Psionics was also a simple house rule: I simply re-used the Fatigue rules from The Personal Day. When the END check failed, our psionicist's "Psi Fatigue" increased one level. Three strikes, and then he would be unconscious for a day.
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