TRAVELLER Preference

[Easterner9504]

My current group are active Scouts so have ship, weapons and armor.

However I've been strolling down memory lane and re-reading old JTAS odt. Most Amber Zones were geared to shipless TRAVELLERS with minimal gear anticipated by scenario designers.

So I'm curious as to what kind of parties players tend towards in their campaigns.






Humiliated by a typo
odt= on dead tree (paper)

 

[rust]

I did choose "shipless, light weapons and armour", but in fact the characters
have no personal weapons and armour at all.

Since combat is extremely rare in our setting and campaign, most of the time
there is no reason for the characters to be armed and armoured, in fact the
possession of arms and armour would only get them into unnecessary trouble.

 

[CosmicGamer]

When starting a campaign, I would go with no ship and little weapons and armor so that the players can have fun adventuring to acquiring these items (if they want to).

When doing anything shorter than a campaign, I'd go with whatever the group is most interested in.

 

[robject]

I prefer "light weapons", but my fellow players seemed to gravitate toward munchkinism, so I selected "heavy weapons".

 

[Gadrin]

Wow, I selected Ship owners, light personal weapons and armor
and was surprised that's the majority.

(damn italics is stuck after copy/paste)

Anyway, I'd probably go for light mercenary-style campaigns unless the players really wanted to be in the trenches.

Plenty of intrigue and enough gunplay to simulate Firefly type of atmosphere without the need for combat armor and heavy weapons like RPGs and so-on.

I tend to stay away from over the top type of setups that involve saving the Imperium or the Marches or whatever. Sometimes I feel the TNE is a very good setting, since things are in chaos, and would force the PCs to be wary (not as easy to stockpile things) and still be forced to take chances.

But I suppose that's also workable in an area that's not completely high-technology. I think that's a nice feature of the setting: NO FTL comm and the long travel times, still allow for keeping things uncertain.

>

 

[Gallowglacht]

Ship owners, heavily armed and armoured.

It's a TNE campaign so heavier than normal trav. They are basically RC sponsored paramilitaries.

 

[saundby]

I like the ship as a ref for a few reasons:

It gives that immediate panache of the game being SF.

It lets the group move around, even on-planet, pretty freely when the situation would otherwise be somewhat static. Sometimes a change of place, needed or not, adds some dynamism to a story.

Keeping the ship equipped and running is an adventure in and of itself.

It gives the party a "safe haven", which, I've found, makes them more willing to take on certain kinds of risks.

 

[Easterner9504]

Gunless

Rust what kind of campaign has weaponless crew, it sounds interesting?

Knives?

No rough & tumble starports?

No, "paying good, stealing better" clientele?

No survival kits?

 

[rust]

Rust what kind of campaign has weaponless crew, it sounds interesting?

The characters are colonists on a remote frontier world. Most of their adven-
tures on the planet (exploration, politics, etc.) require good planning and the
clever use of skills, but they do not require weapons of any kind.

While it is often necessary and not difficult to travel to other planets (diplo-
macy, trade, etc.) - the colony owns a small ship for such missions - it would
be unnecessary to carry arms, and the starport security would confiscate
them anyways.

In our view, guns have a tendency to make a game stereotypical and there-
by boring. It is far more of a challenge to solve the problems without combat,
"the MacGyver way", as one player called it.

Well, and if combat should become unavoidable, the colony could provide the
necessary equipment, or the characters have to find a way to buy them if on
another planet.

 

[Easterner9504]

Rusrt Planet

So no hostile indigenous lifeforms???

And here I am jumping out a pinnace to engage Aslan raiders in my campaign.

 

[far-trader]

Stop me if you've heard this... (too late... )

PC Adventurer: So no hostile indigenous lifeforms???

Local: Yes! There!

PC Adventurer: What? Behind the rabbit?

Local: It *is* the rabbit!

PC Adventurer: You silly sod!

Local: What?

PC Adventurer: You got us all worked up!

Local: Well, that's no ordinary rabbit...

I couldn't resist (well, not that I tried to, much)...

 

[rust]

So no hostile indigenous lifeforms???

No, only a very hostile environment. The colony's planet is somewhat Mars-
like, still very cold and without a breathable atmosphere, and the terraforming
is going very slowly.

There are some "neighbouring" alien species, two of them have already been
"discovered" and contacted by the colonists. Both species have a technology
that is significantly superior to the technology of the colonists, and so they
could easily destroy the colony if the colonists' diplomacy would fail.

The same is true for all other "players" of the setting, from the Solar Federa-
tion the colony belongs to down to the megacorporations active in the sec-
tor.

The colonists, and among them the characters, are by far the weakest and
most vulnerable "player" of the entire region. Therefore the characters have
to use their non-combat skills and the few available equipment and money to
keep the colony alive and growing, any attempt to use force against any of
the other "players" would be suicidal.

We played other types of campaigns before, including mercenary campaigns,
but after a while (almost 30 years of playing Traveller ...) we realized that
we had the feeling that we had played each and every combat scenario al-
ready - and several times.

So we decided to try something completely different, and we like the change
of focus very much. It is almost like discovering and playing a new, different
game.

 

[Easterner9504]

Colony

Ahhhh. Makes sense!

 

[Major B]

I selected active military since that is the campaign that I'm developing now.

But as a player, most of our campaigns seemed to have acquiring a ship as our major goal and the amount of weaponry depended on the situation. Usually we were lightly armed. On occassion everyone had to fit out with heavier weaponry, but I don't remember ever donning combat armor or using a PGMP/FGMP as a player.

 

[spinwardpirate]

Clicked "ship owners, heavy weapon and armor." The reality of it is probably closer to a balance between light a heavy weapons.

 

[kafka47]

Slight modification but it still applies for the stats...Ship employees, light personal weapons and armor - owner is a NPC. For me I don't like giving a group of players a ship but sometimes it is the only way.

 

[Gvadakoung]

Ship owners, light personal weapons / armor.

Someone nearly always manages to muster out with either a Scout/Courier or a Far Trader, though there are ways to keep them planet-bound if I need to.

The adventure I am patching together occurs in part on a gigantic luxury starliner, where display of personal weapons would be intolerably rude.

But from there they will be investigating a murder, a decade-old trade war and ducal coup, Vargr/Zhodani diplomacy, and illicit research Imperial and otherwise, before getting to the nut of the problem, and will need to be doing a certain amount of running around in their own little rock-skipper transport.

I suppose a few fights are likely, but I do not stress combat, personal or naval, in my game.

 

[Jame]

I also voted "Ship owners, light personal weapons / armor."

I generally prefer ship-owners, because it allows me the freedom to develop any adventure that my randomly dancing imagination wants, and light weapons only because I want there to be limits.

 

[ThunderChilde]

In my current game, the players are shipowners, have light to med armor, up to ACR's for 2 of them, 1 of them is quite helpless altogether in a fight, handgun and blade 0.

So far the only two fights that have broken out in the game have been fought with bare fists, blades, a stunstick and no armour. The generally helpless pilot got stabbed last night, and the Marine showed why a Marine with a Cutlass and erudite skill is holy terror. Gonna need to adjust any further lowlevel combat somewhat to account for that.

The ship allows me to move the players when I choose to to a new locale. Otherwise, it also gives them something to worry about.

 

[Ran Targas]

I chose the "have ship, have light arms" option although the "have ship" thing doesn't necessarily mean they own it

The campaign I ran the longest had a crew of three operating a Type S that they patched together and kept running mostly by luck. The heaviest weapons carried by the PCs were SMGs and combat shotguns. Heavier weapons were available at times, when necessary, but nothing that managed to be of much use after.

After reading this thread though, I starting to think a "have no firearms" campaign might be pretty cool if done right. Sure would make "cutlass" a more interesting skill.