General What's Your Payoff?

[Blue Ghost]

Ultimately my personal payoff is to entertain. I want people to have a good time with my creations, even if I'm running someone else's work like an adventure module for D&D or something.

I'll that to me Traveller, unlike D&D, has a lot more freedom and a built in "sandbox" with the 3I than ever D&D did with its Greyhawk or one of the other default settings created for it. Ergo with Traveller, if you're house-ruling, you can come up with some really fantastic stories and adventures for players. And seeing your friends get into it by going over their character sheet about what gear they have and what skills they can bring, is pretty cool.

Your tech-geek PC with that body pistol can't do much against that Zho grav tank, but he just happens to be sitting next to a shoulder mounted AT weapon with an ECM warhead. If he finagles the thing just right, maybe he can't destroy that grav tank, but maybe he can put it out of commission with a good throw of the dice.

Stuff like that. and the ability to explore space the way the rest of us normal non-futuristic types can't. Grav tanks on Efate one session, Chamax in Darrien space on another, then Vargr corsairs in another. And again, if you're house ruling, you can throw your PC's subsidized liner into a Mirror Universe where the 3I is the Third Evil Empire with draconian laws, and see how they manage to get back to our 3I.

The OTU is pretty limiting on some themes, but is still free form enough with a good solid starship and combat mechanic that, to me at lest, it beats other RPGs. And when you can entertain people with it, and they think what you've done is cool, that's a payoff.

Thanks.

 

[AsenRG]

Referees, what is your payoff in playing the role of Referee?

I get to play the game I want. And I show the tricks of running a game to new players, so that one day I'd be able to play in their games.

 

[sabredog]

I get to exercise my creativity and imagination since everything beyond what's in the LBB's I have to make up myself IMATU. And I get to play everyone instead of being limited to a single character.

I love designing things, ships, animals, alien biomes and races, and mapping cityscapes and worlds. I love systems and organizing them (not star systems...rule and other types).

I love to tell stories. What better payoff than to interactively share stories with friends in a medium that lets them help write those? When the players are laughing, sweating, panicking, and exulting, I'm having the time of my life through that - it's like directing a movie with actors who write their own parts.

 

[SpaceBadger]

I get to play the game I want. And I show the tricks of running a game to new players, so that one day I'd be able to play in their games.

Yah, this. One of the greatest benefits to me of teaching my kids to play RPGs (started three of them with a D&D-style GURPS game when they were 7, 8, and 10) was when the oldest decided that he wanted to GM. The result was that I got to play in his GURPS-based Superheroes game (something I'd never played or GMed before); his own D&D-style game that started as GURPS and later switched to Pathfinder, which went on for years and all of our kids except one played in at one time or another, plus some of their friends; another GURPS game in a fantasy world of his own creation, unlike any D&D world I ever heard of; and his own homebrew game that he calls StarPath, using modified Pathfinder rules with new classes that he invented to play in a Star Wars setting. Now if I could only convince him to run Traveller for me (ANY version!), or the Firefly RPG (I'm not a big Star Wars fan).

So yeah, running games for my kids over the years had a direct payoff, in addition to enjoyable time for all of us together, in all the playing time I've gotten from his desire to GM (he is ErianFrost here on CotI, played First Officer Kalos Tharr in my SBRD campaign, while one of his younger brothers played Security Specialist Gayne Maize).