Traveller

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That's been my experience as well...but it's quite possible Nobby-W Nobby-W would have different experience.
Absolutely, especially given that much of what I was talking about was in Ye Olden Days, before the web, and before most people even had email. Each community had its own unique characters and customs and history back then.
 
Just found this thread and hugely enjoyed geeking out on it.

Traveller - I love it. My history with it is a bit strange as I managed to miss it until about 2009. My first edition was actually T4 because it was free off drivethru. Even weirder, I found Traveller via 2300AD.

I was a massive fan of the old Elite computer games, and Traveller immediately appealed to me in a similar way, except it was even cooler because it has all the freedom and openness of an RPG, and because I could create my own setting. I found the rules just meshed with my imagination and unlocked my creativity.

I went on a detour of "more is more" for a while, especially after I found the GURPS books. More detail! Then I finally realised Classic Traveller is plenty.

I might have missed it upthread, but this guy's blog goes into the charms of playing Traveller the way it was written in 1977:


I have got no time for edition wars because I have found something to like in every edition I've seen. But with Classic you get an incredible amount of narrative and imaginative richness and complexity from a sparse, simple rules chassis, because your imagination is left free to work.

This is why, for me, Classic edges it over, say, Mongoose. Mongoose gives you these event tables where you roll and get told your Scout was in a shipwreck and learned Survival-1 or whatever. Classic gives you the bare bones and lets you weave your own story round it. I find that much more compelling.

Likewise random world generation "that makes sense". I was excited when I got GURPS Space and started rolling up worlds. Until I realised I had rolled up a dozen or so that might as well have been modern day industrial countries. Population tens of millions, democratic, medium law level... OK. I'm not saying you can't create interesting stories on those worlds. You can do so in the real world. But the Classic Trav system acts as a prod to the imagination in a way that a more "realistic" system doesn't. (OK, how did we get 10 million people living at bronze age tech level on an airless moon..?)

I can take or leave the OTU. The furry aliens are kind of ludicrous, and the 2D map is an out of date convention given modern IT. At some point in the early 80s, it seems to me, Trav took kind of a weird path where people started to think the referee aids (like the worldgen system) were somehow actually a model of reality in an in-game sense. There is an early scenario where the Scout Service commissions the PCs to go round checking the world stat codes they have on file. That is kind of bizarre. It's as if in SWN, the PCs were commissioned to go round checking the World Tags were still accurate. It's not so much putting the cart before the horse as pretending the "cart" (the GM aids) actually is the "horse" (the gameplay that takes you places).

That turned into quite the ramble. Short answer - 'yes'!
 
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Someone mention 3D maps?
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That is very nice - did you do it off the 2300AD map? I mess around with Astrosynthesis.
It is Hipparcos and Gaia DR1, some Gliese; 2300 is Gliese, and Arcins from the 1960's, with some "extra" stars thrown in to make the 7.7ly routes work. SPOTS is Traveller pretty much, I mean the Unity is an analog for the Imperium, except restyled as an imperialist democracy (who has heard of such a state?), and while I have made it for Cepheus Engine, I have played it with Classic Traveller, and even Mythras based M-Space. Mongoose Traveller 2e would also work, even though I run it like the Expanse: smaller ships, and human-centric.
 
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It is Hipparcos and Gaia DR1, some Gliese; 2300 is Gliese, and Arcins from the 1960's, with some "extra" stars thrown in to make the 7.7ly routes work. SPOTS is Traveller pretty much, I mean the Unity is an analog for the Imperium, except restyled as an imperialist democracy (who has heard of such a state?), and while I have made it for Cepheus Engine, I have played it with Classic Traveller, and even Mythras based M-Space. Mongoose Traveller 2e would also work, even though I run it like the Expanse: smaller ships, and human-centric.
For a 'small ship universe' capping ships at the original LBB 1-3 size of 5,000 displacement tons works pretty nicely. That's MgT's and T5's 'adventurer class' ships, I think.

A WWII Liberty ship comes out at something in the 3-4 KDTon range, depending on how you view its likely jump fuel capacity, which rule set you use, etc. At the time it was a decently large, but not huge merchant ship. That makes your 400 DTon 'subbie' merchant a little coastal tramp freighter in comparison, which seems about right. the 200 DTon free- and far-traders are tiny coasters, really marginal, hopping round tiny third-world ports and backwaters that most people have never heard of. Again, about right.

A small warship is in the range of the basic ones in CT, like the 'patrol cruiser' and the 'close escort'. A 'real' cruiser is in the 1-2 KDTon range, as they were pre-High Guard. A frontline 'battleship' is in the 4-5 KDTon range, and probably doesn't have a whole lot of jump range - they are more like a pre-dreadnought than a 20th century battleship in relative power and mobility compared to smaller ships.

It actually all works out pretty nicely, but you do need to keep interstellar states relatively small fairly cash-strapped for it to make sense, because if your budding empire has a hundred-plus worlds and a decent supply of tax money, building ships many times these sizes and just sweeping away enemy fleets is basic stuff.
 
What does frustrate me with it is that my friends just want to play "Uber Drivers in Spaaaaaaaaace" campaigns which all end the same way. We get bored and abandon it.
I ran one of (what I consider) my most successful campaigns based on the Space Uber concept. We had so much fun we ended up playing two sequel campaigns.

The main backbone of the campaign was from the Bulldogs! campaign Heart of the Fury, although I did pad it with some scenarios from The Pirates of Drinax, as well as a couple of the Daring Tales of the Space Lanes scenarios. The Heart of the Fury campaign assumes that your PCs are all space truckers. I had a pool of players, and whoever could attend the session that week made up the crew of the Uber Freighter that session.

The idea is that while the PCs start off as space truckers doing deliveries, something sinister is happening in the background. And during their deliveries, they begin to notice more and more signs of this sinister thing happening initially in the background, and later their missions become complicated due to this thing. As they gain more knowledge of the thing, they realise that they can actually do something to stop it before something really bad happens.

The beauty of this system is that you can simply plug and play an off-the-shelf module, or just generate your own 'mission of the week on the planet of the week' scenario, and occasionally make reference to the sinister thing, and one session in a few will have the PCs actually encounter the sinister thing.

Of course this format can also be used in other genres, but Heart of the Fury is a good example of how it can be done.
 
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Funny you should say that - I've seen a lot more 'D&D' games with massive piles of house rules to the point where it's barely, if at all, recognisable as D&D than I have Traveller games. What I have seen is huge changes to the official Traveller setting, and of course there were huge flamewars over these back in the day, because for some reason people wanted to hack the official setting rather than brew their own, and then they wanted everyone else to agree that their version was the best.

Of course my version is best. That's just the natural order of things.
 
Just saw something called Cargonauts Traveller Keith Brothers Lost Supplements Collection (Near Mint condition) on sale from Noble Knight for about $1600. To be exact - one thousand, five hundred and sixty-five dollars and twenty-two cents, US.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on with these supplements that could explain ("justify" would be impossible) this price? This is presumably not some amazon algorithm pricing glitch, but a deliberate list price from NK.
 
Just saw something called Cargonauts Traveller Keith Brothers Lost Supplements Collection (Near Mint condition) on sale from Noble Knight for about $1600. To be exact - one thousand, five hundred and sixty-five dollars and twenty-two cents, US.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on with these supplements that could explain ("justify" would be impossible) this price? This is presumably not some amazon algorithm pricing glitch, but a deliberate list price from NK.
I used to own this. It’s a collection of unfinished/unreleased supplements drafted by the Keith brothers (who were extremely prolific - they wrote several adventures published by GDW, a ton of articles for JTAS (under multiple pseudonyms to try to hide that they were writing 50%+ of most issues), most of the FASA Traveller stuff, and almost all of the Gamelords Traveller stuff before going on to write a ton of stuff for other RPGs (mostly GDW and FASA games - Twilight 2000, 2300 AD, Star Trek, Dr Who, Battletech) and eventually writing novels. It seems likely this stuff was intended for publication by Gamelords as they fit the other books released by that company: there’s another Environment book (the Arctic Environment), another encounter table book (Starport Planetfall), expanded coverage of the Rogue (Scam) and Pirate (Letter of Marque) careers, and some other miscellany.

It goes for high prices now because it was released in extremely limited quantity - I doubt more than a hundred or so copies were printed, back around the turn of the century. It’s good quality stuff on the same level as the other Gamelords books - but definitely not worth that price. Especially since you can get all of it & some other stuff in pdf on a CD-ROM from Marc Miller for $35: https://www.farfuture.net/Contents CDROM Apocrypha-3.pdf

I probably shouldn’t have sold my copy, but at the time I was pretty ruthless in trying to cut cruft out of my overgrown collection and these seemed inessential. Which they definitely are, but if you like the other Keith brothers stuff they’re comparable in quality. I occasionally consider buying that CD, and probably would have already if my computer still had a built-in CD-ROM drive.
 
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I probably shouldn’t have sold my copy, but at the time I was pretty ruthless in trying to cut cruft out of my overgrown collection and these seemed inessential. Which they definitely are, but if you like the other Keith brothers stuff they’re comparable in quality. I occasionally consider buying that CD, and probably would have already if my computer still had a built-in CD-ROM drive.
You buy a usb dvd drive for $20 grab as many of The $35 CDs you want. You maybe can ask for them to be put on a flash drive.

Amazon product
 
You buy a usb dvd drive for $20 grab as many of The $35 CDs you want. You maybe can ask for them to be put on a flash drive.

Amazon product

Yeah, I’ve got one of those. But I’m also lazy and digging it out (I’m not actually sure where it is since we moved) is a hassle. So it makes for a convenient excuse not to (re)buy a bunch of stuff I kind of want but don’t actually need ;)
 
Yeah, I’ve got one of those. But I’m also lazy and digging it out (I’m not actually sure where it is since we moved) is a hassle. So it makes for a convenient excuse not to (re)buy a bunch of stuff I kind of want but don’t actually need ;)
Don't they have them as Drivethru bundles as well:devil:?
 
Don't they have them as Drivethru bundles as well:devil:?
It doesn’t look like those particular titles are available on DTRPG, which isn’t to say they might not be added at some point (or are already there but I missed them, but I tried both title searching and category browsing and didn’t turn them up either way).
 
In general, the best deals for Traveller PDFs are always those $35 CD-ROMs.
Yea, even the Bundles of Holding don't offer as good a value.

That said, the Bundles of Holding and DTRPG prices are good enough that if you just want a few items DTRPG is a reasonable way to acquire them, and if you want most but not all, the Bundle of Holding price is usually decent. With either of these options you get totally electronic delivery which may be worth something, especially if you are outside the US.
 
In general, the best deals for Traveller PDFs are always those $35 CD-ROMs.

A friend of mine has the CD-Roms for Classic Traveller and MegaTraveller. The PDFs of the CT books are great, but the MT PDFs had sections that bordered on unreadable - because a lot of the text in various MT books were originally printed on a grey background, and whatever OCR they used in their scans didn't do a very good job with it. I think it's the only time my friend went to a file-sharing site to get alternate copies of the MT books... which in many cases had better scans than the official copies.

He got those discs several years ago, so hopefully since then FFE has gotten/made better scans of the MT books.
 
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The scans of the TNE books are generally quite reasonable - except for the 2nd printings of the core rules and FF&S. The FF&S 2nd printing seems like the contrast was turned up too high, and it's not great to read. The 2nd printing of the core rules was converted to pdf at far too low a resolution so the text is blurry from compression artefacts. As a consequence I find it's best to use the 1st printings except where there've been changes. Unfortunately that means either knowing where those changes are, or constantly consulting the errata/change list.

I do not expect this to be fixed, and I doubt there's anyone with any influence that gives a rat's arse about TNE.
 
It doesn’t look like those particular titles are available on DTRPG, which isn’t to say they might not be added at some point (or are already there but I missed them, but I tried both title searching and category browsing and didn’t turn them up either way).
Bit disappointing if you dropped $1600 for them in deadtree and then they popped up on drivethru the next week...

Then again maybe someone willing to spend that kind of cash on RPG supplements wouldn't care too much
 
It doesn’t look like those particular titles are available on DTRPG, which isn’t to say they might not be added at some point (or are already there but I missed them, but I tried both title searching and category browsing and didn’t turn them up either way).
Or I might be misremembering, it has happened before:thumbsup:.

A friend of mine has the CD-Roms for Classic Traveller and MegaTraveller. The PDFs of the CT books are great, but the MT PDFs had sections that bordered on unreadable - because a lot of the text in various MT books were originally printed on a grey background, and whatever OCR they used in their scans didn't do a very good job with it. I think it's the only time my friend went to a file-sharing site to get alternate copies of the MT books... which in many cases had better scans than the official copies.

He got those discs several years ago, so hopefully since then FFE has gotten/made better scans of the MT books.
It would be funny if FFE took them from the same source...:grin:

Bit disappointing if you dropped $1600 for them in deadtree and then they popped up on drivethru the next week...

Then again maybe someone willing to spend that kind of cash on RPG supplements wouldn't care too much
Generally, if you want the deadtree, you want the deadtree, not just the PDFs. And IIRC most of these don't have POD options.
Also, if you're such a fan of the game you want the deadtree for $1600, you'd probably be glad that any potential players can purchase their own copies:shade:.
 
After many years of hemming and hawing I finally broke down and bought the slipcase edition of Traveller5 and it was delivered yesterday. I obviously haven’t had a chance to digest it yet (it is, after all, almost 1000 pages long) but I flipped through the whole thing and have started reading and I am VERY impressed so far. It’s almost unbelievably comprehensive with layers upon layers of complexity, but still (seemingly) boils down - assuming all of the advanced options and systems are not used - to something fundamentally compatible with the spirit of Classic Traveller. It’s a true magnum opus and feels like a perfectly logical culmination of the project Marc Miller started in 1977 and fulfillment of its promise: the result of 42 years of growth and refinement and iteration.

I’m very much looking forward to continuing to dig deeper and deeper into this over the coming days and weeks.
 
After many years of hemming and hawing I finally broke down and bought the slipcase edition of Traveller5 and it was delivered yesterday. I obviously haven’t had a chance to digest it yet (it is, after all, almost 1000 pages long) but I flipped through the whole thing and have started reading and I am VERY impressed so far. It’s almost unbelievably comprehensive with layers upon layers of complexity, but still (seemingly) boils down - assuming all of the advanced options and systems are not used - to something fundamentally compatible with the spirit of Classic Traveller. It’s a true magnum opus and feels like a perfectly logical culmination of the project Marc Miller started in 1977 and fulfillment of its promise: the result of 42 years of growth and refinement and iteration.

I’m very much looking forward to continuing to dig deeper and deeper into this over the coming days and weeks.
I called it his Exegesis* sort of as a joke continuing his use of canon, and apocrypha in the names of the disks he is selling. It has a lot of useful stuff such as an alien maker, and expanded star system generation, I also like the trade goods list.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exegesis
 
I can certainly see why people find it overwhelming and intimidating, and there are some odd editorial choices like throwing the reader almost immediately into the deep-end with a ~20 page discussion of universal range bands that feels like it should have been in an appendix alongside the statistical analysis of dice-rolling probabilities. I’m loving it, but I’m by no means the average reader (and also have about 35 years of prior Traveller experience).

I wonder if there’s a way to distill a more wieldy and accessible single-volume Players Guide containing the basic rules for generating human characters, the basics of task resolution, the basic personal combat procedure, and gear lists in about 60 (and definitely no more than 100) pages. Because without that it’s very hard to imagine almost anybody ever actually playing this game. “Here, buy this 1000 page set for $100+shipping” isn’t a very effective sakes pitch!

I mean, I’m by pretty much any reasonable definition a hardcore Traveller fan and it took me almost 10 years to get around to picking it up.
 
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There was a players guide in the works, I have not heard anything about that project in a while though. There is a game in T5, I know there is, I have both played, and run games; though I will say it favors the stat over the skill level, where Traveller usually favors the skill level. I go back to 1979 as a Traveller player and that is still where my head is at, I like a lot of T5 and feel it is worth the price, though I'm happier with more rules light presentations of rules. T5 is good for extras, plus things like advice from Marc Miller, which is cool in itself.
 
MegaTraveller was my drug of choice so I’m not turned off by complexity, but this version (at least so far) seems better and more fully realized and rationalized - basically actually implementing what MT tried but failed to accomplish. I still prefer the MT/DGP version of the task system, but am willing to give the T5 version a chance - at least it looks like he finally jettisoned the stupid half dice, which I bounced off hard in T4. Inflated skill values are consistent with TNE and not my preference either, but at least we’re not still using the heretical d20.

There’s a good chance that by the time I’ve read the whole thing I’ll end up with a hybrid - adding cool elements from this on top of the CT/MT hybrid I currently use.
 
It is great to take parts from, works on its own too. I was talking with Don McKinney before he died and he was saying something about a version using only dice for the number, without using mods that I found intriguing. T4's combat is sort of cool, being by Greg Porter of Guns Guns Guns fame.
 
I honestly don’t even remember the combat system from T4. It’s hard for me to imagine anything replacing my beloved AHL/Striker rules, but I’ll keep reading and see what they’ve got to offer.
 
So T4 combat is basically similtaneous but with some dice pool options. The range is the difficulty in dice. You roll under skil + stat to hit. Damages are in whole dice. Armour is applied to whole dice. Sadly this means armour is a really all or nothing affair a lot of the time. I'd suggest making it damage resistance of 3 x the given armour rating, which is usually 6 and at 18 still makes you pretty much immune to 2d and 3d damages. There are some dice pools, the tactics pool can be tapped by anyone on your side, the strength pool can be tapped when making melee attacks this is basically the strong and weaked blows rule from CT, I think there was one more but can't recall. Anyhow it was dead simple and my only complaint is that armour was too absolute. T5 fixed this but added a doze protection ratings, most of which are irrelevant. I mean, a vacuum suit will either do the job or it won't right?

A big problem with T5 combat is that they ditched the half dice from T4 because people hated them. Instead there's a nasty mish mash of difficulty dice and modifiers that produces some really weird results. The funny thing is that the original version from 5.0 worked pretty well but only used 2d difficulties and modifiers. I ran three versions over the years. The original was the best. It needed some clarification and explanation. The STAMP turn sequence was a wargame phase sequence in which things are resolved in an order that is focused on results not narrative but people had a hard time grasping that. Ah well, T5 is one of the great missed opportunities in the history of gaming, just like every other edition of Traveller.
 
MegaTraveller was my drug of choice so I’m not turned off by complexity, but this version (at least so far) seems better and more fully realized and rationalized - basically actually implementing what MT tried but failed to accomplish. I still prefer the MT/DGP version of the task system, but am willing to give the T5 version a chance - at least it looks like he finally jettisoned the stupid half dice, which I bounced off hard in T4. Inflated skill values are consistent with TNE and not my preference either, but at least we’re not still using the heretical d20.

There’s a good chance that by the time I’ve read the whole thing I’ll end up with a hybrid - adding cool elements from this on top of the CT/MT hybrid I currently use.
Bah. TNE is both the One True Traveller System AND the One True d20 System.
 
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