Traveler
Let's talk about starships.
The classic traveler PC ship is the Free Trader. This is a 200t ship, with 3-5 crew (the table!), capable of carrying 75t of cargo, and a few passengers. It's slow, capable only of jump 1, maybe has armor (?), by default no weapons, and the cargo and passengers are sufficient to keep the crew alive. It also comes with a 40 year mortgage.
Tell me why this is awesome, some stories you've had in this ship. Or maybe some other ships. All that jazz.
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I've never actually played traveler, so I'm curious, is the "40 year mortgage" thing actually in the rules?
ReplyDeleteIt's awesome because everyone wants to be Han and Chewie?
ReplyDeleteMatt Johnson Yes! And a means of reducing it, one decade at a time.
ReplyDeleteRalph Mazza The Falcon has lots of guns.
The Falcon is not a "by default" ship :-)
ReplyDeleteMore seriously, Traveler characters don't really level up. So the acquisition of gear and toys is the leveling up.
Starting with a weaponless ship is being level 1.
In all the years I have been role-playing (and I cut my teeth on black-box Traveller back in high school) I have yet to meet someone who actually played Traveller with the default free-trader set-up. I have met people who wished to have done so, who thought doing so now or in the future would be fun, but not anyone who has actually done it.
ReplyDeleteSo I'll be intrigued to see if anyone replies to this post with actual play experience. I'm sure there was some, but it anecdotally seems rarer than one might think from reading the rulebooks.
Hans Messersmith I'd love to hear what actual play difference you've seen, too.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what you mean by "difference" there, but I can say that my experience with Traveller was intensely enjoyable and rarely actually involved travelling about on space-ships. It was the '80s, we were all on fire for militaristic stuff, so it was mostly "special operations mercenaries!". Landing on planets and training guerillas to fight the Zhodani, sort of thing. It was all gun/laser fights and small unit tactics. All of us had absurd dreams of being Green Berets some day. Now I am a Mennonite and shudder at the thought... :-)
ReplyDeleteWe weren't interested in any of the economic elements of Traveller, and the space combat in the original three black books (all we had) seemed sort of thin and boring to us. The group didn't get a space-ship of their own until literally the very last session we played (they got a sweet ship in a "Sting"-like con game played against some organized crime types).
In other words...I cannot answer your question at all, and hope I haven't wasted too much space in this thread. :-)
My favourite experience was when I was the owner and Captain of a modified Scout/Courier. I was transporting a rich toff archaeologist around with his nukes and bulldozer. He would blow up everything we came across on the assumption that if it was ancient tech with finding it would survive the nuke. He was paying enough that my ship's mortgage was covered so I was happy to take him wherever he wanted to go. We ended up getting in trouble with the Solomani because we saw them up to no good.
ReplyDeleteMy character was fun too. He was higher Social than the toff, smarter than the scientist/engineer, as good at piloting as the pilot and a pretty good swordfighter. I made a point of delegating everything though. I hardly ever did anything.
I ran a little Traveller mini-campaign for some college kids last spring, and they enjoyed running their free trader; they had a blast with the trade tables, finding commodities to buy low and sell high. The player with the sniper rifle and Rifle-4 dropped out after a while because he wasn't feeling really engaged, though I did my best. Things got a little crazy at the end, when they did try to participate in some medieval tech level planetary warfighting, and the whole thing devolved into internecine PvP conflict, with an ex-general holing up on the bridge and the other PCs storming in. But the power plant overloaded and went critical because the general didn't know what he was doing, and only the PC with the grav belt made it out.
ReplyDeleteOh dang, i def need a way to buy low and sell high. That sounds like a move.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like the guy with the sniper rifle would have been perfect at the end, to deal with the planetary warfighting.
I adore that they enjoyed buying and selling as an RP activity. Do you think this would have worked without tables, reliant upon your above-average BIll-ness?