Why penalize him? There's a bigger problem going on here: The player feels he has to remove himself from the game to avoid costs as set by the rules. As a GM, this is directly counter to the idea of a roleplaying game -- a collaborative activity that all players should be able to participate in. I a...

Those are all great solutions if you want to drill down to that level. In spite of the implications, I intend to just go with the "splat" method. Battledress and combat armor essentially make you impervious to most attacks. But once a capable enemy decides he needs to eliminate you, he brings the t...

I call it the "Ping-Splat" conundrum: Either the enemies can't do anything to the players (their weapons ping off their armor). Or they have weapons that can penetrate the armor which will pretty much always kill the player wearing it because the power needed to penetrate the armor is overkill on th...

The way I read it, the stopover on 567-908 is written in to perhaps lure the players into a false sense of security, so that upon arrival at Walston, the expectation is that this is another humdrum backwater world where nothing much is gonna happen. So putting in a side-quest on 567-908 might under...

Want to run the logic by me where a non lethal device is going to be less tolerated than something that is lethal? Because authorities want to discourage their use. The more reliable and safe the stunning technology is, the more it becomes a "weapon" and less a "defensive" or "self-defense" item. O...

I think it's very reasonable that military ships that are "going that way anyway" would carry cargoes. I think a ship going to a Naval Depot for maintenance or coming back would likely be packed to the gills with cargo - ranging from hard-to-find and no-longer-produced items being used to refit olde...

I say this as someone who loves mecha-type robots and so on: They're not practical, not at the technology we have now. They're ponderous and clumsy, mechanically unreliable, difficult to armor, and have no advantages over wheeled and tracked vehicles - only disadvantages. That might change in near f...

So what do refs and players think about the odds of a starship losing control of having equipment failure and crashing when approaching a starport? Does anyone use that as a plot device for adventures, or the designs of their starports? I use a rule that the higher the rating of a spaceport, the mo...

Somebody solve this mystery! /Sven He's a professional writer who does this for a living, not someone who does it as a side job. You'd be amazed how much you can get done when you that's what you do for a living so you have to actually hustle to produce output. :wink: Especially if, say, at some po...

As someone mentioned UBI, in my Traveller the pension fulfils part of that function. It's an interesting concept. It sort of pays into a concept I had for the Third Imperium. My Third Imperium (I feel) is less the Lorenverse Third Imperium - the central government's reach is long, but its grip is p...

Personally I don't think he really uses a high-tech method of figuring this out. I think he more or less takes your word for it ; it's likely he doesn't advertise that he has a favorable bias towards former Navy. It's just that if he finds you were, he's more favorably inclined towards you after the...

Sadly, JNJ, it's another case of a "bug" in the MongTrav because it often defaults to "legacy code" and nobody has bothered debugging it. In "classic" Traveller, tickets did not change price based on the distance traveled. It was some idea that came about in later editions (I suspect this one is uni...

Another possibility is that at least some organizations may deliberately limit or restrict the spread of tech like 3D printing or AI in order to foster a continuing dependency. Do not discount the potential influence of cultural or religious traditions on issues like population control either. IMTU...

Does the difference strike anyone else as odd? Ships that can exist for a hundred years but subsystems can't for more than a week. Yeah, it's pretty weird. I think in a sense we're back to the "Ship of Theseus" issue. There is this entity called "a ship" that is conceptually separate from its subsy...

(which is REALLY silly, because I've definitely chosen most of my skills in real life!) ...and did you get nothing but skills you only need for your current career (assuming you're working and not in school or whatever)? And if you truly are such a focused person, I envy you (for the record, I do k...

So what skills do you think we won't actually need in the Traveller future? It depends. I mean the problem with eliminating skills because "we won't need them in the techfuture" is certainly understandable, but there'll come a point where someone like me will come along: "What skills?" "Humanity as...

Traveller is definitely "crunchy." With the creation of game systems like FATE or the older Theatrix and other systems, basically all RPGs that aren't those types are all going to be seen as "crunchy" as they have systems that are simulationist in nature. Traveller is less crunchy than many other sy...

In a session, how much time is spent in action scenes versus non action scenes? It depends on the game system I'm running. Games that are more combat oriented (like dungeon-crawl Dungeons and Dragons) players might spend most of their playtime in combat - it's basically a brief commute from fight t...

The first reference to "Grav Pong" I remember was in the Traveller The New Era rules where it was something a Vampire ship (a starship that had been completely taken over by an AI, usually malignant to some degree) doing to the squishy humans inside. Perhaps it comes from an earlier era. I kind of g...

This is kind of the idea behind the troupe system of Ars Magica , where characters can be out of action for months doing magical research. I'm familiar with the Ars Magica system. I suppose I come from a philosophy about RPGs that is somewhat at loggerheads with a lot of these games. I define a pla...