Combat Armour/Battle Dress and Fair Fights...

[Maedhros]

Here's a question for all you Traveller grognards:

My players are all ex-military (Navy, Marine and Army) except for one Scout. They are armed reasonably well - gauss pistol, TL 11 laser rifle, etc. One is layered up with subdermal armour and high-tech vacc suit and there are a couple of combat armour suits in the ship's locker.

I've already seen what an auto burst from the gauss pistol can do to one of my lightly-armored cyber cops

How does one best gauge opposition for high-firepower vets? I don't want to arbitrarily start over-equipping every drifter they come across just to make fights interesting, and I certainly don't want to overcompensate and blunder into a TPK by sending combat-drugged Marines at them. On the flip side, the game will get pretty boring if they can brush all opposition aside like gnats. They're already getting a bit of a "shoot first and ask questions later...hell, who needs questions? Just shoot more" attitude. I'd prefer that there is at least some roleplaying interaction between PCs and the rest of the Imperium. :?

 

[kristof65]

Making sure that there are consequences for ones actions is really the only solution here. Unfortunately, this may result in a TPK, but in the end, the players have to make that decision, not you. When the PCs gun down a drifter type, there are typically consequences beyond the death of the drifter - family, law-enforcement, friends may all be seeking the PCs for one reason or another.

Law-abiding authority types will tend to escalate things, and simply bring in bigger guns. Underworld types don't play so fair - hired assassins, sabatuers, etc may start slinking around the PCs and their stuff. Messages can be sent by assaulting loved ones, etc.

One way to drive the point home to them is have one of the party arrested upon arrival somewhere, for extradition to planet x (somewhere they gunned someone down). Then run them through a gamut of the world's legal proceedings, trying to fight the extradition, attempt a breakout, etc. If they continue to escalate things, they they will end up as wanted fugitives, dead or in prison.

Remember - while the PCs may be better armed than your NPCs, you have an entire galaxy of legal systems and criminal masterminds to throw at them.

 

[Zowy]

This is not D&D, let them get in over their head. If they do not run away, let some of them die.

:twisted:

 

[AKAramis]

The Noble's huscarles may be called in to deal with overpowering offworlders who go extra-legal. A few marines with grav belts, ACR's, Battledress, and a PGMP or two can make short work of such types.

 

[alex_greene]

Unlike a fantasy game, characters are generally answerable to some law or other. If they go in wearing full Battle Dress and FGMPs against bare-skinned TL 1 natives carrying spears, the Imperium would frown upon the use of fusion weapons against a clearly unequal opponent.

The best course of action, in that case, would be to withdraw, to observe from a distance, and when hostilities had calmed down, send in dip0lomats and trade missions.

(And if the bare skinnjed natives eat the diplomats, send in one Marine with an FGMP, and tell him that he has permission to take the safety off).

 

[GypsyComet]

Arrange a customs visit while they are inbound from Jump. If they refuse it, the active radio signal will still give that nearby refitted Voroshilef (you know, the one with the Black Globe) enough fix to disassociate their component atoms quite handily.

APBs travel faster than PCs do in most cases.

Scenario balance can be tough when your players have decided to take the low road and be ready for a gunfight at any moment. Many worlds will either not be able to keep up, or won't bother with fair fights if they have a clue who these pinheads are.

Governor to Police Chief: "You think they're WHO? Alright. Keep 'em in view but don't lose any more men. I'll call the Marquis and tell him the fist of Imperial Justice is called for."

 

[Infojunky]

Unlike a fantasy game, characters are generally answerable to some law or other. If they go in wearing full Battle Dress and FGMPs against bare-skinned TL 1 natives carrying spears, the Imperium would frown upon the use of fusion weapons against a clearly unequal opponent.

WHY? And whose gonna tell....

 

[Epicenter]

If the players don't play fair, their enemies don't have to, either. The biggest rule to remember is that guns are magic weapons and armor. Anyone with the money who lives near a starport could buy weapons like your players if they're interested enough. Always keep this in mind.

How smart are your players? Do they get into shootouts on TL12+ civilized worlds? Or do they intelligently keep their sociopathic tendencies on frontier areas?

High-Tech Hi-Pop Worlds:

Again, your players are not unique.

1. A lot of GMs forget is that your Imperial-standard TL12+ world with populations in the billions or higher ... surveillance is just a way of life to keep society working with so many people living close together. Consider all the shoplifting cameras in stores, the red-light violation cameras on streetcorners, traffic-flow cameras on highways, cameras on automated teller machines, police car cameras, and so on ... and multiply that by 100 for higher TL worlds. Surveillance is just impossible to avoid. They can shoot people and run but they'll be followed, tracked, and eventually run to ground by security forces who can track these people by their shed skin cells and pheremones they leave behind in the air. It seems to be a running fantasy of ex-military types playing Traveller to play "Great White Hunters With Anti-Gravity Missiles and Supernova Cannon Fighting the 20th Century Insurgents" ... but this doesn't happen - just as the players technology goes up, so does the technology of their opponents.

2. The cops might not be as well armed as the players, but there's a lot of them, and the more cops you kill/put in the hospital, less interest they have in taking you alive. If someone is wearing an armored vest, they'll aim for the arms and legs, and call for back-up (see #4). Since surveillance is so prevalent on hi-pop hi-tech worlds, it'll be trivial to track them.

3. Also, getting weapons onto these worlds would be a major issue. There's going to be no "freedom to bear arms" on worlds like this. With all the high-tech sensors, they're going to have a heck of a time trying to even smuggle weapons out, and they're going to be up against cops who have profiled thousands of people just like your players and will be like, "Oh look, more budding domestic terrorists, tag these guys and track 'em for the entire visit."

4. If there's no difficulty getting weapons and power armor onto a world, you know what world your players just visited? Welcome to Future Dystopia. Players commit crimes here, and they're likely to get a unit of police hardcases who are like them ... multiplied like a hundred times. You know, like Section 9 from Ghost in the Shell. Guys who are going to have Gauss Sniper Rifles and put a hole in the head of one of your players from 10km away from an Air/Raft. These things happen you know.

Lower-Tech Worlds

In rough-and-tumble starports, again, people like your players aren't unique. Think of the cantina in Star Wars. If your players are toting around laser weapons and body armor, do you really think people like your players are something new to the bar owners? Chances are there's plenty of other hard-bitten vets of the Frontier Wars or something in the bar, with their own alphabet soup of psyochises, a veteran's willingness to embrace violence, and weapons. Other people in the bar might have equally "exotic" hardware. It's a rough universe, you know.

Or do your players really do despicable things like only picking on people who they scout out and figure can't fight back? You know, that agri-town that gave the players lip when they wouldn't lower the price on the jeep the players wanted, so the players pulled guns ... and it all sort of spun out of control there? So what happens when Joey comes home from his stint in the Imperial Marine Special Forces to visit home, and his father (sans an arm and a leg) tells his son about "those men" who showed up and shot him up, his brother Tommy, and burned the house down, killing his mom, and his sister and the dog? Or the town all pitches in and hires an assassin to get even (think "Unforgiven" in space) ... it might take months or even years, but if the town pitches in, they might afford some really hard expert...or experts.

 

[SnowDog]

What fair fights? Everybody fights to win. If you're in a combat situation, you want to maximize your chances of survival and killing off your enemy. This is as simple as that.

But, and that's when things get interesting is the environment. What is the law level of the planet/region where your PCs hang around with such a hardware? If it is so low that no-one cares, then NPCs are likely to have similar equipment. Otherwise your characters are breaking the laws just by carrying that stuff

If your players seem to get out of the line with their attitude, talk to them first. Tell them that their behaviour is not acceptable and what you expect from the game. Add to that that there will be consequences if they keep on bullying.

That's the warning. After that you can send in the heavy hitters if your players don't catch the drift. Right?

 

[alex_greene]

Unlike a fantasy game, characters are generally answerable to some law or other. If they go in wearing full Battle Dress and FGMPs against bare-skinned TL 1 natives carrying spears, the Imperium would frown upon the use of fusion weapons against a clearly unequal opponent.

WHY? And whose gonna tell....

IMTU, certain weapons carry computerised sensors that determine how, and when, they were discharged. Logs of those weapon discharges are uploaded from the weapons into the computer when the weapon is stowed, and these are added to the ship's log / mission orders.

And if there's been an atrocity, at some point some Traveller crew's going to set down on a world and see the destruction and, well, end up reporting it. I know. It's one of the scenarios I wrote and ran the other day.

 

[exiledblue]

WHY? And whose gonna tell....[/quote]
IMTU, certain weapons carry computerised sensors that determine how, and when, they were discharged. Logs of those weapon discharges are uploaded from the weapons into the computer when the weapon is stowed, and these are added to the ship's log / mission orders.

And if there's been an atrocity, at some point some Traveller crew's going to set down on a world and see the destruction and, well, end up reporting it. I know. It's one of the scenarios I wrote and ran the other day. [/quote]

Or just logged into the computer in the weapon. Ah having your own gun give evidence against you would be such schenfreude.

 

[alex_greene]

If there is one thing consistent about militaries all over the universe, it's that the thing that keeps them all running is not leadership, or troop loyalty. It's bureaucracy.

There's a reason why FGMPs, lasers etc. would carry even the simplest RFIDs to log all details of discharges.

Each discharge uses up energy and fuel. Which costs money which has to come out of the military's budget. Weapons discharges also mean wear and tear on the weapon, which means regularly scheduled maintenance to keep them in good working order.

If a barrel falls off a mounted machine gun, it's bad enough. An FGMP that malfunctions could be disastrous in a wide area, considering that basically you're carrying a handheld fusion reactor with one end open, so those beauties need to be kept in tip top condition as much as possible.

So. Maintenance records, budget costs and paperwork. Militaries drown in paperwork. And if I know militaries, I do know that none of them throw any of that paperwork away. Ever.

So yeah ... I can see a Marine's greatest enemy being, not some Zhodani shock trooper in Battle Dress snarling at him in a wash of testosterone across some decaying, blasted TL 3 battlefield ... but his own kit.

 

[kristof65]

If your players seem to get out of the line with their attitude, talk to them first. Tell them that their behaviour is not acceptable and what you expect from the game. Add to that that there will be consequences if they keep on bullying.

That's the warning. After that you can send in the heavy hitters if your players don't catch the drift. Right?

One has to be careful about this approach, as it can come across as too heavy handed. Better to used in-game responses scaled to the level of the PCs actions, and back that up with casual conversations about what the player's see as potential in-game consequences to their PCs actions.

 

[mhensley]

Also remember that even lower tech level planets have ways to hurt them. 50 caliber sniper rifles or HMG's are pretty low tech. RPG's are cheap too. How about an anti-tank rifle? That should put a hole in most armor.

 

[dayriff]

How does one best gauge opposition for high-firepower vets? I don't want to arbitrarily start over-equipping every drifter they come across just to make fights interesting, and I certainly don't want to overcompensate and blunder into a TPK by sending combat-drugged Marines at them. On the flip side, the game will get pretty boring if they can brush all opposition aside like gnats. They're already getting a bit of a "shoot first and ask questions later...hell, who needs questions? Just shoot more" attitude. I'd prefer that there is at least some roleplaying interaction between PCs and the rest of the Imperium. :?

I'm going to start from the assumption that both you and your players enjoy running combats. If you want to avoid fights altogether, it's simple to set up problems that can't be resolved by shooting people. Your options are roughly this.

1. Have their adventures take them to high Law worlds where they can't easily cart around weapons and armor off of their ship and must rely on what they can acquire outside the starport.

2. If shooting people is where their skills lie, then have Patrons who hire them to utilize those skills against matching opposition.

3. Make the lead-in to combat the exciting part. Sure your players can win any fight they get into, but the trick is finding the person they need to shoot and pinning them down long enough to shoot. If a drifter they're looking to rumble sees a bunch of guys with gauss rifles and combat armor coming his way, he's going to rapidly run in the other direction. Chase scene!

4. Don't let them get away with shooting cops. That never ends well.

 

[Infojunky]

If there is one thing consistent about militaries all over the universe, it's that the thing that keeps them all running is not leadership, or troop loyalty. It's bureaucracy.

There's a reason why FGMPs, lasers etc. would carry even the simplest RFIDs to log all details of discharges.

RFID? How would a passive tag do that? RFID in the powder along with tags would be a pain to clean up after yes, but FGMPs don't leave that sort of residue. Now you probably mean the on board computer that regulates the power plant could probably do that.

But any Gunbunny worth half his salt will know that and disable the reporting function.

I still have the huge hole though, Why would the Imperium care? The local authorities might/should but not he Imperium.

 

[kristof65]

I still have the huge hole though, Why would the Imperium care? The local authorities might/should but not he Imperium.

Best way to look at that is to compare the 3rd Imperium to the US Government. The Feds don't care if things stay restrained to a local jurisidiction - it's up to the locals to sort things out. At the state level, they let the individual municipalities and counties deal with things, unless things get bigger than one region.

If events start to cross state lines, or affect interstate commerce, the Feds get really interested. Sometimes the locals don't have the resources, and ask their state, or even the Feds for help.

In the Third Imperium, things should stack up in similar ways in most cases, although specific tiers may be missing, or extra tiers may exist, depending on the planet.

Cities < Regions < Planetary < System < Subsector < Sector < Domain < Imperium

Effectively, Subsector government's and up are speaking on behalf of the Imperium, and will have Imperial resources to draw on. As far as most common folk are concerned, anything beyond their Solar System government IS the Imperium.

Criminals will be dealt with at the lowest effective level possible. For the most part, this is going to be Planetary or less. But a group doing damage on lots of worlds may get noticed by the Subsector government.

Other ways the Imperium (or Subsector and higher governments) could become interested without escalation:

- equipment being used is beleived to be stolen Imperial equipment. IE, it doesn't matter if all the PCs are doing is shooting womp rats as a pest control measure with those FGMP guns - if they're stolen Imperial property, the Imperium is going to care.

- a pattern of crimes is detected across multiple worlds.

- the Imperial rules of war are violated.

- crimes against Imperial nobility.

 

[AdrianH]

They're ex-military types with lots of high-tech weapons and armour, and are clearly not battle-weary. So they'll probably be suitable for a mercenary campaign. Start with a scenario in which a poorly armed world is being harassed by a heavily armed gang, and the characters are hired to help - sort of "Magnificent Seven" with lasers. If the characters don't get the hint and decide to act like thugs, they'll face the same scenario anyway, from the other side.

Also consider maintenance. If the characters haven't considered maintenance, it's going to be fun watching the players' faces when they face some lightly armed cops, pull out their laser pistols, and then the fuses blow. And you can have all sorts of fun with the guy with subdermal armour. :twisted:

 

[Pyromancer]

Players will always have more firepower than most locals. A tiny ship laser does 1d6 times fifty points of damage. If they want to shoot a random drifter or the local police headquarter, they can.

 

[kristof65]

Players will always have more firepower than most locals. A tiny ship laser does 1d6 times fifty points of damage. If they want to shoot a random drifter or the local police headquarter, they can.

Agreed. But if they start blasting away local police headquarters with their starship lasers, eventually some planet is going to have their SDB forces blow the PCs ship away before they even reach orbit. Just to be sure, you know?