Rank 4 skills are extreme levels of competence. World class expert type stuff. So, I wouldn't say that they can do "supernatural" stuff, I am pretty generous with the level of success that can be achieved. Spy novel protagonist level of "something's not right" and whatnot. In some ways it would be better than Telepathy 1 and other ways not quite as good.
Is psionics a plot breaker or OP?
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Rank 4 skills are extreme levels of competence. World class expert type stuff. So, I wouldn't say that they can do "supernatural" stuff, I am pretty generous with the level of success that can be achieved. Spy novel protagonist level of "something's not right" and whatnot. In some ways it would be better than Telepathy 1 and other ways not quite as good.
ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
I'm going point-by-point here, Vor, not being picky.
1. The way I do PSI strength is players roll their 6 standard attributes and place them where they want them. If they really-really want to be a psion, I have them roll their tested PSI score at age 18... one roll that counts. The character then rolls for Talents. If the character is Imperial or Vargr, they have to have a PSI score of 9+ to get trained before college/first term. Otherwise they have to find a trainer during their career. If the character is Zhodani AND they have a Soc of 11+ they're automatically trained as Nobles [Zho nobles are trained psions, but even they can have low PSI scores]. If they have Soc of 10 and a PSI of 9+, they're an Intendant and trained for that.
2. I don't find the 100d limit to be a 'dumb' rule. It's a rule that lets the players interact with the rest of the star system, that's all. Without it, players would just teleport from mainworld orbit to mainworld orbit and there would almost be no reason to generate the rest of the system at all.
3. Both you and Alex are right about mortgages. It really depends on the players. If your table is excited about the idea of paying their ship off early by mucking about with trade, more power to them. If they'd rather not, then arrange the campaign that way. Forcing them to play a campaign that's not fun for them is where the terminal capitalism comes in.
alex_greene
Guest
No, the 100D limit isn't the dumb rule. It's the 1000D limit after which the ship's M-drive magically no longer works any more. So they can't go from one world in the system to any other world in the same system without having to go into a microjump.
This applies to small craft M-drives, too, which forced Mongoose to have to come up with a new variant of an M-Drive which takes up extra mass, uses up to 100 times more power than the old M-drives did, and feels like a pointless workaround with a "Whoops! We screwed up with the canon rules and we can't retcon this so we've had to come up with this extra unnecessary piece of equipment to make your Travellers' lives magically worse, and by the way you can always play it with M-Space rules."
Back in the LBB, there was none of this. Your Travellers could hop on to a Starship or a shuttle or a pinnace, and happily travel between planets and moons without needing Jump space.
THIS is a game breaker. Not psionics.
And I will now continue this tangential rant in another thread.
ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
Huh.
Maybe I'm old school, but the way I've always done it was that M-drives work in MOST of a star system... You'll have to microjump to the Oort Cloud [and desperately hope your astrogation is up to par], but otherwise the drive will get you to Pluto or local equivalent.
Re psionics or anything similar, the problem isn't that the PCs may have these sorts of abilities. The problem comes when the adventure writer insists on following a specific set of rails.
Or, to put it another way: if the PCs have those abilities then write your plots around the expectation that they'll be used.
So sure, thanks to the psion the PCs will know that the patron is planning to double cross them and may even know how the patron plans to do it. That doesn't screw up the story: it means that you have a different (and probably more interesting) one than, "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!" What can they do with that information? Maybe they'll just call the guy on it and walk away, or maybe they'll play along and turn the tables on him when the time comes because they know just where, when, and what to expect. Or, if they can't do it directly, then that patron probably has rivals/enemies who would appreciate having some intel on the guy, or an opportunity to draw the treacherous patron into a trap, with the latter having the added bonus for the PCs that they get to turnabout gloat about it afterward. And those are just a few generic/obvious options.
Or, to put it another way: if the PCs have those abilities then write your plots around the expectation that they'll be used.
So sure, thanks to the psion the PCs will know that the patron is planning to double cross them and may even know how the patron plans to do it. That doesn't screw up the story: it means that you have a different (and probably more interesting) one than, "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!" What can they do with that information? Maybe they'll just call the guy on it and walk away, or maybe they'll play along and turn the tables on him when the time comes because they know just where, when, and what to expect. Or, if they can't do it directly, then that patron probably has rivals/enemies who would appreciate having some intel on the guy, or an opportunity to draw the treacherous patron into a trap, with the latter having the added bonus for the PCs that they get to turnabout gloat about it afterward. And those are just a few generic/obvious options.
1) That's a fine houserule. I was just referring to the RAW.
2) Misunderstanding corrected by others
3) Sure. Traveller mortgages are just a stand in for "all the operating expenses of a merchant prince wannabe that we don't think are fun to actually spell out". If your players just wanna be Firefly-esque adventurers who use merchanting as an excuse to find adventures, mortgages are not useful. I basically have a 'space trucking' chart that basically just says "These are places you find contracts that'll cover your expenses IF you get there in the specified time" and the actual gameplay is adventures of various sorts.
Mortgages are only fun if your players want to lean into the "how much money can we make from trading instead of adventuring." I don't find too many players that have that inclination, but some do because the question comes up fairly regularly.
Probably half of my Traveller campaigns, the players didn't have their own ship. Maybe a quarter, they had some sort of starship that was just "the team bus" to get from point A to point B. Usually a Type S because it really is ideal for that. The rest were space trucking like I mentioned above. I can only recall one campaign in my 40 yrs of Traveller play where the players really got into trying bulk speculation and getting rich by trading. It was like 20 years ago, so I am kind of fuzzy on the details other than I spent a lot of effort on creating competition for them from other free traders, smugglers, and small corps.
ShawnDriscoll
Cosmic Mongoose
Smart phones can break mystery games. Electricity also. Referees need to roll with it all.
ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
Uh, YUP!
In one of my early EARLY LBB Traveller games, I had a psionic character. Nothing too crazy, iirc, my big talent was Awareness so it was nothing game breaking. In this game we were playing in Regina subsector and my character was trained at the Regina Psi Institute. I go to see my old master after a couple years of in-game time and I find him in a cheap startown apartment [a'la Cyberpunk] eating cheap ship rations, watching the 3-V and drooling a lot. Seems he got caught teaching students on the side and the authorities lobotomized him...
I was VERY careful about PSI usage after that....
It wasn't until 3 or 4 real time year later that the referee explained to me that the Regina Institute was run by the Imperial Navy and that every psion they trained was on the Imperial record books [at least in his game]!
I thought I saw somewhere in one of the MG 2nd edition books that psi prejudice is starting to cool down, circa 1105. Maybe I’m mistaken.
alex_greene
Guest
As with every aspect of the game, that's where the Travellers come in.
Your Travellers could be drawn into a campaign where they discover that somebody is pulling strings to get people hating psions again, only they uncover evidence that the man behind the hate crimes and stoking public resentment, hostility, and anti-psi bigotry has an agenda. His political rival, a community activist, is a telepath, and this is part of a plot to get her eliminated and blame it on the psion community, deflecting attention away from his shady moves to seize power.
The FFW, like all campaigns, centres around the player characters. NOT the tides of history in the background.
And tha t includes psion Travellers.
You know that whole thing about "psionics being illegal?" What do you think the Travellers do? Engaging in piracy, smuggling, burglary, abduction, heists, and murder? A whole career strand called "Rogue?" They're not exactly boy scouts running soup kitchens for the Lutheran church on the corner of Fourth and Havelock.
CordwainerFish
Emperor Mongoose
LBB adventures have the unstated assumption that the party is a crime gang with a side gig in hauling.
ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
Please! Be respectful!
PC parties are just trying to make a living in the underground economy. They mean no one ill will... these are 'survival crimes'
ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
And if you wish to do a campaign like that, I suggest getting the T4 book Psionic Institutes. It takes a deep dive into the politics and public relations campaign that led to the Psionic Supressions to begin with.
The molding of public beliefs for the purpose of both positive and negative change in a society is called 'memetic campaigning' or a 'memetic offensives'. It not only uses memes but factual studies, public relations spin, and outright conspiracy theorizing. It is characterized by using all facets of human public discourse [logic, reason, reactionism rhetoric, oratory, humor, irony] in one package to force a widespread change in beliefs. While not using those exact terms, the T4 Psionic Institutes book describes just that sort of thing in a campaign format.
ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
I don't have that one, but I know enough about it to say 'good suggestion'
ottarrus
Emperor Mongoose
About the T4 Psionic Institutes book:
I have been saying this book was about the era of the Psionic Suppressions. I was wrong. The book was specifically written as a Milieu Zero book. However is still contains a great deal of discussion on how psionics are viewed and received. The seeds of Suppressions are definitely in there.
I have been saying this book was about the era of the Psionic Suppressions. I was wrong. The book was specifically written as a Milieu Zero book. However is still contains a great deal of discussion on how psionics are viewed and received. The seeds of Suppressions are definitely in there.
Alqualonde
Banded Mongoose
A mix of fear (of what they don't understand) and envy (of the power psions can wield). Everyone will have a third-hand story of someone whose mind was scrambled by a psion, and most of those story will be fakes. We had witch hunts in the past, psion-hunts are the same.
You are right that the seeds of Suppressions where already there back in the millieu zero, and probably had always been present.
Or I'm just overly pessimistic.
alex_greene
Guest
Just map the experience of being psionic to that of being LGBTQIA+ in the Sixties. It was illegal in the UK, right up to 1967 when the Wolfenden Report broke the hysteria apart and took homosexuality off the statute books.
It took thirteen more years for the World Health Organisation to take being gay off their list of dangerous communicable diseases. Seriously. They used to think that being queer* was catching.
Then Thatcher came along with Clause 28, which became Section 28, and being gay was a crime yet again. Took fifteen years for that stain to be scrubbed out of the law books.
Now map that to the psion experience. Psions hang around with one another, form secretive communities, seek relationships and to raise families with their own. And then you get the karens out there who think it's catching, and psions hang around bathrooms looking to turn kids into telepaths.
That's the look of the dumpster fire, right there. That's the subtext. Whether you like psionics in Traveller or not, they're a persecuted minority, and the parallels with being LGBTQIA+ in the late 20th century, where Traveller was born, are inextricable.
Point being, psionics is part of the character's identity, as much as being an Aslan or a Vargr. It isn't like a career - you can be a former Rogue, an ex-Army grunt, and of course there is always retirement, even for Marines (gawd bless 'em) and Scouts.
But you'll always be a psion, possibly as alien as any weird creature sitting at your Free Trader's Navigation console.
*Present company included. I've been the B and A in LGBTQIA+ since childhood.
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