Selling Starting Gear

Jak Nazryth

Mongoose
I know you cannot sell or trade ship shares, but what about the free gear for mustering out benefits?
Small Craft is the same as a ship share, you cant sell it for cash or trade it for other gear. If you don't want the small craft, I think you can trade it for a ship share, right?

There is a guy in the game on Saturday nights (a game where I am playing a smuggler) and a guy on my Thursday game (he is playing a scout), both have gotten "armor" multiple times. Both are getting TL-12 combat armor and selling it. For my Thursday guy, I've said "ok" but imposed a "half book value" penalty that is typical to virtually every RGP, "gear/weapons" can be sold at half value.
The Saturday guy is expecting to sell his armor at full value, or at least the GM doesn't realize it yet, or at least he has not made a decision.

Is there a hard rule any where under the new system that covers starting gear for cash?

Another guy who is playing a Darian in the Saturday Game (he is 98 years old and had 20 terms!!!) got "vehicle " 4 times. We all know the first time you roll a benefit you can get the item and the second roll you can elect to take the skill, or simply anther item. Can he take air/raft multiple times and sell off the spares?
Because he can get a giant bag of cash fast that way.

Has this issue come up before in your games?
 
Once you start play you can sell anything you want?

What you get as mustering out benefits are not new items, but a well-used item you acquired years ago and have used since then. Let the greedy players go to a used vehicle lot and let them haggle...
640px-2011-05-07_Rusty_truck_behind_Fullsteam_Brewery.jpg
 
Interesting. Have never actually had anyone turn down the skill ranks. But, I've only played with lower-term characters [more on that below], so we were hungrier for skill ranks.

I might say they're free to sell them in character, at the table, once play starts. Not just cash them in during char-gen, because that would have been a cash roll not a benefit roll. But if they want to literally haul all them all around until they find a buyer they're welcome to do that.

But, actually, if you are worried about the cash, I can see a case for capping them at one ship's boat/air raft/suit of combat armor and making them take the skill ranks. There's not any hard rule about that to my knowledge, it would be a GM ruling, but wholly within your prerogative if you feel it's needed to balance the game.

Jak Nazryth said:
Another guy who is playing a Darian in the Saturday Game (he is 98 years old and had 20 terms!!!) got "vehicle " 4 times. ...

So... that there in bold is part of how this came up. A group of characters with up to 20 terms is going to run up against some issues that a campaign that caps characters at 4 or 5 terms (common in my experience) is never going to run up against. This is not a criticism, not telling you how to play, it just bears stating as a lead-in to saying you shouldn't be afraid to make your own rulings if somethings not covered.

Acknowledging you're already past it, I like Mongoose's default char-gen with a set limit on terms. It tends to produce characters roughly in the same band of competence, without the runaway effects of high-stat admirals getting lucky on aging and low-stat deckhands retiring out after a bad roll.

If you don't have a set limit, there's a functional argument for Classic's hard-core death in char-gen approach. There's a valuable balancing dynamic in it, where if you roll crap for stats you go Scout trying to get killed to re-roll, and either you do, or you live long enough to get the skills to decide you want to play the character after all. Whereas if you roll a Greek demi-god in stats you probably go Navy and hope for a commission, but in the back of your mind you have to be thinking of that survival roll, and maybe you muster out earlier than otherwise before you lose the character entirely.
 
I set an absolute max of 10 terms. I suggest 8 terms. But with anagathics you can be in your 50's and have the phycial appearacne and abilities as someone in their late 20's, early 30's
The GM that runs the game on Saturday night (that's the game where I get to play) has the 98 year old "Space Elf" with 20 term. My smuggler character tapped out with 7 terms.

In my game you I simply say you can sell your gear for half book value, but it never came up until last week when my friend rolled 3 times on the cash benefit table, then more than half of his other benefits ended up as "armor". He had 5 suits of armor as a benefit! Out of 6 rolls he rolled "armor" 5 times! He took one suite of armor, then took the skill vacc suit, and asked if he could sell the other 3, so I just made it up on the spot... "Yes, at half book value".
 
Isn't the smallcraft forty year surplus?

While the smallcraft's original sticker price is ten million, it's bluebook value might be rather less.
 
Anagathics aren't free. They can be very expensive plus you have to roll your survival roles twice while on them.
After your career is over, it's 2k per month and you roll immediately for aging if you ever miss a dose.
It's up to the player if they want to take them. I set the limit on max terms but I'm not going to prevent the players from using the rules as written.
Some GM's have an adversarial relationship with their players and throw up road blocks at every turn. I do not. If its in the rules, they can do it. But they also take all the risk of the downside.
Personally I don't think they are worth the cost. The characters I create avoid them. (Ok as of last week I got to create my first Traveller character since 2009)
I never seem to get to play Traveller, I always GM. This time I get to do both. :)

Anyway I'm not going to screw the players out of something within the rules.
 
Jak Nazryth said:
Anagathics aren't free.
Check out MgT2 or CT. Anagathics are more expensive and more difficult to get hold of.


Jak Nazryth said:
Some GM's have an adversarial relationship with their players and throw up road blocks at every turn. I do not. If its in the rules, they can do it.
I quite agree, but MgT seems to make it too easy, I would prefer the MgT2 rules.
 
aH..
I'm using MgT1 so I guess that's where some of the cross talk is coming from.
I wanted to use MgT2 but simply didn't have enough time to fully read the rules, plus everyone else only has MgT1 rules.
I'm incorporating the new rules for training, duel wielding, and boon/bane dice when it it's appropriate.
 
And I knew people who played Darrians before, but in my old campaigns I limited everyone to 4 terms, so aging wasn't a real factor anyway... but last week the this younger guy wanted to play a "space Elf" that's when I realized the huge differences between Darrian and normal Human aging.

My friend who is running the Saturday game thought this young guy was making multiple characters (we all made 2-3 and picked the best one that made sense for the party) but in reality he kept going until his 20th term, fighting off aging with anagathics! The GM almost refused to accept the character, but the kid was having soooo much fun creating "grand dad" lol... that he allowed it. Plus he DID fail his aging rolls a couple of times. His Str and End add up to a grand total of 7. This 98 year old might be smart as a whip, but he can get taken out with a single shot of an average pistol. He won't last long in a fight.
But at least the kid had fun creating him. It is his first time playing Traveller.
 
You could find the age of an item just by extrapolating what career path he received it from, and which roll it came from. You served five terms, and your first three terms were as a marine. You received 2 rolls, one from your first term, and one from your third. You take equipment rolls. The first one gives you a weapon, and the second armor. The weapon is around 20 years old and the armor around 12. Of course that's assuming your players kept solid records about their character creation. I tend to require it so I know where I can work NPCs and whatnot into the story. Knowing when and where they had some special event or mishap can be very useful and make the world feel a lot more alive!

As far as anything they mustered out with that they want to sell, I say let them do so but only after the game starts. Use the speculative trading rules. Make them find a buyer, and haggle over price. It's more interesting than just giving them full value for old equipment and they won't feel cheated by the GM for setting some arbitrary "used" value.
 
Jak Nazryth said:
Because he can get a giant bag of cash fast that way.

I generally use a rule that say you can only ever get one item reward. If you roll it again, you may either elect to get the skill or just reroll the table.

Though to be honest, a character having a mountain of money isn't the problem it may seem at first. Many GMs fear what happens when they can't motivate a player with money ... but that isn't the GM's problem. That's the player's problem. If his character is doing things for money ... yet he has 2 million credits ... what's he doing with a bunch of archetypical tramps on board a leaky free trader that barely makes ends meet? Two million credits is enough to retire on. If he's doing it for adventure and excitement, then he shouldn't be that concerned with how much he's being paid. If he wants to pay off the ship or something -- let him, but ask him if his character would really do that. That's like four friends pitching in to buy a house to live in. What happens if one wants to leave and take his share with him? What happens if he wants to leave? Would he really do this? If he wants to pay the bills for everything, let him. Eventually he's going to start getting irritated when everytime the party wants a new missile a or new G-carrier they simply expect him to the group bank account. At that point, the problem will solve itself.
 
There is no way I'm going to give aging rolls for crappy old used equipment that characters get for mustering out benefits. Show me in the rules where it states a vehicle is an 80 year old rust bucket.
If the mustering out benefits intend the gear to be old and worn out, it would state that fact in writing and you would have to role a quirk for every 10 years of age. All it says is characters pick up the gear during their terms in service. The gear they revive has the exact same stats as a brand new piece of gear in the core book, CSC, or any other supplement. It's all behaves just like brand new gear.

I'm not going to suddenly start imposing penalties on old crappy gear that's been in the rules for decades. My job as a GM is not to f*ck my players on something as insignificant as a simple mustering-out benefit.

I've already informed the guy with the 5 suites of armor that he cannot take the same set of armor multiple times because the way the rules are written, it says you can chose another type of armor if you roll it multiple times in essence.
Sorry, I'm at work... (I am always at work these days) so I'm not going to quote the rules word for word. But after re-reading the mustering out rules.. no multiple sets of combat armor.

The GM from Saturday came up with a pretty good solution. A character CAN trade in his gear for cash, but it is at either half book value OR it maxes out at the characters max cash benefit of the career he got the benefit from in the first place.

You want trade in that extra grav-vehicle for cash? Sure, here's 10,000 credits! Sucker! :)

Good luck with your speculative trading with that! Personally I would take a GUV, Grav-Bike, and Flyer-Grav skill for my 3 vehicle befit rolls.

For the multiple suite of armor the player in question can get sub-dermal, combat armor, vacc-suite skill (or battle dress) skill, then light Weight poly-carapace, boarding vacc-suite, advanced cloth, or what every he wants. If he want's to trade any of that in for cash, he gets' half price or maximum cash benefit allowed on his mustering out table, without the gambling skill modifier.

I think that is a pretty reasonable solution
 
Jak Nazryth said:
There is no way I'm going to give aging rolls for crappy old used equipment that characters get for mustering out benefits. Show me in the rules where it states a vehicle is an 80 year old rust bucket.
If the mustering out benefits intend the gear to be old and worn out, it would state that fact in writing and you would have to role a quirk for every 10 years of age. All it says is characters pick up the gear during their terms in service. The gear they receive has the exact same stats as a brand new piece of gear in the core book, CSC, or any other supplement. It's all behaves just like brand new gear.

I'm not going to suddenly start imposing penalties on old crappy gear that's been in the rules for decades. My job as a GM is not to f*ck my players on something as insignificant as a simple mustering-out benefit.

I've already informed the guy with the 5 suites of armor that he cannot take the same set of armor multiple times because the way the rules are written, it says you can chose another type of armor if you roll it multiple times in essence.
Sorry, I'm at work... (I am always at work these days) so I'm not going to quote the rules word for word. But after re-reading the mustering out rules.. no multiple sets of combat armor.

The GM from Saturday came up with a pretty good solution. A character CAN trade in his gear for cash, but it is at either half book value OR it maxes out at the characters max cash benefit of the career he got the benefit from in the first place.

You want trade in that extra grav-vehicle for cash? Sure, here's 10,000 credits! Sucker! :)

Good luck with your speculative trading with that! Personally I would take a GUV, Grav-Bike, and Flyer-Grav skill for my 3 vehicle befit rolls.

For the multiple suite of armor the player in question can get sub-dermal, combat armor, vacc-suite skill (or battle dress) skill, then light Weight poly-carapace, boarding vacc-suite, advanced cloth, or what every he wants. If he want's to trade any of that in for cash, he gets' half price or maximum cash benefit allowed on his mustering out table, without the gambling skill modifier.

I think that is a pretty reasonable solution
 
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