Traveler Question...

[R Arceneaux]

Walking into a bar in the bad side of town, pointing at someone and saying the word "DIE" with the person pointed to dieing is never boreing.....

Dont worry about the plot line, the Game Master will if he or she is a good one will come up with something to make it interesting for you.

 

[rust]

Walking into a bar in the bad side of town, pointing at someone and saying the word "DIE" with the person pointed to dieing is never boreing.....

We will have to disagree on this, for me achieving anything without much
effort and risk is not challenging, and therefore indeed boring. :wink:

 

[OddjobXL]

None of the above. Traveller is a game "driven" by the will of whatever each group of people gathering around to play it at any given time and location decide.

That could be said about any RPG. But out of the box? It's a simulationist-style game where narratives and drama arise from randomized happenstance as much, or more than, as scripted encounters and events. There are no player empowering systems (bennies, willpower, etc.) or narrative mechanics (ala Burning Wheel, FATE or Cortex).

However, and this is a big however, the simulationist elements in Traveller make for great non-structured roleplaying and emergent storytelling. You can start with chargen and pretty soon you're part of an epic story with fully fleshed out personalities as characters.

Obviously, that's not all Traveller can do. You can have intrigue heavy games if you want them (which is essentially what Prison Planet does) or structured epics (Beltstrike). You can even change out what the core campaign mechanic is by employing supplements with different core mechanics (see Dilettante for an extreme example).

Corebook Traveller is a freetrader, Firefly-style, campaign but one with actual rules for trade and tables for generating worlds, alien creatures, patrons and adventures on the fly. Once the Campaign Guide is out it will be even better at this than before.

 

[Stainless]

Walking into a bar in the bad side of town, pointing at someone and saying the word "DIE" with the person pointed to dieing is never boreing.....

Hmm, speak for yourself.

 

[R Arceneaux]

I remember a little magic user I made under D D 4.0 ed ...

She needed to get from point A to point B and the only quick way was by a fishing ship. Well it seemed that the sailors had this superstition thing about a female on board their ship.

Well sir or mam, when I had the captain of the vessel point out two of his crew that he did not mind seeing get hurt....my caracter just quickly threw two spells that killed them on the spot.

The captain seeing the value of having a broken bad ass as a defense against pirates immediately offered my little female magic user the job of security and pirate defense...

The crew by the way, seeing what happened and what I did so cold bloodedly, both feared and respected my little female magic user.

The moral of that story, sorry for it being so long...

So try a new approach (being good is OK, but being the bad guy without moral guidelines is more fun).

 

[rust]

The crew by the way, seeing what happened and what I did so cold bloodedly, both feared and respected my little female magic user.

Hmm, even if the sailors feared her too much to kill her themselves, they
doubtless reported the murder to the authorities at the next opportunity.
As a result there is now a bounty on the magic user's head - preferably
dead, of course. Moreover, the cold blooded murders endanger the repu-
tation of all mages, who hate to be seen as homicidal maniacs and also
remember the last witchhunts all too well, and so the mages' guild asks
some archmages to take care of the problem and to make an example of
the mad rogue magic user.

All in all, her life expectancy is now counted in hours. :twisted:

 

[Faelan Niall]

The crew by the way, seeing what happened and what I did so cold bloodedly, both feared and respected my little female magic user.

The crew seeing this decided that it was only time before they would be joining their friends, the next time the psychotic mage decided to make a point. Realizing this the crew either 1) puts rat poison in her food, and gives the body to the fish, 2) wait until she is sleeping, knock her out/sedate her etc., cut her tongue out, break her fingers, and blind her so they can have their own plaything who's screams will soothe their dead friends souls, or 3) wait until bed time and have a little party to see how many knives they can stick in her.

 

[Mithras]

That's a wonderful description of Traveller Alex ...

Traveller is unlike either Vampire / World of Darkness or D&D.

Traveller character generation, for one thing, is very much unlike the above two games. Your characters' career up to the start of play is as important as the game itself. You can make Traveller chargen as adventure in itself.

D&D and World of Darkness characters enter play with a bunch of selected characteristics, Skills, Merits and other advantages, and gradually accumulate more characteristic/Skill /Merit points through XP expenditure. The Traveller character comes more or less equipped with all the skills he will ever have. He can improve his skills, but only with great effort: Traveller doesn't have an XP system.

In Traveller, also, the Travellers - while they may have come from certain careers - don't generally belong to those careers when play starts, other than Scouts (who remain Scouts-on-Detached-Duty until their sixties or until death) and Psions (who generally remain psionic until death).

In Vampire as in Werewolf, Mage, Changeling, Promethean, Hunter and Geist, a character belongs to his Clan/bloodline and his Covenant from the moment play starts, and remains an active member of that Clan / Covenant. The Clan, Bloodline and Covenant / Tribe / Path, Order and Legacy / Lineage and Refinement / court / cell, compact or conspiracy /Krewe play an important role in the character's development: in Traveller, your character only has loyalty towards his shipmates.

In D&D, characters progress through levels, learning feats and improving upon their abilities, including their ability to suck up damage: in Traveller, a character's health remains fixed: his physical characteristics, Str, Dex and End, determine how much damage he can take before dying. And Traveller characters do not have levels or feats.

Finally, while D&D focuses on the dungeon, and Vampire focuses on the Danse Macabre, Traveller can have any kind of focus, any kind of adventure: it all depends on what the Patron wants the crew to do, or on where the speculative trade die rolls lead. Do you want your characters to become privateers, to develop psionics, to explore strange new worlds or to rise to the position of Archduke and run an entire sector? Whatever your goals, the Referee has a story that will let that happen - or not.

 

[alex_greene]

Funny, but players always seem to think that the world happily tolerates psychotic characters who kill randomly, when it's their characters - yet another player's psychotic character is so much worm food because they consider that same behaviour intolerable.

If I ran a major Storyteller character as some sort of unstoppable mad butcher character, also, I'd get player complaints of unfairness every time they nail that sucker with a long range sniper rifle, only to see him turn up later jumping out of a closet to stab yet another player character half to death.

Players seem to love it when the characters do all the killing. Not so much when they're the ones getting killed, for some reason.

And another thing - D&D may have alignments, WoD may have the Morality / Humanity / Gnosis ladders, but Traveller has no such morality systems to guide player characters. You can let your characters be as moral, or as amoral, as you wish.

And so can we Referees, and Refs don't have to worry about paying for FGMPs or Battle Dress to kit out our NPCs. Isn't that splendid?

 

[R Arceneaux]

well first off I did not include it in the post but the crew were all NPCs and not player characters. And the second thing I did not put in the post was that the port was in star wars terms a hive of "scum an villany"

Well At Any Rate the pirates did attack and with one single fireball landing in the magazine this one little whisp of a chick blee over half the ship up leaveing the other half to sink.

With reputation well sealed the crew made her one of their own because she saved their bacon.

ALSO her high charisma would later lead to a supurb bluff check where their ship was viewed by a port as an ambassadorial ship (go figure) and painted and refitted FREE OF CHARGE--That made the captain extremely happy.

As to killing in sleep the only problem with that is that IF they tried and IF they failed it is only logical that whe entire crew knew that pure hell was going to be comming down on someones a$$ in revenge.

Fear can in many cases control NPCs better than love.

 

[rust]

Fear can in many cases control NPCs better than love.

Not really. People have a strange tendency to kill what they fear, but only
rarely what they love.

Besides, it seems a strange idea that there should be any kind of differen-
ce between the way PCs act and the way NPCs act. In my view this would
be a sure recipe for a very implausible setting.

 

[vitalis6969]

Fear can in many cases control NPCs better than love.

Not really. People have a strange tendency to kill what they fear, but only
rarely what they love.

Wrong, most people are sheep and will follow what they fear.

After all, who wants to be the first person to die trying to prove their point. Just look to man's past for all kinds of leaders and despots who ruled through fear. I can think of two leaders who rose to power in the 30s through violence, manipulation, charisma and fear. One leader eventually killed himself, the others regime lasted until it went bankrupt.

Poor simple sailors, illiterate peasants every one, would most likely be far too petrified to act against the maniacal mage, they would be afraid to die, they would be afraid of whatever curse might be put upon their soul for crossing a mage. Far easier to feign acceptance and then jump ship at the first port. Spreading tales of the vile mage across the land. Though most would be too afraid to do that either.

Countering that mad mage is the province of heroes, not simpletons.

Saying they would attack the mage is like saying that six men would rush a man holding a two-shot derringer. Sure, the derringer holder would only get off two shots, killing two men out of the six, but which two are going to volunteer to die so the other four can be victorious?

You want more proof of how most people are sheep? Watch brutal fight videos on YouTube. It is common to see a couple of thugs crushing the crap out of some poor victim in a restaurant or store while dozens on onlookers watch horrified. Too afraid to help the lone person getting pulverized. They had the chance to stop these things, but that requires putting themselves into harms way.

As even more proof, look back to the age of sail and Britain's great fleet. Do you think the press ganged sailors or the common sailors loved their officers? Not always, floggings, tough days of bad food and little grog, long months stuck on board their ship. But did they mutiny? Rarely. Why? Too afraid of stepping against their betters because if they did so they would have their impudence rammed down their throats sideways.

Fear is a powerful motivator.

-V

 

[AlphaWhelp]

After all, who wants to be the first person to die trying to prove their point. Just look to man's past for all kinds of leaders and despots who ruled through fear. I can think of two leaders who rose to power in the 30s through violence, manipulation, charisma and fear. One leader eventually killed himself, the others regime lasted until it went bankrupt.

One of the leaders you are referring to was actually loved by the overwhelming majority, only feared by small minorities.

 

[rust]

One of the leaders you are referring to was actually loved by the overwhelming majority, only feared by small minorities.

And the other one survived 42 attempts to assassinate him in 13 years,
and after only a few years of his rule preferred to avoid the public and
to hide in one of his many bunkers for the rest of his life ...

 

[DFW]

One of the leaders you are referring to was actually loved by the overwhelming majority, only feared by small minorities.

And the other one survived 42 attempts to assassinate him in 13 years,
and after only a few years of his rule preferred to avoid the public and
to hide in one of his many bunkers for the rest of his life ...

I guess that's what happens when you murder millions of your own "loving" citizens.

 

[R Arceneaux]

I think that I will buy a traveler book. But not exactly for the reasons the writers intended IF I read all the above posts with their intents are as stated...or by the writers of the book.