Re: Classic Psionics in Traveler

[raito@raito.com]

One of the better things about my campaign was that the players learned
pretty quickly to only engage in combat if they had an edge of some sort.

If you want to just do a pile of combat, get a commission from The Thorsz
to clear out some land somewhere. Don't try it in the city. Or join the
army.

Sure, your character may be a badass. But that doesn't mean much when the
other guy has a lot of money and favors owed to him, and pays his people
well.

I liked having a campaign where temporal power was at least as much of the
game as the numbers on the sheet.

Neil Gilmore
raito@raito.com

> I had a player like that.  After the first two or three TPKs because of
> him, the other players would jump him if he so much as flinched in a
> non-combat situation. 
>
> Also, any time he got killed, the other players would have a serious
> debate about wishing him back to life or not.  On several occasions, they
> refused to do so.  Eventually, he was running a 32 point character with
> their 40+ point guys, and at that point, given that the level of their
> opponents was correspondingly higher, they would see him do something like
> that and just stand back and watch, claiming they'd never seen him before
> in their lives.  I guess they figured if he wanted to be an "army of one,"
> go for it, but it didn't require them to die because of it...
>
>
>       From: David Carter <clumsyspider@hotmail.com>
>  To: "tft@brainiac.com" <tft@brainiac.com>
>  Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2016 8:23 AM
>  Subject: Re: Classic Psionics in Traveler
>
> The same thing sometimes happened in our ITL campaigns. We would be
> peaceful negotiating to pay a bridge toll to local NPCs and one of our
> characters would charge and pull a Leroy Jenkins. Usually the same dude
> each time.
> D
> On Oct 26, 2016, at 11:16 AM, David Bofinger <bofinger.david@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>> after years of loyal Imperial service a new character would muster out,
>> grab their ray gun and go on a murderous rampage!
> So many groups have noticed this effect that it seems like it must have
> been something about the game itself but it's hard to pin down what.
> My recollection of Traveller massacres was something like this:
> 1. Some irresponsible player has their character fire on the first NPC
> they see.2. A segment of the party think this is a criminal action, and
> fire on the PC in protection of the innocent NPC.3. Another segment of the
> party this this is betraying a comrade in arms, and fire on the previous
> segment.4. The only survivors tend to be characters who found really good
> cover early on.
> The point is that the characters acting in phases 2 and 3 both felt they
> were role-playing their characters and acting as soldiers, etc., should.
> They saw themselves acting in an extraordinary way because they found
> themselves in extraordinary circumstances, not because their character's
> psychology was extraordinary. It was only the first character whose
> actions were completely unreasonable, but the chain reaction only needed
> one of those to start a cascade.
> --
> David
>
>
> On 27 October 2016 at 01:29, Chris Nicole <chris.nicoleuk@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> I liked the character creation system from Traveller. One thing seemed odd
> to me was that after years of loyal Imperial service a new character would
> muster out, grab their ray gun and go on a murderous rampage!Maybe it was
> just the people I played with, but ew of our characters rarely lasted long
> enough on civvie street to gain anything more than a hangover and
> bodybag!One of our most memorable games was an Imperial Navy campaign
> where our mustering out point became the characters current rank in
> service and we played on as Imperial officers or crew within the
> navy/marines.It gave the game a lot more structure as we were ordered out
> on patrols or missions, but we could call on the navy and subordinate
> troops when we needed backup.
> Chris
> On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 7:31 PM, Tom Ellis <trellis66@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Hi Rick,                When I used to GM Traveller I spent a good several
> hours with each player building backstory during the character development
> over their career, but I also modified house rules to allow for further
> growth.   No RPG rules are ever carved in stone despite what current game
> rules out there seem to want.  A former Marine of the Imperium could
> certainly increase his aim in my house while in game.                I
> think one lesson here is that no system is perfect and we (GMs) need to
> manage that and allow for it.  A static character who can’t grow in skill
> can start to get boring for a player.  That all being said the psionic
> system was far better balanced in that regard than I’ve seen before or
> since. Tom From:tft-owner@brainiac.com [mailto:tft-owner@brainiac.com ]On
> Behalf Of Rick Smith
> Sent: Monday, October 24, 2016 12:23 PM
> To: tft@brainiac.com
> Subject: Classic Psionics in Traveler Hi Tom.  Welcome to the list.     I
> confess that the thing I liked least about basic Traveler wasthat all
> character development happened before the game began.Perhaps getting
> experience points and improving skills and attributes was less realistic
> than people gaining most of their skillsearlier in their career.   
> However, seeing the characters you spent time with was definitely more
> fun. Warm regards, Rick.  On 2016-10-22, at 3:21 PM, Tom Ellis wrote:
> Hi, people.  To answer the question, I preferred Classic Traveler vs. D&D
> psionics  because of how they balanced it.  Be skilled based vs. level
> based, Traveller made people make choices.  You could spend 20+ years in
> the service and have mad skills, but at that point you also wouldn’t be
> able to achieve your full psionic potential.  Then there was the whole
> drama of finding a Guild to study at. So, as an introduction.  Hi again. 
> My name is Tom and I still have my paper D&D books from the 70s.  I look
> forward to more fruitful discussions on this list.
>  
>
>
>
>
>
>
>