NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tom B1" data-source="post: 8456388" data-attributes="member: 6879023">An excellent summary, but I expect that from Aramis. I started on the original release of some of the 1977 stuff and then got the Deluxe boxed set when it first came out and became a completeist (everything from GDW, Judges Guild, Comstar, Imperium Games, GURPS Traveller, Mongoose 1st edition, Paranoia Press, Seeker, and many others). I stopped being a completist in that costs of some products went up while my wealth went down and I didn't get T5, MgT 2 (because although I liked some of the changes, MgT 1 was good enough), and I've only been able to get into one of the big Kickstaters lately. I remember dogfights on EBay to get copies of Arrival Vengeance and some of the other rare supplements from 3rd parties.  And I E-bayed 5th Frontier War, Invasion Earth, Tarsus, Beltstrike, Belter, and some other boxed sets. ACQ from BITS, Striker, Striker II, Fire Fusion and Steel, Snapshot, Azhanti High Lightning boxed set, and on and on. And I bought the minis - ships, 25mm figs. My Traveller books fill multiple shelves in a big bookcase and the boxed games and minis take a lot of space elsewhere. Deck plans span multiple bins. Got a lot of the software too - including Heaven and Earth and Traveller Universe (best software product, just wish the new version would reach completion with a different underlying DB). I've run events at conventions in Canada and the US, played in Travellers miniature wargames and ran a few. We ran one multi-DM convention game aboard the ISV King Richard (big luxury liner) that had a Starship Titanic aspect (computer issues that were worsening) but the players all had their own backstories and goals (among them an assassin, a wanted criminal impersonating a cop, a scientist looking to get the local Marquis to fund his research, and others). It was a blast! We've played in multi-table games with each table being a shp in a fleet when everyone just found out about the assassination of Strephon and with each ship having supporters of Lucan, Strephon and Neutrals and Captains on the different ships with different allegiances, there was chaos and a big board that constantly tracked who was targeting who and so on... wild! I ran Imperial Marines vs. Zhodani Commandos on a airless moon with an alien step pyramid as the objective. I got to play a 15mm scale assault on a starbase one year, and another year we got to run a bunch of Mercs with a Shuttle from a Broadsword trying to raid a village to capture local insurgents (who were secretly being trained by Sword Worlds Special Forces). I've run a year long campaign that was very political and with much secret activity, another that was a straight up merchant campaign, and another that was a covert mission to locate a lost Imperial vessel that had a new prototype drive installed. There are so many good stories that Traveller can encompass that it's hard not to find something to be excited about.For a long while, until Hunter Gordon passed, I was kaladorn on CTI and on the TML. Guess I still would be, but I haven't been back in a while.I've run games from the 1977 version of CT up through MT and TNE (which has the BEST ship to ship combat game that unfortunately doesn't have easy ways to backport standard CT ships into because of the system in TNE Brilliant Lances). I've run MgT and home brewed versions and we tried TNE once or twice. Played several campaigns in Traveller: 2300 before it became 2300 A.D. Didn't like T4's are much, but got the books on PDF. My favourite version: MegaTraveller (MgT 1 my second choice)Why? It wasn't the setting of the shattered Imperium. I generally hewed to a GURPs Traveller timeline with no collapse. And the fact they gave lots of rules including a combat system that claimed to handle a punch to starship gunnery was not necessarily a claim that was fully executed well. And anytime you pickup any MT printing or any of the supplements, go find the Consolidated Errata List for Megatraveller. The editing was horrific and for a lot of the construction systems, the mistakes, omissions, etc. were confounding. But it did two things that I thought were magnificent: 1. They expanded the skill table to give many different skills for a game that had more vision than pirates with shotguns and cutlasses in space (that's a fun perspective, but it never motivated our gaming groups). And with that, they brought a universal skill system. Instead of trying to figure out what levels of what skills applied (in CT, sometimes you had to look at the rulebook to recall modifiers and when they kicked in because it varied a lot between skills), you had a Task Statement: To Fix A Broken Speeder, Electronics, INT, Difficult, 10 minutes, Note: Having vehicle manuals drops difficulty to Routine. That one sentence identifies the task, the applicable skill and/or stat , the difficulty level (3+, 7+, 11+, 15+, Routine being 7, Difficult being 11), told you the time increment (3d6 x time increment equals task duration) and any special notes or mods. And there were tags (Fateful, Hazardous, and others) that added some additional meanings. And the task system included partial success or critical failure or exceptional success. There were rules for being Cautious (lengthening task for reduced difficulty) or Hurried (with faster task execution for increased difficulty).And with this tool, a GM could play with a referee's screen (for some of the combat tables) and dice and virtually NOTHING ELSE, because you could knock up task statements on the fly that were entirely reasonable. Throw in a space map and really I almost never had to pull out a rulebook other than at character generation. The BITS task system is also not bad (free from the British Isles Traveller Something)2. World building with the World Builder's Handbook. Lots of depth, lots of getting to know the world you built and letting the GM make it come to life for the players.I suppose also the art in the MT books and the 3rd party stuff that showed starship interiors, made wonderful deck plans and exterior looks for the ships, and that gave us a better idea of what the world of the characters looked like was pretty inspiring. My personal favourite Trav products: Starship Operators Guide, Vol 1 (MT)The MT Boxed Set & Ref ScreenTAS for the breadth and interesting peeks at the many worlds of the Third ImperiumThe Keith Supplments (Undersea Environment, Arctic Environment, Mountain Environment plus Skyraiders trilogy among others)Azahanti High Lightning and At Close Quarters (from BITS also) for giving a tactical board game option for combat (Striker too, but it had higher effort to get into)My own (or Allan Goodall's own) mods to use Stargrunt II from GZG for platoon to company level combat in TravellerStill looking for a good small ship game that integrates player skills and still lets you fight tactical battles with your characters involved on the ships with ships from 10 to 800 tons (nothing bigger) - Snapshot or Brilliant Lances could have been this, but both had shortcomings. World Builder's Handbook from the MT era (or the later World Tamer's Handbook from GURPS) - amazing generation systems for complex, interesting worldsNice to see people are still finding the game.</blockquote>

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