Traveller?

[payn]

?
Traveller has no levels. You do have promotions during character creation but they hardly correspond to levels. Advancement is mainly money based and a tiny bit of skill training which takes only time.

Yeap, pretty much this. You can gear up and increase stats through body augs, though it becomes more difficult to heal the character. Other than that, ships, property, titles. Its a flatter progression that focuses on adventuring for character goals instead of character stats and/or feats.

 

[darjr]

I didn’t mean it had levels. I know it doesn’t. But older D&D magic items and gear and treasure were often substantial to character growth. In Traveller it’s almost all you’ve got.

 

[darjr]

Sorry, typing along my phone between bench sets and typing is off.

 

[Golden age Superhero]

I would love to play in. Traveller game.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I ran a campaign for 2 or 3 years with Mongoose Traveller--my own setting, though--and it definitely did the job. But I also steered clear of a ton of stuff in the books, including a lot of the tech (I limited the tech levels pretty hard). As an almost OSR-ish core system, I thought it was surprisingly useful and adaptable.

But where it absolutely still shines is in the character generation. Lots of imitators or at least similar lifepath systems, but I have yet to see something on par with Traveler. It was especially great for my campaign, since at some point I had people create a new group of characters to play out a different part of the war, with play alternating between the groups, and later a third team of mutant weirdos (adding house rules for superpower-like abilities was easy), and at one point I even had a couple of players roll up characters for a two-shot (so yeah, I guess that's four total groups of PCs).

With other systems all of those characters would have been a hassle. With Traveler it was just about perfect. Players could let the career paths and events flesh out their characters for them, then we'd fill in the gaps during play.

I'd never say that Traveler is necessarily the best SF game out there, but I think if you keep the tech level on the lower side, it's a hell of a game.

 

[Kobold Stew]

Currently running a Traveller game for my Sunday morning crew -- 2 hrs online per week, with people across N America. Lots of fun.

 

[aramis erak]

I only played traveller once in the early 80s. How is the current Mongoose (2016) version? Has the technology in the game followed the evolution in the real world?

In hands familiar with CT or MT (MegaTraveller), it can feel like CT. But it's actually different under the hood, and has several key diffferences that can reduce that feel... The revised MGT from 2016 is MGT2.

• A task system (Which CT doesn't have) MT and MGT1 & 2 have ones. MT's isn't the same as MGT's
• different design system for ships (The MGT1E is close to CT, but many key differences; MGT2E is similar to CT HG; at a combat system level neither is stat compatible for weapons to the CT counterparts, but close enough that designs and deckplans can be converted easily.)
• A different approach to careers. CT & MT careers are single track, have few cascade skills; MGT has more cascades, and each career is actually 3 closely related
• Very different approach to weapons. CT weapon skills are very narrow, and the primary reason for cascades. MT and MGT1 both have far fewer, significantly broader ones. MGT2 has even fewer; most small arms fall under 1 weapon skill in MGT2.
• Different maintenance rules; each editions' are slightly different. (This often causes interesting discussions on COTI)
• Different shipping and passenger rules. CT has two different sets - Bk2 and Bk7 (and CT 1E/2E have some minor differences); MT is a very close variant of Bk7; MGT 1E is wholly new (but in part based upon CT2E, CT Bk7, MT, and T20...), but procedurally different from all. I haven't bothered looking in MGT2 at the trade system.

It's not a bad game. But one's approach to rules and to setting materials may result in it not feeling much like CT.

 

[pemerton]

I only played traveller once in the early 80s. How is the current Mongoose (2016) version? Has the technology in the game followed the evolution in the real world?

I have an active Traveller game using the 1977 rules with a few adaptations from later versions and late 70s/early 80s White Dwarf articles. Those include modified character gen tables that include some of the skills added in Books 4 to 7.

My players regularly groan at the primitive IT/communications tech. I explain it this way: all the research effort in our real world that has been sunk into electronics, communication technology and telecommunications, in the Traveller world was sunk into creating anti-grav and jump technology. I'm not a physicist and neither is any of my players, so I can even gloss this with buzzwords: the emphasis was on the study of quantum gravity rather than quantum electrodynamics.

It doesn't stop the players groaning, but it creates a suitable fig leaf!

 

[darjr]

Ha! I groaned at anti grav and grav plates back when I was a kid. I knew if they tech was real then time meant nothing and limitless power, almost free energy, was available.

Also I was programming things as a kid and knew the computers were already outdated but the early eighties or would be in the near future.

 

[Bluenose]

The argument on the TML with regard to the size of CT computers was that it wasn't just the computer but also all the control and communication systems and other hardware linking it all together across the ship that was being measured, so the controls for the environmental system and the linkage with the power plant and internal sensors were part of the volume/cost of the computer. Not an entirely plausible argument and it ignored the issue of non-starship computers and communicators which were clearly based on WW2 technology.

An alternative would be the 2300 setting, Mongoose have just put out their second edition of that and it's far more based on modeern technology than the main Traveller rules which are inspired by 1950s/60s/70s SF. 2300 looks much more like it's based on modern developments.