HERO Traveller?

[Al_Beddow]

I have just picked up Star HERO and while reading it have been considering just how I want my Sci-Fi campaign set up. Then I remembered, I have all this Stuff for Classic Traveller and MegaTraveller.

Has anyone out there thought about or done any work on creating a Star HERO campaign in any part of the Traveller Universe/Timeline?

[ShelleyCM]

Hi, Al --

I run a GURPS Traveller Game and have recently thought about translating it into HERO. The easiest way would be to translate (point-based) GURPS Traveller to HERO, rather than Traveller to HERO (which is more nebulous). Otherwise, you end up having to do what my husband did pre-official GURPS Traveller (when he ran it in GURPS) and just eyeball it while keeping a tight grip on the genre. It worked out well, but it was a LOT of work on his part.

(If you don't already own the GURPS Traveller books, be careful. The quality is spotty.)

What concerned me the most was losing the "feel" of Traveller (and GURPS), where it's much easier to die than it is in HERO. But I'm sure people on the boards can give us suggestions on how to fix that.

-Shelley

[Seenar]

I never liked how easy it was to die in Travaler (or that the best starting characters were old men).

I would use the source material for the feel of the universe, and the eyeball everything.

[Bartman]

Originally posted by ShelleyCM
What concerned me the most was losing the "feel" of Traveller (and GURPS), where it's much easier to die than it is in HERO. But I'm sure people on the boards can give us suggestions on how to fix that.

Thats not hard. If you use all the option combat rules, hit locs, bleeding, disablement, etc. you will generally find that you have a mortality rate that would keep anyone but a C'thulu fan happy.

[ShelleyCM]

Originally posted by Bartman
Thats not hard. If you use all the option combat rules, hit locs, bleeding, disablement, etc. you will generally find that you have a mortality rate that would keep anyone but a C'thulu fan happy.

Oh, certainly. But it makes combat more cumbersome, and to me one of the great GURPS/Traveller "feel" advantages is speed of combat. I was thinking more along the lines of either halving all BODY stats or doubling all BODY damage -- something quick-n-dirty.

Over my shoulder Matthew is saying that in the past he doubled body for dirty space HERO games.

-Shelley

[Jerry A!]

This is something I've thought of doing, and would definitely be interested in. Please tell me you're in the DC Metro Area.

As for ideas, here's a few.

• Use the hit location table. This definitely helps speed up combat. If you've got lots of dice handy, I recommend giving each player three of one color to determine hit location, and a fistful of other unused colors for the damage rolls. Thus, with one big roll, you've got damage and hit location right in front of you.
  
• Have a copy of Star Hero handy. Is it my imagine, or do the package deals "feel" like a direct lift of various Traveller classes. Not that I'm complaining, just makes this easier.
  
• Check out www.travellerhero.com. This guy has taken a stab at some ship conversions. Nice work and a great "jumping point" (pun intended).

[Kevin Scrivner]

Originally posted by Seenar
I never liked how easy it was to die in Travaler (or that the best starting characters were old men).

Eek! I'm now old enough to be some of the characters I role-played in high school! I've missed some of my saving rolls to avoid losing stats, and I'm not sure I've gained new skills for each term of service!

[Al_Beddow]

ShelleyCM said:

(If you don't already own the GURPS Traveller books, be careful. The quality is spotty.)

Oh I hear that Shelley. That's why I left GURPS. Besides some other problems I had with the company (including with mr sj himself), I found their "high quality and control over the product" to be less than advertised. I almost fliped when I found out that their blueprint for the Empress Marava Freetrader was so off. I mean the first level of the cargo hold had twice as many hexes as the ENTIRE ship was supposed to have (by their own rules). I acutally managed to sell off ALL my GURPS stuff for what I paid for it (and am now buying HERO books)

Jerry A! said:

Have a copy of Star Hero handy. Is it my imagine, or do the package deals "feel" like a direct lift of various Traveller classes. Not that I'm complaining, just makes this easier.

Check out www.travellerhero.com. This guy has taken a stab at some ship conversions. Nice work and a great "jumping point" (pun intended).

Thanks for the tips and website Jerry. I love the work the guy did with the standard Traveller ships. That alone is going to save me quite a bit of time.

[TravellerHero]

Thanks for the kind words guys.. right now the site contains non-canon Traveller references mixed in with the rest (meant to be unusual occurances in the third imperium) such as unique or rare weapons and races. Just strip out the ones you feel do not fit and use the rest.

The Alien conversion should have been done by now, but I got sidetracked by the ultimate vehicle book, and ended up making updated versions of the ships. It looks like I will have those up in a week or two, and the aliens will have to come after the revised ships.

and finally here's a contribution to your game if it's going to have anything to do with space travel...

http://www.utzig.com/traveller/iai.shtml

[Dr.Unpossible]

MOTHER OF PEARL!

this site is a beauty to behold =). Well a beauty to a Traveller geek anyhoo. Thank you very much for sharing your hard work. I will be parusing this site often I can tell =)

Have you posted the link for the rabid traveller fans over at
http://www.travellerrpg.com/ to consume. I'm sure the msgbrd there would love to see this site as well.

If I remember correctly, thats how I came across your TravellerHERO site. Some one had mentioned it in a Traveller Post.

[Thag13]

Thanks for the great sites.

VERY well done and an giant help to me as I am running a SCI fi Hero game this weekend.

As its stands now, its a VERY alternate Babyon 5 universe, but every bit helps

Thank you VERY much

[James_Kiley]

If I'd had access to a good traveller-hero conversion three months ago I probably wouldn't be using TE. I gave serious consideration to using Traveller's Imperium for my own game.

[TravellerHero]

Shelley,

Have you considered simply having death occur at 0 body instead of twice starting body? The numbers I have set up for weapons and armor lean a bit towards the weapons already. It should be able to capture the speed at which you dispatch enemies in Traveller. Once you add the death at 0 rule it becomes extremely deadly.

However I personally do not use my 0 death rule as I like to have an expensive longshot to revive the character. (remember the old character generation system where you could get injured during service and there was an optional roll where you could have surgery to correct this issue, but you could die on the operating table? That's why I keep the twice starting rule, it alllows players that really still want to play this character to have a chance to jump back into the game [after some time and a lot of money])

[ShelleyCM]

Originally posted by TravellerHero
However I personally do not use my 0 death rule as I like to have an expensive longshot to revive the character. (remember the old character generation system where you could get injured during service and there was an optional roll where you could have surgery to correct this issue, but you could die on the operating table? That's why I keep the twice starting rule, it alllows players that really still want to play this character to have a chance to jump back into the game [after some time and a lot of money])

I've only played "real" Traveller once, and "real" MegaTraveller once, and didn't have anybody die during creation -- whew! I've always played Traveller in GURPS, even before there was GT, thanks to my husband's excellent adaptation.

It's not so much that I want to kill PCs (I don't, but all bets are off for NPCs) but that I want the game to feel more lethal, and to me, HERO just never felt lethal enough for dirty space.

Of course, this is *so* subjective!

-Shelley

[AnotherSkip]

Another Sugestion would be to have All NPC's suffer from the 8 average stats rather than the 10 average stats, (PC Hero's excerpted of course) thus opponents fall easier.