HERO Traveller?

Thrakazog · July 1, 2003

I haven't had to deal with starship combat yet, but we're getting there. Since it's a PBeM, I plan on using a liberal dose of "winging it", no pun intended.

The starship weapons are the same as Traveller: beam lasers, pulse lasers, missiles, sandcasters, etc. The Impie Marines use a caseless HEAP round in the assult rifles they use, not lasers, but by comparison the ship's weapons would be a large number of d6 KA.

Vondy · July 1, 2003

A big part of lethality is how much access the pcs have to body armor and defensive screens, especially military grade ones. If they don't have much in the way of resistant defence they're extremely vulnerable.

I've never been able to figure out how PCs justify a lot of their arms and defensive equipment unless they are 1) working for the powers that be, 2) are operating in an old west frontier style environment, or 3) are criminals.

And even then, consider just how nasty sci-fi arms would be. Without military grade defenses running into military grade equipement: autofire fletchet guns that fire hex shredding bladestorm rounds, gyrojet rounds packed with advanced explosives, plasma rifles that aren't stopped by anything other than e-screens...

I can see where advanced weaponry might make PCs desperate to find non-combat solutions for most problems.

If I have light armor [5PD/2ED] and I run into a guy with an automatic fletchette launcher [2d6 RKA, AP, AE 1 Hex Accurate, AF 5-10] I'm going to cry... after I've found a 4" steel bulkhead to hide behind.

Thrakazog · July 1, 2003

Hmmm... Perhaps I should clarify that the Imperial Marines use the big guns. The players are mostly ex-Navy, with one ex-Marine, one noble on the run, one street thief, and one ex-corporate agent.

The biggest weapon they have is the shotgun carried by the ex-marine. The ex-agent has a body pistol, and someone else has a rapier. That's pretty much it. Oh, and there's a couple of flare guns in the emergency kits kept in the ship's locker.

It's a fairly new campaign, with only one combat so far against a few goons with collapsable batons. The agent knows martial arts, so it ended up being a fair fight. The ex-marine was pissed that she missed it.

tancred · July 1, 2003

Traveller-HERO campaign

I've just begun a Traveller-HERO campaign.

Our group is only three people, so my 2 players are a noble ex-Marine on the outs with his family, and a former Aslan scout (retired).

I've done a bunch of conversions of equipment, and am in the process of building prefabs for all of the gear.

As for the package deal for the Aslan, I just winged it. I wrote a conversion system for all characters, and added racial abilities to the Aslan that seemed to fit.

I plan on starting the team off with some old Traveller modules I never got to finish (The Traveller Adventure, then perhaps Twilight's Peak and/or Expedition to Zhodane).

By the way, I was VERY disappointed with the HERO Designer pack for Star Hero.

The Bestiary download, for only $2.00 more, had over 350 files, while the Star Hero pack had less than 100. And a dozen of the Star Hero prefabs were repeats of the Size/Weight packages included with the Bestiary.

Where were all the weapons and equipment from Star Hero?

(pp. 148-176). Of all those examples, something like 6 were included in the Star Hero pack, 2 generic blaster weapons, a force blade and energy sword, and 2 robots.

I'm going to be VERY reluctant to buy packages in the future, until I'm certain they're actually worth the price.

I'm having to write up most of the things I expected to find in the download.

One of the first things I've always found with Traveller players is they want to buy stuff, and I wanted to have the gear all ready for them. I thought that the Star Hero pack would take care of that, but it helped hardly at all.