AlHazred

You can do what you want in your Traveller universe. In mine, the sensory powers are going to be as I stated.

So, my players finally got together enough scratch after four years of game time (both in and out of game) to afford battle dress for the team. It was unexpected, so I quickly looked through my notes and found "IISS Walkabout Armor" which is the less combat-heavy version; I had noted earlier in the campaign that if I eventually let them buy battle dress, this was going to be the kind, as "real" battle dress is insanely hard to find in my Traveller universe (IMTU), at least for regular tramp freighter crews. Sure, a rare few thugs can get them, but they are established members of their organizations, not fly-by-night types who might get the supplier in extreme amounts of trouble with the law. Afterward, I looked at the stats on power armor in the Traveller Hero book for the first time, and realized it's based on the GURPS Traveller material. I'm not fond of how GURPS Traveller suits work, so I decided to work up my own, based on the material in MegaTraveller, which has a lot more flavor. I'm almost done, I just need to double-check my math on the sensors. I found this useful paragraph in an article on battle dress from MegaTraveller Journal #1: "Its sensors can detect a campfire at 500 km and a pin dropping at 5km." Oddly enough, with Hero, these kinds of hard numbers can be translated fairly easily to in-game stats! Detect a Campfire at 500km: I assume this is a campfire at night (why would you make one during the day?) which is an Extremely High Contrast (+5) Diminutive (-4) object at 500km (-32) for a total penalty of -31 to a Normal Sight Perception Roll; note that the armor's built-in Light Intensification system will negate the Night (-4) penalty so I haven't included it above. So, the telescopic Sight Group part of the sensor package must include at least +28 or +30 vs. Range Modifiers. Detect a Pin Dropping at 5km: A pin dropping is approximately like a Whisper (-3) at 5km (-20 or -19 if you use the alternative RMod) for a total of -22/-23 to a Normal Hearing Perception Roll. So, the telescopic Hearing Group part of the sensor package must include at least +22 or +23 vs. Range Modifiers. That said, here are the armors. I still need to fill out the Options. Also note that there are some foibles with the armor values because of the system I'm using to flatten out the damage/defense power creep of the Tech Level scale. 6E Equipment - TL10-15 Battle Dress.pdf

Re: Starship Maps I loved this guy's work for Ki Ryn -- unlike many other, more Star Wars style, products I've never had any trouble using Ryan's stuff for my Traveller Hero game. In fact, the PCs are currently using one of his ship designs for their main ship.

Re: Traveller 5 Kickstarter The irony is this would be a perfectly acceptable thread in either the General Roleplaying or Non-Gaming Discussion areas.

Re: Betty Ross, Gammazon (5e, 900+ pts)

Re: The Footprint of God (?) Why is it in the side of a cliff? Was it from a giant baby kicking out? That would make the adult giant over 40ft tall! You can't explain it!

Re: Gastropod "love dart" What is the specific in-game mechanism of the sting on humans? Does it inject a toxin of some sort that rewrites DNA so that the host divides, or is it more of an Aliens-style egg-implantation device? Does the victim of a sting always spawn, or does it only happen in some percentage of cases? What's the delay between sting and spawning? Are there any side effects associated with being "impregnated?" In any case, the traditional methods in Hero are twofold: Summon, or Transformation Attack. The Summon is easier to determine but requires GM hand-waving on what exactly happens to the victim; however, if victims can survive but still spawn alien young, then this is the route to take. Most people go with a Severe Transform, but that generally requires multiple hits to guarantee the Transformation, unless the power uses an egregiously-high number of Active Points. Oh, and if the offspring is a copy of the originator, down to the memories, then this is a Duplication special effect. Whichever one you pick, it's a Linked Power attached to the tail stinger attack, generally with the "Linked Killing Attack Must Do BODY Damage" Limitation. Ultimately, if you're just applying it for plot purposes, your best bet is probably "Congratulations, [Player], you're expecting now" and hand-wave the points. You can worry about Hero-mechanical specifics later if they come up. And you don't need anything beyond those volumes to stat this out. Technically, all you really need is the two basic volumes, but the Star Hero book is an excellent resource and will save you a lot of time with a wide variety of minor stuff.

Re: Something all SF gamers should have. But it's d20! Has someone done a conversion?? How am I going to use this in my Hero game?!? ( )

Re: The Four Element(tal Forces)

Re: The Four Element(tal Forces) I'm at work so I can't watch the video, but my initial instinct when faced with the subject was "What, fire, earth, air and water? How's that Science Fiction?" A moment's further consideration led me to the correct impression. I need to read more sci-fi, stat!

Re: One Page Dungeon: The Lanisha Crisis Winners have been announced. Head over to the website to check them out. I really thought I had a shot this year, as graphic design has had a big impact in previous years. Ah well. It would help if I knew what was bad about my entry so I could do something more winnable next year, but everybody just says "It's great" and leaves it at that.

Re: Build the Enterprise 90 days? Definitely crackpot, with the emphasis on the "crack"! Last I checked, ion drives can only produce about a thousandth of a G acceleration; feasible for unmanned probes, but not for us humans. 90 days seems highly unlikely. Of course, a fantastic breakthrough is always possible, in which case I'll be first on line for a ticket.

Re: One Page Dungeon: The Lanisha Crisis As I generally take away at least one thing (be it inspiration, a cool trope, or even just an evocative name) from almost all of the entries, I will take that as very high praise indeed! Thanks!

Re: One Page Dungeon: The Lanisha Crisis There's limits to how much you can fit on a single page.. I was hoping to hint at behind-the-scenes stuff without actually coming out and saying it. Hence the Marquis' business card, stacks of cash, and the way the news article "ends" as it runs off the page.

Re: One Page Dungeon: The Lanisha Crisis Thanks! That's exactly what I was going for!

So, there's this One Page Dungeon Contest they've been doing for four years now. I entered last year with a fantasy entry, but this year I'm running Traveller Hero so I wanted to do a One Page scenario I could actually use. I had this idea last year, but of course I didn't work on it until a week before the due date. I figured I'd post it here; sorry if it feels rushed. Here's the link to my submission, the Lanisha Crisis. I've made some additional materials, which I've posted to my generic gaming blog here and here. I plan to make a Classic Traveller style deckplan as well. Comments would be welcome.

So, my players went to planet Bicornn/Glisten (2331 Spinward Marches), which is listed as having a Renaissance technology level. The native race is constantly at war with the human settlers (more or less). I wanted the natives to have weapons which were useful but also appropriate. I settled on making some unusual weapons that kind of fit the tech level while still being interesting enough to give the players pause. I post them here for comments. I basically want5ed to give the planet a whimsical air without destroying canonical science fictional bits already in the campaign. Please note that these weapons are built under my system, which gives weapons levels of Armor Piercing to represent the advances of higher technology. In general: crossbows and black powder weapons get AP, percussion cap weapons APx2, modern firearms APx3, gauss weapons APx4 and so on. Corresponding armor is given levels of Hardness: maximillian plate and reinforced chainmail get Hardness, flak vests get Hardnessx3, advanced polymers Hardnessx4 and so on.

Re: Traveller Hero: Jump Drive Causal Influence Diagram Heck, as far as I can tell, the Starship Operator's Manual is pretty system-agnostic. I'm still processing the flowcharts - while I like the level of detail for myself, I have a feeling it's going to be too much for my player. Plus, my group has a different starship which they've customized, so the specifics in the manual are not very useful. A pity, too, as I think the idea had a lot of merit. Would have been nice to see the same treatment for a number of different ships, with deckplans and a separate stats section.

Re: Maps I'd love to see more added sometime. I've used these in the past for convention games and they are great, but they could use some new blood.

Re: WarHERO 40,000.... has anyones done this? If you search for Warhammer 40K on the forums (do a general forum search, as opposed to just the Star Hero portion) you should find quite a number of conversions here. I have personally done conversions of power armor and Space Marine implants, and I know a bunch of weapons have been converted on the boards already.

Re: Traveller Hero: Weapon Tech Levels I use a combination of the GURPS Traveller TL scale (which does a much more reasonable job at distinguishing the lower tech levels) and Classic Traveller (for the high end, which GURPS hand-waves as "Beyond"). In my game, a level of AP on an attack means, count the BODY on the dice, and ignore that many points of DEF. Multiple levels of AP stack. So, a Gauss Rifle round at 2d6+1 that does 8 BODY (3 and 4 rolled on the dice, +1) ignores 6 points of DEF from primitive armors, but only 2 points from Kevlar. And, I've messed up my chart somewhat, since I had already decided that Gauss weapons have two levels of AP over Kevlar, and then four levels over primitives, so that round would ignore 8 DEF of a plate armor, but only 4 DEF from a Kevlar vest. But versus TL 12 Combat Armor, it only gets to ignore 2 DEF, so even though the Combat Armor has a lower PD and ED score than the full plate armor, it's more resistant to the effects of higher-tech weapons.

So, one of the difficulties of running a plausible Traveller Hero campaign is the differing technological levels of the various member worlds of the Imperium (to say nothing of worlds outside the Imperium that may be either unimaginably magic-tech or savagely primitive). I've seen various methods proposed on the boards for reflecting the advancement of weapons technology. Some prefer the idea of just giving higher-tech weapons more dice. So, where my longbow can maybe shoot a 2d6 RKA arrow, the .30-06 shoots a 3d6 round, the Gauss Rifle a 4d6 flechette, and the Laser Pistol a 5d6 beam. Armor of higher tech levels would have a correspondingly higher DEF. There are many proponents of this system but it falls a little flat for me; intuitively, it doesn't feel right. I mean, by these standards a laser can cut through a concrete slab in seconds, but in practice it takes a beam quite a bit longer to do its magic. Then, also, it means the power-armor guys can just ignore the vast swarm of savages attacking them as they wade into battle on the jungle planet; this may be great for Warhammer 40K campaigns, but in Traveller there's a feeling that a savage with a sharp knife can be deadly to even a well-trained soldier, as long as he gets a lucky stab. Others go for increasing levels of Armor Piercing for weapons and Hardened for defenses. The problem with this method is there's no hard-and-fast rule for it. I've seen people propose one leve of AP for each Tech Level the weapon is higher than the defense, but this can lead to Gauss Rifles that just ignore Plate Armor, no matter how thick. On the other hand, it doesn't have the Warhammer issue. So, I was thinking of using a modification of the second method. How's this for beginners? [TABLE=width: 506] [TR] [TD]Weapons [/TD] [TD]Weapons [/TD] [TD]Superior (+1 AP) [/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]No AP [/TD] [TD]Swords, Axes, Spears, Bows[/TD] [TD]Stilettos, Picks[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]AP x 1 [/TD] [TD]Crossbows, Early Firearms[/TD] [TD]AP Bolts[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]AP x 2 [/TD] [TD]Modern Firearms (AK47, H&K MP5)[/TD] [TD]Teflon Rounds[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]AP x 4 [/TD] [TD]High-Tech Firearms (Gauss Weapons)[/TD] [TD]Etc.[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] [TABLE=width: 286] [TR] [TD]Defenses [/TD] [TD]Armors [/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]No Hardened [/TD] [TD]Leather, Chainmail, Plate [/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Hardened x 1 [/TD] [TD]Lamellar, Maximilian Plate [/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Hardened x 2 [/TD] [TD]Kevlar Vest, Ballistic Cloth [/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Hardened x 4 [/TD] [TD]Combat Armor, Battle Dress [/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] Laser weapons go against Armor ED, which is generally half of PD, except for specially-designed armors and Reflec. Plasma and Fusion weapons have Penetrating, and maybe Armor Piercing as well. No Armor has Impenetrable, it's a function of robots and inanimate objects. Comments? Concerns? Constructive criticisms? All welcome.

Re: Traveller Hero: Bicornn/Glisten (2331 Spinward Marches) I've updated the character brief cards to reflect what I used during this weekend's session. I decided the human natives brought black powder to Bicornn, but the development of firearms has been slow because of a lack of easily-exploited metal resources on the planet. I've since decided Bircornn, smaller than Earth but with almost the same gravity, has significant heavy metal deposits in the core, including veins of lanthanides and radioactives. I would be interested in speculation on the use of spent-uranium slugs in black-powder matchlock/wheelock firearms! Armor Piercing? Penetrating? Huge surprise for high-tech PCs not expecting significant native resistance due to superior Tech Level?

Re: Battletech Starter Kit This should probably go into the General Roleplaying forum.

Re: Traveller Hero: Jump Drive Causal Influence Diagram I have acquired a copy of the Starship Operations Manual (best not to ask how) and will have to read it for version 2 of the diagram.