Scott Ruggels

Well the "Interpersonal Interaction", often led, as it does in D&D , to some sort of Empire building. The Melodrama was in service to a goal of taking over some stellar locality. Again, probably not your thing, but it kept the men and women at the table united on a goal. However, I was not the GM. How would I GM Traveller? Probably ta;;k to the players some, to at least get an idea of what they want to do, because like Hero, you can do pretty much anything in Traveller. The short lived All Vargr game had them as "policy implementation specialist (hired guns) for a few corporations outside of the Imperium. But as a GMI am flexible to a point. I am curious enough to want to run Travgeller again, or play it. Traveller Hero? Probably, but in 5th Edition, if not earlier.

Create once, cry once. Play for years.

How to get to stranded folks, in a hurry in crap weat5her that a helicopter can't handle? use a jetpack!

I think it's just a combination of the women, and the GM. in those days I was a professional player, and didn't start GMing until Fantasy Hero became "official". But back in the Traveller days we a couple of women that had a Nobility fixation. In the most recent game (last year), the game was the Papers & Paychecks medium low risk game, after the crew got bit by armed opposition in a couple of missions (and the re-occurring NPCs sometimes were hilarious), and only towards the end did we start taking a look at nearly uninhabited planets. I think the most extreme example was one woman who at one point, snapped, and would not play in any further games that had the possibility of fatal encounters any more, and went total Melodrama, so we only saw her in Champions games, and she went off for her princess adventures that the rest of us avoided (I faded out of that group soon after that). So it really is a case of GMs and the interactions with certain players is what tends the flavor the games IMO.

I think I was a little later, with my SF being different authors and a heavier dose of shows like UFO, Space 1999, and such. I've read and enjoyed the Heinlein juveniles, and I think I have read a couple of his other stuff, here and there, but I was reading a lot of just about everything back then, so I had a lot of different influences. The Expanse has been one of my favorite recent shows, mostly because of the Hard Science approach, and substituting acceleration for gravity, because of the Epstein drive allowing for multi-day 1G burns. Also the whole "Protomolecule" subplot was a right and proper "Space Mystery", and there have been few GMs that I have gamed with, that had enough of a science background to pull that off, so in a gaming situation, it takes a high level of education, and a lot of prep to get something like that to not only work, but survive the barrage of elegant, and educated, as well as bone headed questions from the players. L.D.Garret's "Polarized Gravity" Subplot was probably the pinnacle of that, and it predated Star Wars Prequels by About 5 years. In another thread, That touched on the decline of homebrew content, and the assumption of GMs competent at Homebrew, it's still a question of time. Right now Time is stolen by anything with a screen, but more specifically social media, and short form video. Time is also stolen by overtime at work. So there really isn't a lot of time for prep or homebrew items, with some notable exceptions. The Creator of Traveller, Marc W. Miller is ambivalent about much of the background that was created for it, having a much more minimalist approach to the game, than other people, at that particular point in time. The hobby caught up with him a decade or so later, but in the mean time enthusiastic players filled in the background, for other enthusiastic players who purchased the published material, and kept GDW afloat. Now, the paradigm is that a full adventure is provided to the GM, including as much detail as can be included in the book to run the adventure, and cover for player induced divergence, so as to prevent the adventure from feeling on rails (See Pathfinder Adventure paths). It's not 1983 any more. The Politics in the Prequels made it's point, though Lucas wrote some very bad dialogue, due to some harebrained theory about "Mythic acting", which marred the movie. It's a valid critique on a way for Democracies to fall into tyranny. But in games, in my experience, the more women in the game, the more "socially" focused it got. In games with no Women at the table, a lot of the Traveller games became Tactical war games, which I quite enjoyed.

Waiting on getting paid for an art commission, but yes still interested.

I used to play a lot of Traveller. I think I played D&D for about a year, before the first Traveller books came out. We didn’t quite understand the rules, but had a lot of fun with it, and eventually worked out the kinks. Also, we tried a number of systems as well, until champions was released in the summer of 1981. We still occasionally play Traveller concurrently. I played in Matheson’s fairly vanilla campaign in the Spinward Marches, where we used High Guard to build ships. I also played briefly in Paul Gazis’ Eight Worlds campaign, which was ner total home brew (as he was a NASA engineer at NASA Ames), and had a very 16th Century feel, socially, after a collapse of the Star Empire. In College, even after abandoning most other game systems for Hero, I got an invite into L. Douglas Garrett’s Traveller campaign, which invoked a fair amount of an intrigue of noble house, and Small Unit, Special Operations. Even recently, in Roll20, our D&D group gave Mongoose 2nd Edition Traveller a year of play, before returning to D&D 5e. So I have experienced a lot of different flavors of Traveller in my 45 years of gaming experience. In the early days, the exploratory nature might have been overstated, depending on the group. Sure, there was a good set of rules for generating sub sectors, and then the planetary ecology, but the enthusiasm for “frontier” style gaming was inversely proportional to the number of women in the group, and we had a few. The women would steer the play more towards social roleplay and interacting with the noble houses in the Spinward Marches, and would shy away from open conflicts and kinetic operations. Heists and abductions became common as well. On the other side of things, we also tried out the ship combat rules as a pure wargame for an afternoon, involving a few of us. Back then we had an embarrassment of riches of gaming groups, and people would swap in and out. One of the things I learned was tha different groups has very different play styles. The rules then, and now supported all of them ( even my short lived, all Vargr ship and mercenary unit, that was probably proto-furry, even if there was a moderate body count.) Not everyone was enamored of frontier exploration, the recent campaign was pure trade and profit, with us taking minimal risk if we could help it. Some campaigns were intricate ASOIAF political maneuvering. It all depended on the desires of the group, and those desires became clear usually by the second r third contract that the ship accepted. It also generally helped when the players, and the GM, kind of discussed the campaign over the meal breaks, during other campaigns, so when the current champions campaign or D&D ended, there was some idea and agreement on what the Traveller campaign would look like. My tastes ran towards being a tourist rather than an explorer, enjoying the scenery of other civilizations, and settled planets, going to TL5 planets to buy hand made bespoke suits and shirts for bargain prices, watching the local air races, buying something for my lapel from the little Vargr flower seller, talking to the locals about the news, and partaking of the local food. Either being a merchant or mercenary suited me just fine. As such I like the published material. for those that want to explore uncharted space, there is plenty of blank map out there. Travellermap.com illustrates what has been documented, but also where the edges of the map are. Just use the various generation rules and such to fill in the sub sectors as you go along. It does take time to do it though. Running Traveller on a Hero I haven’t tried yet, myself, but Duke seems to have had a fair amount of success with it. I would definitely want to give it a try, but then how much of the regular system do you replace with Hero? I would probably not use Hero for ship combat. The idea of dropping the tech due to jump energies I thought was preposterous, until I remembered the modular electronic systems I had invented for a Hero based SolarSystem campaign. No WiFi and all programs hard wired in to the modules that would snap together like Legos or Technics, to prevent outside hacking, or failure due to cosmic Ray damage. So you would put the plastic nodes together to make the computer do the thing you wanted to do. The more nodes, the higher the power consumption, and the more heat it put out, but the system was far more robust and easily repaired than Microchip based tech, that could be fried by a solar flare, or be hacked by malicious code from outside. Little nodes would then themselves become a commodity based on what function they could do and how rare or common they were. The computer room would then be these semi-random looking collections of Lego looking bricks, with fat cables coming out. However, with this system, functions could be distributed all over the ship, so that hits don’t disable all computer functions, and having spare bins of modules would allow for easy repair, or after hours tinkering to improve, or invent new programs. The other idea was reverting to electromechanical fire control, but that didn’t go too far. I know how Battleships and Submarines did it, but not with too much detail, other than that they were analogue and relied on skilled machining to make the forms within the device, necessary for the ballistic calculations. I rambled, but then Traveller causes me to, due to my history with it. But part of my twitch about the change in the tech, was it felt like it pushed Traveller into a pulp paradigm. Traveller, to me now has become its own genre. Sure, in the beginning it was a first generation “universal system”, but due to publications, and a lot of cooperation between groups, it has become its own thing. Sure, enough of the universal mechanics are still there that you can homebrew one’s own background. But why pulp, or worse Sword & Planet? 😁 I’d much prefer seeing something more like The Expanse. But that’s just me. Anyway, these are my thoughts on Traveller, and I kinda want to run a campaign of it sometime. No. Starships run on water or collected gaseous Hydrogen and Oxygen in RAW. I suppose you could invent your own system, though.

I had forgotten that one, but how appropriate.

Sad to report that George Perez has died, aged 67, from cancer. Details: https://variety.com/2022/film/news/george-perez-dead-wonder-woman-teen-titans-comics-1235261261/

Running Cyberpunk Red on Roll20. Have been using Google maps and Zillow to get info on houses and buildings, cutting screen shots up for maps, and it has worked out. Los Angeles in the 2040s is pretty much the same, just more economically depressed, what after the tsunami, and the film making diaspora to avoid California taxes.

Fan-made animated Batman film, written and animated by Stephen Trumble. Original score by Claire Wickes. Starring Brian Vaughan, David Trumble, Sylvie Nightingale, Bronwyn Sweeney, Calum Carpenter. Special sound design by John Moros. A much better than average Batman Story, where Batman is true to character, doing his Detective thing at the start.

Probably none. I would have continued with Bushido, and Traveller, and played other non Class, non D20 based systems. The attraction was because Champions was a well designed "Game", which to me was far more attractive than Superheroes. More importantly, without Champions, point buy systems would be a lot rarer, and/or stunted. D&D would have had less competition. I may have picked up some of the Tri-Tac games a little sooner. Cyberpunk, as written, would have been very different.

The Space-X Starship is really big https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/spacex-engineer-says-nasa-should-plan-for-starships-significant-capability/

Good point.

It’s not bad and it moves along. Good martial arts fights.

Watched the second season of Ultraman on Netflix. it's Mocapped 3D, and Cel shaded, so the dialogue scenes are a bit stiff, and robotic, but, it's Ultraman, so the acrobatics and the martial arts are stellar. IT has a much more epic feel than the first season.

Mostly The rare times I have seen it, as it was NPCc Heroes. PC Heroes spent the points elsewhere to boost their combat effectiveness. Then there is how you class them. Are they followers or DNPCs?

I did, for about half a decade after that incident, but I wasn’t the GM any longer. Then A couple of us had a falling out over game styles/ politics, and some of them stopped gaming. When I moved to Los Angeles in 2005, that was the end of that phase of gaming until I got coaxed back into it due to the advancement of online tabletops by 2015. I still will send a note to a couple of them from time to time, but I game online exclusively now, and they didn’t need to ( three of them live in the same house. )

Many lifeboats were made as independent watercraft with a sail, a bin of cracker rations, a fishing kit, a water cask, a compass, two pair of oars, and a tarp. This is different from a whaleboat which is just the boat with oars. It can be used as an expedient lifeboat, but lacks navigation and sustainment items. Recently, especially for commercial vessels, the lifeboats are powered, weather resistant, enclosed, fiberglass, boats, gravity launched from the ship to give them a kick away to get clearance. They have navigation and radio. All lifeboats have to be inspected, and restocked if need be. The USCG takes a dim view of unmaintained lifeboats. Paying 1/25th points seems fair for a limited use craft used to leave a bad situation, or a damaged and unrecoverable ship.

Man... I ate at a few of those. There is still a Red Barn structure here in town, but it's a car wash, now. Howard Johnsons had better breakfasts than lunches IMO

LIES! LIES! You Get What You Pay For! You get what you pay for!! ...only half kidding, based on some of the responses I see in these forums. (And most of the rationale for 6e). I tend to view points as a game currency rather than as hard math.

HERE HERE!

Didn't the Harbinger of Justice do this to store his gun collection? Look at his write up?

Wow, talk about a day and night comparison. I am somewhere in the middle, it was for the most part, a competent film, but also IMO a bit too dark in the cinematography. I thought the story was adequate, and I loved the characterization of Gotham City, of what I could see of it. I initially was wary of this film due to the news coming from the set, but the film exceeded my low expectations by quite a bit and I thought the acting was well done. IT seems to also have made its money back. Not a bad film.