Non-Lethal Mis-Jumps

[Ref00000]

So, a couple of years ago, I was starting a new Traveller game with my then-local/regular group.
The Cayo Hueso boys were solid casual gamers, most of whom had been part of a regular, crowded, weekly game, for many years.
That game {NOT mine} had a huge number of Player kills, a LOT of friction, and at least one regular DM/Ref who was notorious for starting big things, and new games and letting them die on the vine. Often.
So, getting these dudes to crack a book on a 'new' system was like pulling teeth.
I convinced them to let me run Traveller, on My Game Day, and slathered them with incentives. It worked, but a couple of weeks in, they misjumped. Well, darn, make a whole new party, right? Would NOT have flown.
So, I let them come out of Jump, weeks late, at the ragged edge of life support, and move on. So they thought.
Actually, they had jumped into another Universe.
Being a huge fan of N.Stephenson, and loving 'Anathem', I moved them 'upwick' to use that book's nomenclature.
The Imperial Authorities figured it out, pretty quick, the party included a Noble, and a couple of Scouts, and they kept 'doing their Jobs'.
The ship they were using was a unique, centuries-old 'Yacht' as well.
In the 'Verse they were now living in, at least one PC's 'opposite number' was dead in the line of duty and that ship was mothballed.
Not for long. The Powers that Be mobilized, and eventually caught up to them. And explained what was happening. The PCs never actually found out, until it was explained in detail, with charts.
Essentially, they became Operatives of The Imperium.
Worked out awesome.
It also allowed me, as a ref to tidy up some loose ends, change some metaplot and kill some Mary-Sues.
"Whattya think, Sirs?" {MST3K ref}

 

[simonh]

Good for you. Illegitimi non carborundum.

The thing with almost certain dooms like misjumps is that they are only almost certain. I have no truck with the "but it isn't realistic" crowd. It isn't realistic that an airline stewardess fell out of a plane door, landed on a snowy mountain slope and survived, but it happened.

I want to be in and run games where we do the interesting stories. The unlikely stories that are full of drama and surprises. I was once in a Traveller game where our party were totally shafted by government secret agents that outmaneuvered us at every turn. We moaned to the GM that we were relatively powerless, lacking in resources, stuck doing relatively uninteresting jobs and he said well that's what real life is like. Except that we'd just met a bunch of NPCs in the same game being cool and mysterious and kicking arse and plainly having a whole lot more fun than we were. We wanted to be those guys, and said so.

I urge every GM to think who are the coolest, most skillful, bad-ass characters having the most fun in their whole setting. In Traveller that means the entire Imperium and beyond. If those characters are not the player characters, somebody is not doing their job properly.

Simon Hibbs

 

[HG_B]

The thing with almost certain dooms like misjumps is that they are only almost certain.

If the odds are exactly 1,000,000:1 against something happening, it WILL happen.

 

[simonh]

If the odds are exactly 1,000,000:1 against something happening, it WILL happen.

To be pedantic*, according to Douglas Adams they happen 9 times out of 10.

Simon Hibbs

* In my defence, this is the internet.

 

[HG_B]

To be pedantic*, according to Douglas Adams they happen 9 times out of 10.

Simon Hibbs

* In my defence, this is the internet.

Different authors, different odds.

 

[Ref00000]

I urge every GM to think who are the coolest, most skillful, bad-ass characters having the most fun in their whole setting. In Traveller that means the entire Imperium and beyond. If those characters are not the player characters, somebody is not doing their job properly.

Simon Hibbs

"no Mary-Sues". simple rule, makes sense, right?
amazing how hard it is to herd cats, though. PCs often miss your finely crafted plot devices, ignore the most blatantly obvious clues in favor of throw-away plot-flesh you slap down to fill space. they kill important NPCs, befriend worthless scum out to rob them blind, and often in my recent experience, wake up and pay attention at a critical point and do 'what their Character would do'. Which, if the PC is at all typical, is something stupid, dangerous and likely to get other PCs killed, at best.
so, what to do? an NPC with a clue, and some skills the PCs don't have. better make them tough enough to handle some damage, or the near inevitable power move by a PC, right?
and there you are again.
oh, and I always heard she fell on a haystack.

 

[Jame]

I would think that most mis-jumps aren't lethal. In and of them selves.

But the results of it might be. So I like the thought of a mis-jump into another universe.

 

[SpaceBadger]

Bravo for coming up with an inventive misjump that moved your campaign into new territory!

Two things I have done to avoid TPK due to misjump:

1) What I used to do was roll the misjump, then send them to the nearest system rather than an empty hex.

2) Now I use a table with some less-disastrous results, ranging from simple bounceback outward from the 100-D limit that requires extra travel time to get where they wanted to go, through misjumps to a different world in same system, misjump to nearby system, or (very rarely and requires taking risks like jumping from low orbit) destruction of ship.

I don't even bother with misjumping to an empty hex, because that is pretty much the same as destruction unless you want to move your campaign forward in time to when they could reach civilization using emergency low-berths, plus most of what we read about Jump mechanics implies the need for a significant mass to trigger exit from Jump (jumping to empty hexes on purpose requires fairly advanced tech, doesn't seem likely to happen by accident).

 

[rancke]

...plus most of what we read about Jump mechanics implies the need for a significant mass to trigger exit from Jump (jumping to empty hexes on purpose requires fairly advanced tech, doesn't seem likely to happen by accident).

No, jumping to empty hexes requires a tricky bit of mathematics. Once you figure out how, you can jump to empty hexes with TL9 ships. And that is stated outright in IW, not implied. And if you don't count GT material, it is stated outright (in TTA) that you can jump to empty hexes.

(Note: I realize that this is the IMTU forum, but I assume SpaceBadger refers to published material when he says 'most of what we read'.)


Hans

 

[HG_B]

No, jumping to empty hexes requires a tricky bit of mathematics. Once you figure out how, you can jump to empty hexes with TL9 ships.

Correct. No mass needed.

 

[Murphy]

I usually just have them emerge on the fringe of their target system, e.g. in the Oort cloud or whatever, with some of the drive / power plant systems breaking down.

So the cost of misjump is a few weeks time and some engineering work. And spare parts of course, which they usually have plenty of.

I rely on mini-games to do various prolonged tasks, and Repairing is the most often used one, with Hacking being a distant second.

 

[Ref00000]

far out-system jump insertions

there's always the lovely hook of;
so, the mis-jump landed you way off course, far from the nearest refuel source...
near the ragged edge of life- failure, you detect a cometary body!
then they get there, and find out the sweet, sweet candy has a crunchy centre.
something very, very old. insert plot here.

 

[Ref00000]

empty Hex issue, temporal misjumps

leaving aside the TL9 jumping comment for now, a random direction misjump includes off the Galactic plane.
this could give an lot more range to misjumps than 'nearest system'
it would seem to make sense that a tangent off the elliptic would not encounter significant masses for much longer subjective time.
also, the misjump could be interpreted as not a navigational issue, but one involving the subjective time dilation, while in JSpace.
this function is 'the same, regardless of range'. this, to me, means there is some component of a JDrive that regulates or monitors 'subjective time in Jump Space'. is this dead wrong or could a misjump be scaled temporally as well as physically?
meaning, if you, the Ref wanted to bite off that much Campaign Gristle, you could dump the party and their ship in another time-line, or at some random {yeah, random like carefully planned} time in the past or future?
just throwing it out there.:devil:
Zero

 

[HG_B]

leaving aside the TL9 jumping comment for now, a random direction misjump includes off the Galactic plane.
this could give an lot more range to misjumps than 'nearest system'
it would seem to make sense that a tangent off the elliptic would not encounter significant masses for much longer subjective time.

No. If you look at the star density of let's say, the area around Earth, we aren't anywhere near a real Rift in either of those two directions.

 

[Ref00000]

so about the TL9 jump

we're talking about the game standard that 'Experimental {item X} shows up at one TL lower than it's minimum' ie; TL10 for JDrive1 means TL9 is when 'Dangerous Tests' happen?

 

[Carlobrand]

we're talking about the game standard that 'Experimental {item X} shows up at one TL lower than it's minimum' ie; TL10 for JDrive1 means TL9 is when 'Dangerous Tests' happen?

That's the T5 new game thing, yes?

 

[BlackBat242]

meaning, if you, the Ref wanted to bite off that much Campaign Gristle, you could dump the party and their ship in another time-line, or at some random {yeah, random like carefully planned} time in the past or future?
just throwing it out there.:devil:
Zero

I did that once... a friend and I had played in a convention Traveller tournament where everyone ended up falling into a black hole with the research station they were trying to clear of aliens (who had come out of the black hole).

Our two characters had stayed with the type-S scout everyone had arrived in, but we undocked just too late, and the ref ruled we fell into the black hole as well.

A few months later we decided to roll up those two as real characters for as game I was running... my friend's as a PC and mine as an NPC.

I ruled that when it became apparent that we couldn't escape the black hole's gravity well that we had jumped... and the mis-jump put us into an alternate-reality universe (the one we jumped from was the non-standard).

I had my NPC leave the PCs as soon as she could, as she "had things to do"... she soon became an infamous terrorist, along the lines of "The Jackal", but fighting against the Imperium to "free Sol for the Solomani".

 

[SpaceBadger]

*snip*
also, the misjump could be interpreted as not a navigational issue, but one involving the subjective time dilation, while in JSpace.
this function is 'the same, regardless of range'. this, to me, means there is some component of a JDrive that regulates or monitors 'subjective time in Jump Space'. is this dead wrong or could a misjump be scaled temporally as well as physically?
meaning, if you, the Ref wanted to bite off that much Campaign Gristle, you could dump the party and their ship in another time-line, or at some random {yeah, random like carefully planned} time in the past or future?

"Travel" into the future via misjump, yeah, that could happen - not so much time travel as a much delayed exit from Jump, which might as well be time travel for those involved, since the subjective week they spent in Jump has been X years in real space.

Can't really see travel into the past by anything we've seen so far about Jump. Robert Heinlein had some stories including hyperdrives in which the astrogator could choose to exit into a different time - I think Lazarus Long discovered the possibility by something like a misjump, and then either he or A.J. Libby worked out how to do it on purpose - unfortunately, those stories were mostly written after Heinlein's weird sexual obsessions had set in :nonono:, and I just can't stand to re-read them.

 

[bromdenlong]

. Robert Heinlein had some stories including hyperdrives in which the astrogator could choose to exit into a different time - I think Lazarus Long discovered the possibility by something like a misjump, and then either he or A.J. Libby worked out how to do it on purpose.

The book was "Time Enough For Love". Minerva the supercomputer pointed out the possibility to Lazarus Long.

 

[Timerover51]

I guess I never viewed a "mis-jump" as automatically lethal. As GM, I roll the mis-jump, and then determine how far and what it the result. It is one way of getting the players to where I want them to be. However, as it is in my own Traveller universe, odd things can happen, which are not in the normal run of published Traveller material.

I have not put anyone into the Bermuda Triangle, but that is one possibility. The big question would not be where, but "when". The area of the Bermuda Triangle can work both ways.

Then there is the Universe mentioned by A. Bertram where things that disappear here go to, like the 5 Avengers of Flight 19, or the Australian liner SS Waratah. After a period of time there, that odd region or space-time ejects them to a more normal Traveller universe.

And since it is in my own Universe, the distances of a mis-jump can cover can be VERY LONG, as in multiple sectors from the original jump. Or from the Solomani Sphere to the Spinward Marches.

I have not, as yet, tossed someone from the Traveller Universe to my AD&D one, but that is another possibility.