What do you use?

[Cryton]

I know this is prolly a dupe thread, but I think its time to ask this question once again as I'm really interested to see what people are currently using!

IMTU, or at least the current incarnation of it, starts with the Traveller 1248 setting books and the MGT rules with the following changes:

1) I limit the number of skill levels a character can have (0 levels do not count toward this total) to the sum of Int + Edu. reciepts of skills levels beyond this total lower the characters least used skill by one (to a minimum of 0). Psionic skill levels are counted towards this total as well.

2) The mods to the Cym chips that resulted in thier becoming virus have "bred out", resulting in third or later generations of virus reverting to becoming Cym Chips (though they do use viral personality templates), and I use the rules from Signal GK for them. Mind you this fact is not known to the general public, and Chips chips can and still do spread their "progeny" to new computer systems, but the comm infection vector has been all but removed from my game for all non GM planned encounters.

3) there is no longer any secondary wave of hard radiation following the psionic element of the Empress wave, as it dissapated thousands light years to coreward. The psionic element is however responsible for a lot of damage as it tends to spawn shocking numbers of insane psionicists in its wake.

4) The Droyne seem to be increasingly more active, and there are roumors that the Ancients may have somehow returned.

5) and finally as I've recieved my copy of T5, I'm trying out a few choice tidbits from there as well to see how they will effect my game.

 

[aramis]

Current TU
Characters: MGT
Tasks: Variant MT with MGT levels added.
Ships MGT Core with some variants from MGT HG.
Astrography: MGT worlds with variant system generation
Psionics: MGT Psion

 

[robject]

Since my friends own Mongoose Traveller, I use Mongoose Traveller for chargen, character-based tasks, and equipment. I also use T5 for supporting material, such as vehicles and starships, starship-based tasks, robots, and some equipment. Finally, I rely on the Classic Traveller CD for adventure material.

 

[sabredog]

I'm too old and stubborn to change:

CT for the basic rules structure (except Merchant Prince chargen, just the trade info)

Striker for combat and making pointy-shooty things

FF&S to keep my coke can from staining the coffee table

Mayday for vector movement if the players can get their heads around it, range bands and lots of theatrics if not

HG2 (I wish I had a copy of HG1) for the big epic battles the players try to stay out of but I drag them into if I'm feeling mean because they won't use Mayday vector movement

my own homebrew universe for all of the above to manage

 

[Icosahedron]

I use:

Homebrew ATU.
MGT point-buy for quick chargen.
MGT for normal chargen.
CT supplements 1, 4, etc for quick NPCs.
Undecided MGT or Rule 68A for tasks.
Pocket Empires for background events.
Striker I & III for most equipment.
FF&S/Gunsmith (tweaked to make it work) for firearms.
HG2+GURPS Starships (chrome) for starship construction.
LBB2 for vectors and travel formulae.
AHL+Houserules+Chain Reaction 3.0 for combat. Still not satisfied.
LBB8+Gurps Robots for robots.
LBB6+WTH for sysgen and world creation
GURPS for chargen adv & disadv.
Shadowrun for cyberspace.
Shadowrun for lifestyle edges & flaws.
Shadowrun+Conversion Houserules for cost of living.
77 Starship Quirks for starship quirks.
Car Wars for vehicle chases.
CarWars+Striker for vehicle combat.
GURPS Starports for starports.
Power Projection+HG2+LBB2 for ship combat.
Stargrunt II for massed combat.
On Target for serious wound determination & recovery.
Universal Corporate Profile for corporate classification.
Inspiration Pad for passenger manifests and random encounters.
CT+Houserules for most other stuff.
Many other sources, including GURPS material, Shadowrun and BITS 101 series for ideas.
Inkscape, GIMP, Fractal Terrains, Sim City and ViewingDale for drawing and mapping. (I'd sooo love to extract the city-mapping elements out of Sim City and ditch the game aspects).

Last but not least, Little Grey Cells for filling in the gaps and fixing whatever's broke.

Having said all that, most of my PbP games end up being surprisingly rules-lite.

Is it Traveller? Who cares, it's fun!

 

[Seriayne]

Currently running two milleu's, with hints that what happens in one has some slight bearing on the other campaign in the 1100's.

I use MT for tasks, though chargen can come from any version of Traveller within reason - no 11 termers or anything like that. My Interstellar Wars era player characters were all dropped in as GenAssist projects so were all pregenerated and passed out to the players that liked whichever character's personality they liked most - players didn't get a chance to see stats or skills - minimal, but adequate to the adventure.

For ships I use MT for stat details, etc. but most of the ship combats are more narrative, etc. to prevent untimely story termination.

Big battles, where the players are involved, but only care for their own or maybe one or two allied ships, are different. One battle I ran awhile back (when I had more spare time) involved several dozen named ships, about a hundred fightercraft, and one Azhanti High Lightning cruiser.

I'd distilled the game down to business cards for every ship (or wings of 10 fighters), gave them simplified MT hit points based on tonnage, and absolute damage done for each weapon type on a ship, etc. It wasn't 'official', and skewed a lot of the numbers, but it was -fast- and a lot of fun. You got to see the effects of Ships and Fleet tactics die modifiers like crazy - and players were sweating over things like timetables (estimated number of hours/days before x faction shows up with y more ships, etc.). It was a cross of the Hobbit's Battle of Five Armies, mixed with the endgame of the Chanur series, with the Azhanti High Lightning in the process of changing hands in the climax of a week long engagement the players had been working toward for about six months realtime and about a year and a half gametime.


I'll use whatever's handy/expedient for the situation, and never sweat the minutia though I like having it for background material. Lately, I tend to have players that can barely remember the die rolling conventions of whichever game we're playing (even Traveller of all things) from week to week, and unfortunately never crack the rulebooks themselves if they don't have to. I think it comes from running too much White Wolf with these guys first.

 

[sabredog]

I use:
Car Wars for vehicle chases.
CarWars+Striker for vehicle combat.

I used to do that, but after a while it seemed fewer and fewer players had the patience (or smarts) for it. Although we did refight WW2 with Car Wars once by coming up with our own gas engine rules and substituting things like VW's and Porsches for 109's and Focke-Wulfes...and Mustangs for , uh, Mustangs. Big Chevy trucks worked for P-47's, and well, an 18-wheeler makes a dandy B-17.

We got the idea from a short story I read, but I wish I could remember it; I'd love to have it in my collection.

But I always used to use OGRE and GEV for gaming out battles even before Striker came out. Simple, fast, and anyone could learn it in like 10 minutes. I just made counters for the vehicles I made in Striker and away we went.

 

[Icosahedron]

Hmm, I haven't found Car Wars difficult to operate - I use the Turn Key template.

I've heard of OGRE and GEV but I've never seen them.

 

[Whipsnade]

I've heard of OGRE and GEV but I've never seen them.

Ico,

Both are beautifully simple wargames, not simplistic mind you, but simple. Nothing but artillery, infantry, and tanks, only four numbers on each counter, straight forward CRT, and enough chrome to make repeat play a given.

How simple are they? I used Ogre to teach a nephew in first grade all about ratios. Not only did he learn about calculating combat odds, he and I were also able to have fun playing the game once I spotted him a few handicaps.

The follow-ons tried ginning things up by adding lots of fiddling detail, but they never approached the beauty of the first two. I don't think it's suggesting too much to state that those designs, plus some others, allowed Steve Jackson(1) to build his game company.


Regards,
Bill

1 - Jackson did design them for Metagaming but, when that firm closed, he retained his rights to both Ogre and GEV.

 

[jac]

Ogre was the first wargame I ever bought, I wish I still had that copy. Came in a plastic bag if I remember correctly. Yes, I'm using anagathics (I wish)

Anyway, I found Traveller a few years later, loved it ever since. Putting together an online campaign after a lot of years away.

CT for chargen, systems, trade, ships (with house rules)
Striker for vehicles
Homebrewed TU, exists concurrently with the Imperium, but 20 or so sectors away. Still lots of work to be done.

 

[Cryton]

My first copy of Ogre came in a little black box, just like my Car Wars, Sunday Driver and Truck Stop and my SFB was in a baggie.

Guess that kinda dates me for when I started gaming. Hehe

 

[Whipsnade]

Guess that kinda dates me for when I started gaming.

Cryton,

You and me both.

My first copies of Ogre, Warp War, and the rest were in baggies too, and not ziploc baggies either. The baggies had a flap closed with a strip of cellophane tape. The counters weren't die cut either, you had to use scissors so half the corners on the counters were bent upwards.

Getting back to your original question:

Characters, Skills, & Tasks: CT for all at first. We immediately switched over to DGP's task system for MT once we first saw it, even before we saw MT's chargens and larger skill lists. Our sessions more slowly transited to MT chargen after that. TNE's systems were looked at and discarded, too quickly IMHO and I believe my group's slow break-up had much to do with that also. Using T4's systems is a non-starter, CT/MT are both simpler and better. G:T and T20 are very good, but belong to different RPG heritages. MgT looks good, but the amount of "back story" rolls gives me pause. My players loved coming up with their own stories and, while you don't need to use that part of MgT chargen, the fact that there is a large section of []iMgT[/i] chargen for that purpose means it's going to be used.

Personal Combat & Mass Combat: You name it and we used it. LBB:2 range bands, LBB:4 free form, Snapshot, AHL, Striker, all of it. The only requirement was that it seemed to suit our current needs and it be fun. Maps of all types from all sorts of wargames were borrowed. We used the boards from AH's Squad Leader very often. GEV got used in one campaign too. We rarely ran large merc adventures, so combat was closer to the man-to-man level and that colored our choices.

Ships & Ship Combat: Mostly vectors most of the time. We ran more ship combat than personal combat it seems. Again we tried lots of games and variations, but generally settled down with a Mayday/HG2 fusion that had several house rules. As the GM, I'd pull out Mayday for "everyday" events like arriving in a system. I'd place the players' ship on map along with lots of others and make them plot a course to the port while I rolled behind a screen. Most times it was just a way to impart information without simply telling the players, sometimes there were more important reasons, but the players rarely knew the difference.

In one campaign, the players were working as "armed transport" for a merc group. They'd picked up a load of munitions, replacement vehicles, and other goodies a few jumps away from the planet where the fighting was occurring to transport it there. I pulled the Mayday map as usual when they jumped into a system to refuel. The players were so jumpy that their comm messages to the locals were jumpy too. Playing off their paranoid behavior, I launched a SDB from the port and the players freaked. They saw that 6gee vector appear and immediately began shaping their own vector for the jump limit. We kept up a strained banter back and forth between the players and port while they headed back towards jump and I kept the SDB "sort of" moving towards them. It was a nice piece of mental gamesmanship which the players actually inflicted on themselves!


Regards,
Bill

 

[Cryton]

Bill

Oddly enough, my players thought that the MgT background gen might be too much, but it does leave LOTS of space for making up ones own background, they tried it and now love it.

And I totally forgot, I STILL use CT Book 2 for Vector combat, though I do use MgT LBB generated ships now.

As for the maps, hehe, I've swiped every gaming map I could find for use in my games, one of my favorites is from Shadowrun and has the " * " hexes all over it for combat in urban environments. Im also guilty of handing my players ship deckplans to work from when they remember to use the densitometer before boarding.

By the way, my name is Rich. pleased to meet ya

 

[aramis]

I should mention I'm using Mayday movement with MGT ship combat to-hit, damage, and damage effects, and PP alá the suggested fix from the playtest. I may go back to letter-damage instead of the pseudo-crits of MGT.

Bill: as for MGT CGen, it's really right comparable to both CT and MT in level of skills; smack in the middle, on average. The extra "detail" is broad strokes. And players have had no problem adapting.

TNE was a bad implementation of a good, but non-traveller, game engine. It worked better with 1d10 tasks vs skill alone.

 

[Whipsnade]

Oddly enough, my players thought that the MgT background gen might be too much, but it does leave LOTS of space for making up ones own background, they tried it and now love it.

Cryton,

That's very good to hear. Getting my players to change sometimes was like pulling teeth and other times was impossible. They knew what they liked and that was that. I've written about my futile, decade long, effort to use Steward skill with them. They didn't like it and went out of their way to ignore it even taking the "hits" I imposed in session.

I've liked what I've seen of MgT's background gen and I don't think it's anywhere near "restrictive". I also like very much that it focuses more on events than assignments. Events help you much more to write a story.

The yearly assignments of CT/MT advanced chargen can be very restrictive at times IMHO. I've worn out many little gray cells trying to explain assignments within a rolled career and I'm not someone who thinks, in Navy chargen for example, that each new assignment means you're assigned to a new ship or station.


Regards,
Bill

 

[Whipsnade]

Bill: as for MGT CGen, it's really right comparable to both CT and MT in level of skills; smack in the middle, on average. The extra "detail" is broad strokes. And players have had no problem adapting.

Wil,

That's the impression I get from reading it and rolling up some solo play exercises. I believe I could run a MgT session without difficulty and any player with only CT/MT experience would hardly be aware of the differences.

As I told Cryton, I especially like the events focus in MgT's background gen. IMHO, that's much better than the yearly assignments/missions of CT/MT.


Regards,
Bill

 

[Blue Ghost]

My first copy of Ogre came in a little black box, just like my Car Wars, Sunday Driver and Truck Stop and my SFB was in a baggie.

Guess that kinda dates me for when I started gaming. Hehe

Funny, I have the exact same stuff. Only more.

 

[sabredog]

WarpWar and Ogre were the first wargames I bought (in the original taped baggies, too!). I must have worn out several copies, and now I have the reprints of Ogre, GEV, WarpWar, and Rivets, but they are the ones that came in the paper boxes with the miniscule die.

I still have the original copy of Chitin I, which nodoby seemed to like so it didn't get played to death like the others. I have the Ogre/GEV add-on Shockwave, but the only thing that is useful in it is the extra map and the rules for demolishing buildings and bridges.

 

[DonM]

I use my maps from Imperial Starfire for tracking in-system travel.