Where did I go wrong x2?

[Erai]

Yeah, I know... there is a risk that they might get that "railroaded" feeling. Waking up in the births might be a good idea, but in this case the problem is that I already used something much like it in a campaign with some of these players.

(They woke up in coffins deep inside a dungeon complex without any equipment, clothes or memory, but scattered around were the freshly charred remains of a group of adventurers. Main questions at that time were "Who are we, what are we, and why are we the main treasure of a dungeon?". Was fun

)

A way to avoid the railroad here is by letting the PC's play a role in a partial success, by taking control of parts of the ship, repel a boarding party, stuff like that. Besides, this way I can give them some extra info, like descriptions of the attacking ships, and the fact that they seem to be pelting every part of the ship with everything they have- except for the cargo hold (which would also be a clue about the safest place in the ship).

It should become apparent at a very, very early stage that the fight is not for the ship but for their own lives. But, I strongly agree that the key ingredient in any RP scenario is a sense of accomplishment for the players!

 

[mike wightman]

The ship doesn't belong to them though does it?
So it shouldn't be a great loss

Look what they gain, their very own spaceship to mess around in the Bowman system, a valuable cargo. Their lives...

 

[Rossoneill]

You might try having them on an active duty naval campaign .
Where they start out as navy or marines on active
duty on a ship .
Then you take the skills and type of missions they received in Generation and that is what Happens while you play and you work out how exactly they learned the various skill and medals earned etc .
And it gives you a fair amount of control over things, and you have an idea how you need to run adventures to match up with the generation .
Of course they start out mostly unskilled but it can be fun watching your character develop if they enjoy this kind of play .
This is a long term method of play .
Fighting ships of the imperium has some good ideas on this kind of campaign .
Also so does pocket empires .
They dont have to be members of the 3rd imperium either .
They could be from a non integrated empire or system fighting to stay independant either in straight combat or covert action .
Pocket empires has good ideas too

 

[mike wightman]

Do you mean T4's Imperial Squadrons book?

 

[robject]

Agree -- if it's not their ship in the first place, then it's not their loss. So they're still in survival mode, and even get to repel some baddies. Works for me.

 

[Rossoneill]

T4s Imperial squadrons is the one i left out
The one i mentioned ,
Fighting ships of the imperium was the one for t20 on download from QLI

 

[mike wightman]

Ahh, of course.

That Fighting Ships.
The "of the Imperium" threw me

For a moment I thought you meant the MT tome

T4's Imperial Squadrons does include an active service campaign.

 

[THHeinrichT1@aol.com]

Reading some of the above messages, i felt placed back in time as i played traveller as a player the first time.

We too, had only experience in AD & D and Midgard as players an we thought a nice merry comes around playing style would be fun. We had a Noble, two Mudcrawlers and one Techcrack within our group. Guess what happened, the adventure (Twilight Peak) was not what it was expected to be, none had the idea to use the Library dates neither did anyone fancy the rumors... some secret society, great something like the scarlet brotherhood?

Our previos experience has destroyed the campaign and furthermore it took the fun with it. Still i found traveller a very good and easy to learn system, and later on it became my favourite system which it still is.

I know, i will never be such a good writer as Loren Wiseman, Tim Brown or the Keith brothers. But i think a had to contribute some of my old self designed material for public use... If i only had some more of the artistic bend, some illustrations would be nice I think.

Regards

Torsten

 

[J.C.D.]

Originally posted by Hal:
For what it is worth, I've not seen how you tried to handle the ship to ship combats. I ended up using the STARFIRE counters to a wargame to game out the combats for ship to ship combat. I'm also not above trying to create my own stuff for use with GURPS TRAVELLER (My campaign predates GURPS STARSHIPS by a long shot). It also helped that I'd been exposed to MAYDAY which, should have been the model rule system for use with ship to ship combat. Unfortunately, I can't really help you with how to make ship to ship combats more interesting. As you've noted, the likelyhood of lasers nailing inbound missiles is rather high. The "tension" of the game should come when the players realize that the inbound missile, if not stopped, WILL hurt them badly. One last comment while I think about it...

I DITCHED the official GURPS missile rules a LONG long time ago. When they first came out I asked "Huh - missiles have to END their movement on a ship in order to hit? Are you insane?!!! That's like saying that a bullet has to end its movement inside a body rather than hit the body, and continue on through! Much of what I used was in fact, inspired by MAYDAY. If you can, I suggest that you find a copy of the TRAVELLER GAMES being reprinted by Far Future Enterprises (A blueish colored book if I recall correctly) and merge/meld the GURPS traveller rules with it.

Try this for missiles:

The missiles move after the ship they're tracking. If the missile moves thru the hex the ship is in, leave the missile counter there and it's vector counter where it would normally go.

Resolve the missile attack in the normal phase. if it is destroyed or hits, the situation is settled. if it misses the target ship, place it in it's vector counter position and move it's vector counter to the new location.

If the missile misses, the owning player can try to hit the target again IF the missile's endurance allows, or he may drop the missile from control to fire another one.

Hope that helps.

 

[Erai]

Originally posted by J.C.D.:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Hal:
For what it is worth, I've not seen how you tried to handle the ship to ship combats.(...)
I DITCHED the official GURPS missile rules a LONG long time ago.

Try this for missiles:

The missiles move after the ship they're tracking. If the missile moves thru the hex the ship is in, leave the missile counter there and it's vector counter where it would normally go.

Resolve the missile attack in the normal phase. if it is destroyed or hits, the situation is settled. if it misses the target ship, place it in it's vector counter position and move it's vector counter to the new location.

If the missile misses, the owning player can try to hit the target again IF the missile's endurance allows, or he may drop the missile from control to fire another one.

Hope that helps. </font>[/QUOTE]Speaking about the missiles, how does the point defense fire work for you? During the little session I did all but one of the missiles popped well before impact

 

[J.C.D.]

Well, you're doing it right then.

Missiles are not terribly effective against targets with laser turrets and decent gunners. Even in GT2e it clearly says that a laser will stop 2-3 missiles on average in the PD phase.

This is realistic, given the conditions of space combat and how lasers and missiles would interact in space.

Now, missiles DO become effective when you can overwhelm the target's defenses, as in 3+ missiles per laser on the target. The problem is you generally need a big ship to be attacking a small ship to manage that, and that's not too balnced for play.

One way to make space combat exciting is for the game to be unbalanced, with, say 3 suileman class ships attacking a beowulf, and the beowulf trying to survive long enough to reach 100d and jump.

Other cases involving the players being out-tonned but only having to escape, not destroy, the enemy could be more dramatically effective.

Keep track of how far from the planet they're leaving the players are, and if they reach 100d with a functional ship and jump drive, they win, this way they can be outnumbered and still have a chance, making things more exciting.

Imagine the players are leaving a planet much like earth, with a moon similar to earth's. So it's 24 hexes from the planet and the players are en route to a system that they need to get to, and in order to jump to it they will follow a path that takes them near that moon. The raiders are waiting behind it and beging to attack the players as they fly past. Now things get interesting, can the players survive to travel 75 hexes to reach jump? Be sure not to allow them to accelerate topo much on the way out, maye the system they're jumping into has limits on exit speed, so that would keep their speed down until they detect the pirates. Also use the detection rules and role for detection secretely. When you start making hidden roles, they'll know something is up.