Why do you like TNE?

[LeperColony]

TNE is my favorite Traveller setting. I do enjoy the classic era, I'm actually not a fan of either the Regency or the R.C. and I think the system is borderline unplayable, and yet TNE is still my preference.

Partially, I'm just a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction and themes. My TNE games tend to take place in the Wilds. But also, I think a lot of why I enjoy TNE has to do with Virus.

I feel Virus is a more interesting alien than the Vargr or the Aslan.

 

[Reban]

After initially discovering Traveller in old White Dwarf magazines my first proper exposure to Traveller was via the many websites and webrings of the late 90s and early 2000s

The detail and crunchiness of the TNE versions attracted me.

Fire, Fusion and Steel was like candy.

Also the gritty slightly dark feel was way more appealing than the shiny plastic space opera of other versions.

Also the politics of the TNE setting were much more interesting than the nebulous Imperium and its cape wearing Emperor Strephon.

TNE is no longer my go to version of Traveller but its still an essential influence IMTU.

 

[mike wightman]

I like TNE.

I don't see it as post apocalyptic (Aftermath) so much as exploration and rebuilding.

Virus is only a threat if you are stupid, TEDs are much more dangerous

I like the way the metaplot was developing and following Dave Nilsen's interview Q&A I have a future history which I think is more in keeping with the original intent.

Small groups of players get to make the epic decisions, and the ultimate solution to Lucan's Black Imperium explains why the Star Vikings were vilified... 'the end justifies the means'...
everyone has a bright future but some had to make the ultimate moral choice.

 

[infojunky]

What's not to love about TNE? It's a builders paradise. There is a broken empire, and ruins to explore. Old Treasure maps to follow, pirates to fight. And the Potential for horrific Monsters.

The setting is grand. The are some bits that are a little dodgy but isn't that every rules set?

 

[jcrocker]

Yes, it was the rebuilding. And the fact that it was actually supported was a big plus.

 

[epicenter00]

Despite all its flaws, TNE is my favorite setting.

I admit the troll in me loves that GDW ruined everyone's precious Third Imperium to make TNE (then I was sad when I realized the Spinward Marches survived, but only for a while).

But beyond that, yes, it is a Long Night #2 setting. (Then later Miller made T4 which was another TNE-like which wasn't as good as TNE.) I liked it more than a Long Night setting because it was set in the ruins of the Third Imperium that so many players loved. It really gave the setting a pathos - the idea, especially if you're on some world in the former Safes, that yes, everyone was indeed living their lives, dreaming of a better future, and just going to work until one day the flying cars fell from the sky and the lights went out and they didn't come back on. A Long Night setting where it was the ruins of the First/Second Imperium wouldn't really evoke that since there never has a true First/Second Imperium setting - Interstellar Wars for GURPS was a great sourcebook but it never really gave you a sense of the First/Second Imperiums as a "living" place. It's always felt like reading some history book about Rome.

I liked the philosophy behind the sourcebooks - particularly the Path of Tears - which I felt really had a good balance between "lots of worlds" and "a single, fleshed out world."

I liked there was undercurrent of idealism and morality to the RC campaign setting. But it wasn't a theme that good always triumphs. It was more a tale of "what can you hold onto and what to you trade away to achieve your goals?" Hilariously to me, Third Imperium diehards always talk about the amorality of the RC - yeah, go back to your mercenary warfare and toxically cynical noble political games.

 

[Tiikeri]

Reasons I like Traveller: The New Era.

1. Fire, Fusion & Steel. I've always loved the creative tools Traveller has provided since it's creation, and after High Guard, Scouts, and Striker, what can I say, I was hooked. FF&S just gave me more of what I loved.

2. The ship to ship combat system, Battle Rider, and Brilliant Lances. The High Guard system was a bit too abstracted for me, and I liked the TNE's ship combat system better.

3. World Tamer's Handbook. This book gave me creative tools for building colonies, which I enjoyed and appreciated.

4. I didn't look through Striker 2 too much, but I'd probably like it if I did.

The game setting had a smaller setting feel, as if it were a place in which a small group of characters could make a difference. The setting had a post apocalyptic vibe, and I like post-apocalyptic settings for the wide open opportunities they present.

I thought many of the supplements were well done, like Smash & Grab, the Regency Sourcebook, and Path of Tears.

 

[aramis]

I like the character generation.
I like compatibility with T2K2.x and DC
I used to like FF&S...

 

[vegas]

I used to like FF&S...

Used to? What changed?

 

[whartung]

Used to? What changed?

He got older .

"I don't have time for this..."

 

[G K Zhukov]

I like the character generation.
I like compatibility with T2K2.x and DC
I used to like FF&S...

The compatibility aspect was very appealing. And having ship and gear construction rules (as well as wargaming rules) fully compatible with the RPG game was definitely a plus if, like myself, you were a gearhead and a wargamer.

I enjoyed the rules (sort of percentile rollunder in 5% increments); very intuitive.

Character hit points seemed a tad high - I usually halved them.

I also enjoyed the background (running for cover)

A pity that the full thing was so ridden with errata...

 

[san*klass]

I ran a two year campaign with TNE back in the day and loved the whole Path of Tears/RCES thing vs The Guild, Virus and Teddies.
But I re read TPoT recently for the first time in 20 years and must admit a lot of it jars (Hivers and Aubani's up on a pedastal thing) or doesn't make sense imho (sending out the Twelve without questioning the Free Trader Network first! Surely FT's visited DL/RC worlds? And brand new Clippers being designed and built within a few years of the Hiver Tech Academy starting).
If I ever ran it again it would be a much smaller, less idealistic DL/RC. (Six or so systems with Trybec as the loosely defined capital) with less resources and tech. So making the TPoT even weepier. And probably CT houseruled for the rules. Yeah too old no to bother with all TNE's complexity!
EDIT now I've got on my commute train. I would base the RC from Trybec (since as per TPoT they funded or provided half the Twelve anyway) and have Dawn base as RCES & RCN central which with Auroura and Fija make the vastly reduced RC. With Vezinia and Lancer as allies. Available equipment TL would be a TLA celling with a lot just TL9 and Relic Battle Dress/ Combat Armour and Plasma/Fusion guns would be only for the RCM. S&G's just got a lot harder!!

 

[David Johansen]

I liked TNE, I'd probably still run it. I liked that there was more room for adventure and exploration, something the Third Imperium, with mighty neighbours on every border, never really did well.

Path of Tears was a great read. Virus never bothered me. The rules...needed some polish but were cool none the less.

 

[jec10]

Path of Tears - still my model for a Traveller adventure supplement. Just so many ways you could go with it. If you were exploration-focused players you could go one way, trade-focused another, and military-oriented yet another. Great world details and a rich background.

FF&S - the best Traveller tech supplement ever published. So many options. The non-OTU tech was especially interesting. You want a universe with ram-scoop starships or solar sails, you can build it! You want CT-style grav you can build it. Or some other lifter technology.

Battle Rider - everything every non-ACS starship combat system published for Traveller has lacked. Hexes and vector movement as in Mayday. Sensors and ECM that actually have a role to play. Player decisions that actually matter (do I go active or stay passive? do I close or stand off? do I use my thrust to evade or to move? etc). The full array of Traveller starship weaponry with different pros and cons.

 

[mike wightman]

I ran a two year campaign with TNE back in the day and loved the whole Path of Tears/RCES thing vs The Guild, Virus and Teddies.
But I re read TPoT recently for the first time in 20 years and must admit a lot of it jars (Hivers and Aubani's up on a pedastal thing) or doesn't make sense imho (sending out the Twelve without questioning the Free Trader Network first! Surely FT's visited DL/RC worlds? And brand new Clippers being designed and built within a few years of the Hiver Tech Academy starting).

My take on that is - we are still being fed ingame info for the most part, ie it is biased.
The politicians of the RC that put the Aubani and Hivers on a pedestal are the very ones with the most to gain from such a position (there's also the chance that Into the Belly of the Beast may have revealed a lot more about Hiver manipulation of the RC).

When we start sending PCs out with the second wave exploration ships we know about the twelve, but we are not told about missions earlier than the twelve, or info gleaned from the free trader network of the guild again for political reasons. Note that I believe that there were limited missions before the twelve, and that some info from the FT network was used when planning the missions of the twelve.
But the powers that be wanted an excuse to begin smash and grab missions...
they knew the twelve were not up to the task, but the next generation of ships on the slipways, the clippers etc., are waiting in the wings.

What better way to engender espirite d'corps than to send the new recruits off to avenge their missing, fallen (sacrificial lamb) comrades.

If I ever ran it again it would be a much smaller, less idealistic DL/RC. (Six or so systems with Trybec as the loosely defined capital) with less resources and tech. So making the TPoT even weepier. And probably CT houseruled for the rules. Yeah too old no to bother with all TNE's complexity!

I moved it forward in time, I think 1200 is still to close to the 1135ish final collapse, and having thought about what I've written above I may start a new campaign much earlier in the future history of the RC (but still set 1300 or later)- first encounters with FT/guild ships, encounters with the Hivers, establishment of the RC proper, then the launch of the twelve...

EDIT now I've got on my commute train. I would base the RC from Trybec (since as per TPoT they funded or provided half the Twelve anyway) and have Dawn base as RCES & RCN central which with Auroura and Fija make the vastly reduced RC. With Vezinia and Lancer as allies. Available equipment TL would be a TLA celling with a lot just TL9 and Relic Battle Dress/ Combat Armour and Plasma/Fusion guns would be only for the RCM. S&G's just got a lot harder!!

Now that is a very interesting idea...

 

[san*klass]

Mike I wont try to quote all your insightful and encouraging posts but I love your ideas about a hundred years added to the timeline but still early days of the DL concept. And the whole Hiver manipulation thing!!
In my TNE campaign back on the day I started but never finished writing a scenario whereby the Players come across a Hiver courier detelict floating in an asteroid belt. Aboard would be documents re some sort of deep manipulation. Either about their true reason for building up the RC (and some top Aubanis). Or that they manipulated some major aspect of the Civil War. Maybe even Strephons assassination. And all linked to an extant top Hiver adviser. Like I said never got completed but ties in with your excellent concepts.

 

[warwizard]

I liked the TNE rules, not the setting. The FF&S clinched it for me, and when T4 came out and FF&S was generally ported over intact (with some omissions and errata) I moved mostly to T4. It was the virus setting that I could not stand, I mostly used the rules in the basic pre TNE universe, the rebellion didn't happen, and the virus did not get released. If I wanted a frontier area, I created one, or rolled back time to before the 1st interstellar war. No need to slaughter 100's of trillions of people. I mostly used TNE and later T4 to do the world tamer's game, designing up in FF&S all the neat things colony ships would have to make a real go at a colony. 1000's of would be colonists in cramped seating, doped up with fast drug, (sponsored by the Chinese regional government of course), with other cultural groups making different choices as to the level of comfort and capitalization of their sponsored expeditions. fun and interesting stuff, playing with the various different choices. However to go beyond a few years in that game needs serious computer support and house rules for all sorts of stuff that was not detailed in WTH.

 

[AsenRG]

I like the rules just fine, though using a d20 is never a good move to get my attention.
However, it's the setting that I like most. Well, I'm still not sure I like the Virus, but I definitely like the idea of civilisation-building!

 

[TheDS]

Several things, really.

Mostly it was the tools. FFS, WTH, that kind of thing. I don't generally have a problem building universes, but I do need help with the tools to build believable ships, toys, economic systems, etc. MT was my first Traveller, and building ships with it was lots of fun. Getting to build not only ships but also the weapons on it with FFS was what made it like crack for me.

The game mechanics also had a lot going for it. The core idea was that if something was twice as hard, the number of valid die results was halved. When applied to many combat tasks, this makes TONS of sense. Ship A and B are identical, but A is twice as far away as B, making it twice as hard to detect, which means you detect A on a 10 or less and B on a 5 or less. Same thing happens when you're shooting at them. Also, B will take half as much damage (assuming A is at or further than optimal range). Since the system was already in use by their other RPGs, it would have opened all three of them to combining, or at least allow players to play them all more easily.

As for the story; it wasn't too bad either. You had plenty of levels at which to start your story (part of a large polity, part of a small polity, part of a tiny polity, by your own bootstraps, as barbarians who get introduced to the galaxy in one of a dozen ways, etc) and plenty of kinds of places to explore. You could set up your own empire or take someone else's or topple someone else. You could do just about anything. The virus part was kinda annoying, but the results cannot be denied: you can do just about anything you want, from just about any starting point you want.

Most of the hate came from people who loved the Imperium and wanted to see it restored instead of leveled. Because of that, they couldn't be bothered to give the game a fair chance, and most STILL haven't. And because GDW got hit with a series of bad rolls all in a row, they collapsed before TNE could prove itself.

(Some of the hate also came from HEPlaR, which fundamentally changed the way the universe worked, but was completely glossed over in descriptions, as if they had no clue they'd just broken the whole universe with that one little change. I agree with Chadwick that ships needed a sort of endurance factor, but that wasn't the way to do it. A much less game-breaking way to do it was with a heat system not entirely dissimilar to the one used in Battletech. But, with the move toward "more realistic", I'm sure they felt they could neither do a justifiably simple and realistic heat system, nor one which didn't feel like a ripoff of BT. It's almost unheard of to find heat management in games.)

 

[savage]

FF&S and the effort to provide flexibility beyond OTU tech.

The post-3I setting with Virus. Although, I altered it dramatically.

Efforts by GDW to tie together multiple game universes with a single system. Yet, it tied back to earlier rule developments.

However, i did not like efforts of early COTI members to bring about a meaningless end to the TNE setting. Lorenverse was more respectable (GT) approach.