Dave, I'm a gun bunny and I'm proud of it. There are people who spend days tweeking their characters to extract every iota of power out of the build that they can... I'm the same way when it comes to gear, I want gear that takes the game in directions I want it to go. Hell I designed a carbon fibre hand gun with 3 rotary barrels for my TNE game just because I wanted the assassin badguys to have a weapon so weird no one would see it coming, couldn't pentrate SBA but man it'd hit you so many times it'd turn your insides into goo in the process.
I can see where you're going with the cutlass, I always made sure that there was never anything bigger than a snub pistol or something firing the same cartridge available while the ship was in the depths of space because I agree with you. Space is very detrimental to your health as a human being, of course it's probably only marginally more hostile to life than the Earth is. I did create a varity of SnubMG's and a SnubCarbine, but generally speaking small arms fire inside a starship is really bad stuff.
I always rationalize that the 10mm snub was a round pretty much designed for starship combat, it hit hard enough to pack a wollop but really lacked the velocity and pentration required to do a lot of damage to the interior of the ship. Did this mean that I as a player wasn't the guy shooting at the LHyd lines over the vargr corsiars heads? Hell no, because I was not going to be the guy who had to re-roll first so I had a tendency to use every dirty trick in the book to survive. CT was a product of the time and it never really marketed itself as a HARD science game, that was probably because it got rolled by StarWars and never managed to establish itself as anything more than a soft sci-fi / space pirates (ahrrrrr and a'vast) kind of game. 2300 felt like more of a hard science game, there was a logical progression of current tech, of course no one saw the smart phone wave and computers were, as in CT, way bigger than they are now.
To be honest I'd like to have seen some zero-g combat in Trav, Bryan Gibson had a great pic with a bunch of Vargr Corsairs in a hallway in zero-g in a gun fight. I think it was in one of the Mega Trav books, I loved that picture and kind of wished the game could be more like that.
I think the players tendency to view the air/raft (<-- huh huh!) or starship as their own private flight of Huey's for hitting the DZ hard and fast getting in and getting out before the bad guys know what's up is ... well to be honest it's not going to happen. Well maybe in an air raft but using a starship to pick people up out of a hot LZ is just foolish in an era where all it takes is one Teddy with a SAM to render your multi billion credit starship into so much slag is just a silly idea. My party had their S-Class shout out from under them by some local with a SAM over Montezuma, hit the FPP and well that was all she wrote, lesson learned.
----- Original Message -----
From:
To: "Traveller TNE" <>
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 11:23:07 PM
Subject: [Traveller_TNE] Gun nuts and cutlasses
The "gun nut" bit was not an accusation of you, it's just a Travellerism.
But I enjoyed the stories anyway.
Traveller has been left in the dust gun-nut wise over the years, but "back
in the day" people used to talk about, "boy, those guys at GDW sure like
guns."
Good point again about RCES: if Hammer Lathrop says there are no air/rafts
available for this op, there are no air/rafts. In the recent conversation
I have not been thinking of the RC framework, but just "the general
tendency of Traveller PCs left to their own devices" over the years.
Certainly the RC thing was a semi-curative against that. If your mission
is to go to the place and do the thing and bring back the whatsis, you
don't just skip the payments on your free trader the way you did in the
good old days.
I always really liked the Cutlass skill. It gave a sense of archaic,
counter-intuitive interest to this future that I liked, and early versions
of Traveller really went with that, with the low velocity snub pistol as
the standard shipboard small-arm. All of my early Traveller characters had
snub pistol and some kind of blade skill, and then as I got permanently
cast as the ref I expanded on that. I felt pretty strongly that the snub
pistol was inspired by the Sandman gun in the Logan's Run novels (it was a
revolver with different specialized rounds) so pulled that into MTU. The
"homer" round was illegal for non-government use, so my players were
trying to get black-market "homers" the way other campaigns were trying to
get battle dress.
The problem was that Traveller didn't really follow through on the early
cutlass premise. Marc later explained that it was just supposed to be the
future version of Mickey Mouse bayonet training in the Army, but I think
that was a rationalization for the fact that Traveller got eaten by Star
Wars, and people running through ship passageways shooting lasers all over
the place was just the dominant vision that people had of what an SF game
was going to be. And it didn't help that Bill Keith just drew
barely-disguised Star Wars scenes when he became the "official" Traveller
artist, because that's what people wanted to see anyway. And then the
minis started looking like the Bill Keith art so looked like Star Wars
figures, and so on.
So, while I had all kinds of rules IMTU for bad things that happen to you
when you shoot guns aboard ship (fire suppression systems attack you
[including pre-emptive de-pressurization], you hit power cables and knock
out the lights or the power or the gravity or the life support or the
reaction controls or the bulkhead or the LHyd pipes [you really think
there's enough extra resources in ship construction to completely armor
the INSIDE of a ship against firefights?] or your NPC crewmates would turn
on you for trying to get them killed by destroying their ship or
flash-freezing them in an LHyd bath), eventually everyone forgot about
snub pistols and Zero-G combat because the artificial gravity never goes
out in Star Wars or Star Trek (because they couldn't afford weightless
scenes).
When I game to GDW I thought about trying to re-introduce some of those
Cutlass and snub pistol ethics, and reminding people that the ship was the
only thing keeping all that vacuum and absolute zero away from them
(whether it's your ship you're defending, or someone else's ship you're
taking, it's still the only thing keeping you alive), so why fill it full
of holes? But I realized that would not only be trying to swim up a
waterfall, it would contradict all of the established acceptance in
Traveller that shipboard combat was like playing laser tag aboard the
Death Star. However, I did deliberately re-assert the presence of the
Cutlass as symbol in RCVG just because.
So anyway, I liked Cutlass skills. Even pulled in the fencing rules from
En Garde to make it more fun. But eventually Traveller stopped taking it
seriously and I went along.
> I guess the point of me being a gun nut in the TNE game I was in was a
> consequence of my looking at the weapons provided in the main books and
> seeing . holes that I didn't like the look of. Encountering more than a
> single LSP droid with a LAG was a recipe for a dead group of players and
> being a completely ruthless SOB I didn't like the odds I was looking at.
>
>
>
> I think it really kind of dawned on me when we ran the adventure in the
> Vampire Fleets source book and encountered Sandman and the . whatever the
> Midu Agaasham was named. One of the players next to me got flattened by
> the
> auto turrets on the bridge and 2 of the others were incapacitated when
> Grumble and me looked at the 2 or 3 LAG's we had between us and the 30 or
> so
> Children of the Ship who were climbing up the lift after us with murder in
> their hearts I decided that it was a stupid weapon. So rather than waste
> any rounds on them I simply killed them all with the elevator . the GM got
> really quiet when I said I was going to run the turbo lift back down the
> shaft they were climbing up, I felt like Bert the homicidal chimney sweep
> in
> Mary Poppins. I was delighted to be still alive and he was horrified that
> I'd killed half the people on the ship with a single action.
>
>
>
> After that session I looked at the LAG and though, this is the most
> ridiculous hunk of junk ever, what the hell was the imperium thinking
> hanging on to this thing for centuries? So I built the 10mm Gauss, the
> idea
> was to pretty much turn a LSP guard bot into a smoldering hunk of tin in a
> single 5 round burst.
>
>
>
> I think ground encounter tables are fine and dandy provided you have an
> acceptable way to introduce them into the scenario. Politely inform them
> that there's enough triple A where they're going to choke a horse, or let
> them know that they can be as noisy as they want leaving but getting there
> quietly is a wise alternative. Lets face it Predator would SUCK as a
> movie
> if Arnold flew in and flew out, but noooooo he's gotta crawl through 5
> miles
> of snake infested jungle to get to the crash site and then the Evac site's
> on the far side of a rebel village. Working for RCES worked stupid well
> in
> this manner because the players were really never their own master,
> someone
> somewhere else was always pulling the strings and typically the Op was
> designed by someone else and they're just the blunt instruments in charge
> of
> making it happen.
>
>
>
> Cutlass was something that never made a lot of sense to me either. To
> paraphrase Sean Connery, never bring a knife to a gun fight.
>
>
>
> From: []
> On Behalf Of
> Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 8:37 PM
> To:
> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Re: Journey vs Destination (and Air/Rafts)
> and
> useless A/E tables
>
>
>
>
>
> Derek raises an excellent point. As well armed and armored(TM) as the
> average Traveller party is (Traveller was the original gun nut game), it
> doesn't matter what you roll on the A/E table, there's just a red(/local
> blood-colored) mist in a couple seconds. And no one cries, "Hey, I didn't
> get to use my Cutlass skill!"
>
>> I've done a few orbital insertions that required a trek to get to our op
>> zone and then a mad dash to our extraction zone followed by mad
>> screaming
>> natives.
>>
>> Derek Stanley
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
I can see where you're going with the cutlass, I always made sure that there was never anything bigger than a snub pistol or something firing the same cartridge available while the ship was in the depths of space because I agree with you. Space is very detrimental to your health as a human being, of course it's probably only marginally more hostile to life than the Earth is. I did create a varity of SnubMG's and a SnubCarbine, but generally speaking small arms fire inside a starship is really bad stuff.
I always rationalize that the 10mm snub was a round pretty much designed for starship combat, it hit hard enough to pack a wollop but really lacked the velocity and pentration required to do a lot of damage to the interior of the ship. Did this mean that I as a player wasn't the guy shooting at the LHyd lines over the vargr corsiars heads? Hell no, because I was not going to be the guy who had to re-roll first so I had a tendency to use every dirty trick in the book to survive. CT was a product of the time and it never really marketed itself as a HARD science game, that was probably because it got rolled by StarWars and never managed to establish itself as anything more than a soft sci-fi / space pirates (ahrrrrr and a'vast) kind of game. 2300 felt like more of a hard science game, there was a logical progression of current tech, of course no one saw the smart phone wave and computers were, as in CT, way bigger than they are now.
To be honest I'd like to have seen some zero-g combat in Trav, Bryan Gibson had a great pic with a bunch of Vargr Corsairs in a hallway in zero-g in a gun fight. I think it was in one of the Mega Trav books, I loved that picture and kind of wished the game could be more like that.
I think the players tendency to view the air/raft (<-- huh huh!) or starship as their own private flight of Huey's for hitting the DZ hard and fast getting in and getting out before the bad guys know what's up is ... well to be honest it's not going to happen. Well maybe in an air raft but using a starship to pick people up out of a hot LZ is just foolish in an era where all it takes is one Teddy with a SAM to render your multi billion credit starship into so much slag is just a silly idea. My party had their S-Class shout out from under them by some local with a SAM over Montezuma, hit the FPP and well that was all she wrote, lesson learned.
----- Original Message -----
From:
To: "Traveller TNE" <>
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 11:23:07 PM
Subject: [Traveller_TNE] Gun nuts and cutlasses
The "gun nut" bit was not an accusation of you, it's just a Travellerism.
But I enjoyed the stories anyway.
Traveller has been left in the dust gun-nut wise over the years, but "back
in the day" people used to talk about, "boy, those guys at GDW sure like
guns."
Good point again about RCES: if Hammer Lathrop says there are no air/rafts
available for this op, there are no air/rafts. In the recent conversation
I have not been thinking of the RC framework, but just "the general
tendency of Traveller PCs left to their own devices" over the years.
Certainly the RC thing was a semi-curative against that. If your mission
is to go to the place and do the thing and bring back the whatsis, you
don't just skip the payments on your free trader the way you did in the
good old days.
I always really liked the Cutlass skill. It gave a sense of archaic,
counter-intuitive interest to this future that I liked, and early versions
of Traveller really went with that, with the low velocity snub pistol as
the standard shipboard small-arm. All of my early Traveller characters had
snub pistol and some kind of blade skill, and then as I got permanently
cast as the ref I expanded on that. I felt pretty strongly that the snub
pistol was inspired by the Sandman gun in the Logan's Run novels (it was a
revolver with different specialized rounds) so pulled that into MTU. The
"homer" round was illegal for non-government use, so my players were
trying to get black-market "homers" the way other campaigns were trying to
get battle dress.
The problem was that Traveller didn't really follow through on the early
cutlass premise. Marc later explained that it was just supposed to be the
future version of Mickey Mouse bayonet training in the Army, but I think
that was a rationalization for the fact that Traveller got eaten by Star
Wars, and people running through ship passageways shooting lasers all over
the place was just the dominant vision that people had of what an SF game
was going to be. And it didn't help that Bill Keith just drew
barely-disguised Star Wars scenes when he became the "official" Traveller
artist, because that's what people wanted to see anyway. And then the
minis started looking like the Bill Keith art so looked like Star Wars
figures, and so on.
So, while I had all kinds of rules IMTU for bad things that happen to you
when you shoot guns aboard ship (fire suppression systems attack you
[including pre-emptive de-pressurization], you hit power cables and knock
out the lights or the power or the gravity or the life support or the
reaction controls or the bulkhead or the LHyd pipes [you really think
there's enough extra resources in ship construction to completely armor
the INSIDE of a ship against firefights?] or your NPC crewmates would turn
on you for trying to get them killed by destroying their ship or
flash-freezing them in an LHyd bath), eventually everyone forgot about
snub pistols and Zero-G combat because the artificial gravity never goes
out in Star Wars or Star Trek (because they couldn't afford weightless
scenes).
When I game to GDW I thought about trying to re-introduce some of those
Cutlass and snub pistol ethics, and reminding people that the ship was the
only thing keeping all that vacuum and absolute zero away from them
(whether it's your ship you're defending, or someone else's ship you're
taking, it's still the only thing keeping you alive), so why fill it full
of holes? But I realized that would not only be trying to swim up a
waterfall, it would contradict all of the established acceptance in
Traveller that shipboard combat was like playing laser tag aboard the
Death Star. However, I did deliberately re-assert the presence of the
Cutlass as symbol in RCVG just because.
So anyway, I liked Cutlass skills. Even pulled in the fencing rules from
En Garde to make it more fun. But eventually Traveller stopped taking it
seriously and I went along.
> I guess the point of me being a gun nut in the TNE game I was in was a
> consequence of my looking at the weapons provided in the main books and
> seeing . holes that I didn't like the look of. Encountering more than a
> single LSP droid with a LAG was a recipe for a dead group of players and
> being a completely ruthless SOB I didn't like the odds I was looking at.
>
>
>
> I think it really kind of dawned on me when we ran the adventure in the
> Vampire Fleets source book and encountered Sandman and the . whatever the
> Midu Agaasham was named. One of the players next to me got flattened by
> the
> auto turrets on the bridge and 2 of the others were incapacitated when
> Grumble and me looked at the 2 or 3 LAG's we had between us and the 30 or
> so
> Children of the Ship who were climbing up the lift after us with murder in
> their hearts I decided that it was a stupid weapon. So rather than waste
> any rounds on them I simply killed them all with the elevator . the GM got
> really quiet when I said I was going to run the turbo lift back down the
> shaft they were climbing up, I felt like Bert the homicidal chimney sweep
> in
> Mary Poppins. I was delighted to be still alive and he was horrified that
> I'd killed half the people on the ship with a single action.
>
>
>
> After that session I looked at the LAG and though, this is the most
> ridiculous hunk of junk ever, what the hell was the imperium thinking
> hanging on to this thing for centuries? So I built the 10mm Gauss, the
> idea
> was to pretty much turn a LSP guard bot into a smoldering hunk of tin in a
> single 5 round burst.
>
>
>
> I think ground encounter tables are fine and dandy provided you have an
> acceptable way to introduce them into the scenario. Politely inform them
> that there's enough triple A where they're going to choke a horse, or let
> them know that they can be as noisy as they want leaving but getting there
> quietly is a wise alternative. Lets face it Predator would SUCK as a
> movie
> if Arnold flew in and flew out, but noooooo he's gotta crawl through 5
> miles
> of snake infested jungle to get to the crash site and then the Evac site's
> on the far side of a rebel village. Working for RCES worked stupid well
> in
> this manner because the players were really never their own master,
> someone
> somewhere else was always pulling the strings and typically the Op was
> designed by someone else and they're just the blunt instruments in charge
> of
> making it happen.
>
>
>
> Cutlass was something that never made a lot of sense to me either. To
> paraphrase Sean Connery, never bring a knife to a gun fight.
>
>
>
> From: []
> On Behalf Of
> Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 8:37 PM
> To:
> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Re: Journey vs Destination (and Air/Rafts)
> and
> useless A/E tables
>
>
>
>
>
> Derek raises an excellent point. As well armed and armored(TM) as the
> average Traveller party is (Traveller was the original gun nut game), it
> doesn't matter what you roll on the A/E table, there's just a red(/local
> blood-colored) mist in a couple seconds. And no one cries, "Hey, I didn't
> get to use my Cutlass skill!"
>
>> I've done a few orbital insertions that required a trek to get to our op
>> zone and then a mad dash to our extraction zone followed by mad
>> screaming
>> natives.
>>
>> Derek Stanley
>> Sent from my iPad
>>