Mongoose Traveller thread
Problem: Due to lucky rolls in char creation and some implants, my players are practically rolling for Effect now. Combat is now simply 'Who rolls for higher damage faster' and the players always win because 90% of the time they're just rolling for Effect. How to mitigate this? Or not?
Also I'm plum running out of Traveller adventure ideas. I've tried dipping in Shadowrun and Star Wards adventures but was wondering if anyone had anything cool they ever ran.
>>44196312
>>44196312
>>44196312
Social combat.
Spaceship combat.
High tech planets that have corrupting nanotechnology.
Low tech planets where implants are equivalent to Satan.
Non-combat encounters.
Villains who will do what your player characters won't.
Try random generators to spark ideas if you're feeling creatively drained.
Also, storytime.
>>44196484
>>44196558
Players were mercs on a planet that had multiple factions warring in the streets, politically, economically, spiritually, etc. Said factions ranged from cultists to alien hive minds. Imagine if everyone in the world lived in a single hive city and special interests were fear mongering turnted up to 11.
So many special interests were splitting the planet apart that megacorps silently withdrew holdings and sent an interstellar armada pacify the planet, which they did exterminatus style. The players managed to escape by desperately Jumping while in high orbit and def not 100 diameters away from the planet. The ship obviously misjumps.
>>44196697
Players are now in an unknown ship they stole with a white collar working class crew that managed to hop on with them. Ship comes out of Jump and after floating aimlessly in space for a week their sensors find a planet with civilization.
The players arrive on the planet but find out that there is something wrong on it - there's no people and it looks like it went through a warzone. The players land at the spaceport but find the fueling hatches are locked on the other side and they need to go into the bowels of the spaceport to unlock them. The players enter the spaceport while the WCW try and figure out how to refuel the ship. The players go into the deserted spaceport and underground, only to find that the basement crew is 'infected' (zambies).
>>44196789
Players fight off zombies, and figure out a simple 'red light, green' light puzzle. They unlock the fuel hatches above by restarting a computer but the computer has a backlog of activity, one in which locks the elevator back up to the spaceport. Players figure out another way out and as they do the ship calls them, saying they are getting chased out by black copter vehicles before cutting out. Players arrive at an abandoned bunker and begin to head outside. As they are leaving a garage door begins to slowly open. Two players take cover. One player stands in the open. An unmarked fireteam enters and sprays down the Dumb One. Other two players throw grenades like maniacs and beat the fireteam. After saving the Dumb One they take the unknown fireteam's car and are chased around the city until their ship arrives in the nick of time to save them. Players promptly get off planet.
>>44196881
>>44196881
Players are still in unknown space. They Jump to the only spot the White Collar Crew/WCC managed to find, a desert planet with a single shielded mining facility on a desert planet. The players get there and are grounded by a solar storm that is harmless to humans but would fry their sensors. Players sweep the mining facility and since they can't take off due to the solar storm, spend 3 weeks jousting with 4 wheelers they found on site. Around this time they get an SOS.
The SOS is asking for help. Players are pensive about helping but are guilted into it by the WCC. Players take their 4 wheelers they stole and go into the desert. The next day they are attacked by sand worms aka Graboids. After they kill the Graboid, they turn their backs and hear a tearing noise. Out from the carcass comes an Assblaster who Assblasts into the air and dive bombs them. Players rip it to shreds.
Players get closer to the SOS signal. There is a sand storm so they take shelter in a cave. As they rest, Dumb One hears a noise and investigates. Without his gun. Dumb One is ripped to shreds by Displacer Beast like beasts. Other players investigate shrieking, kill beasts and rescue Dumb One.
Players spend the next day (total of 3 days since they left the mining facility) finally trekking to the SOS signal and sees the crashed ship. Players suddenly get cold feet and abandon quest. Players spend 3 days returning to their stolen ship. WCC asks them how it went and players all have a Dumb One moment and tell them the truth. WCC disapproves. Players eventually have the brain capacity to call the SOS ship and find out the SOS signal was sent by the ship's AI. Que 20 minute long discussion if they should rescue a piece of technology or not, with another side conversation if an AI with 'high intelligence' is the same as sentience. Players administer their own Turing Test with questions like 'What is your favorite color' and 'Are you happy?'
>>44197108
Players go back to the SOS site and enter the crashed ship. They find an alien organism feeding off the still active power plant and they kill it. They rescue the ship AI core and put it into a robot they generated using random tables, getting a tigerbot with tentacle appendages. This AI core knows of a frontier spaceport called Laika 57 on a moon. Players also find out the AI core has been sitting here for a century on this planet.
Players arrive at the 'frontier' spaceport which has now become a full on city space port owned and operated by the Vargr. Players have some cargo they are trying to sell and after meeting a few crooked merchants they find an honest merchant who is willing to take their cargo at face value no haggling if the players do him a favor. They need to search and find his Vargr pilot crew whom he needs for the big Vargr race soon (this merchant is sponsoring a grav racer in a grav endurance race). Players find the crew being held by pirates and after disabling the pirates they take the pilot crew back to the merchant but the crew is in no shape for the race. Players are then hired to be the merchant's pit crew while the pit crew is upgraded to pilots. The big grav race is about to begin on the planet the moon orbits.
Players play the part of the pit crew trying to figure out the grav racer lingo I based on Nascar and trucker radio signals. After a while players await their racers but there's no reports. Eventually they go looking for the racers and find giant pit holes. A pit hole opens up underneath them.
>>44197400
>>44197108
Players are dumped into an underground cavern where they fight off bandits. Exploring the caves they find a bandit camp in the caves and their crew locked up. Players ambush a few bandits and disguise themselves and walk around. Players all roll terrible disguise checks. One player gets picked on by some bandits and overreacts by going full auto on them. Player successfully kills 1 out of the 600 bandits. 9 bandits then mug him and steal his gun. Everyone begins to chase the 9 bandits as I play Benny Hill. Players eventually lose sight of the bandits. The player who got his gun stolen from sulks and throws a tantrum, blaming the Dumb One both in character and out of character. Player now simply wants to go home and acts hilariously childish. Everyone sticks together though and tries to rescue the racers. Racers surprisingly don't want to get rescued as the getaway plan is simply 'dodge bullets on the way out'. Players escape by themselves.
Players find a motorpool and after fighting bandits they escape on bandit cars. Bandits eventually give chase and there is a car to car battle. Players win but all the cars are totaled. And then the Boss shows up with his armored semi truck. Players all say GG to each other and finally understand what death looks like. Semi truck then explodes as their own ship manages to laser snipe it in a DM fiat. However out of the semi comes the Boss who almost TPKs them but players survive.
Players are hailed heroes and given shiny medals and they are happy. A few weeks later players get all pissy because they just realize all they got given shiny medals for the rescue instead of cash.
At this point one of the players (the Dumb One) forgot that he was playing a roll20 game for the past 2 months and didn't log on whereas I got really drunk and started giving out extra armor to the other two players along with HEAP ammo, rocket launchers and guass rifles. I'm still dealing the the ramifications of that night.
>>44196312
Honestly, if you're already messing with Shadowrun stuff, just throw in a big arc where two corporations show up with the same great idea about mining the same star system, and see if the players can spark a war.
>>44197639
Players travel to a planet that has a high orbital station who informs the players the planet is off limits due to a virus. High port is safe, planet is not. Players then have a panic attack and think that the high port is infectious, and walk around in their space suits.
Players get hired by a planetary doctor (Dr Jumpman) to find some old ass medicine that was stopped manufactured a 100 years ago because it was also the base for a really addictive street drug. Two players begin to look for information and soon give up, despite me telling them that they literally cannot fail the check as its a rollable table of information. Dumb One get shown a picture of a night scene bar and tries to go into great lengths on telling me how he parties there.
Players find some information, fight off some weak gangsters with tommy guns and head to another planet with an asteroid belt. Scanned paper trails indicate a smuggling ship with some of this old ass medicine is crashed here in the asteroid belt. Players find said ship eventually but they only get to watch as it accelerates down towards the planet, crashing into the surface. Amazingly the ship is still intact. The players land at the local spaceport. Incidentally this planet has high gravity which slightly reduced some of the player's immense shooting abilities.
Players hire a ship and head out to where this medicine cargo crashed. Players get ambushed by mercs and some show off their abilities to roll purely Effect.
>>44197873
Players take the ships lifeboats into the island through an inlet and into a river. Players thankfully do not mention that the river current is leading into the island and not out. Players then survive a skill challenge involving dinosaurs, insects, white water rapids, and gators. Players breathe a sigh of relief but freak out when they fall off a little waterfall. Players then have a slight panic attack when I start playing Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls and then I drop them off a bigger waterfall. Players go full panic.exe when I being to play Enya and send them off an even larger waterfall. They suffered no damage because it was all just fluff but Pouty had been triggered and wanted to go home. Players stuck around and eventually found the crashed ship and fought some more mercs that were sent to get the same medicine.
Players make it back to their ship and are about to Jump when a John Deere appears on their scene and offers to negotiate with them over the medicine. Dumb One takes over negotiations for some reason and the other two players allow it. Dumb One's attempt to negotiate is an unbreakable, unflinching circular argument. Also he calls the John Deere a mafioso and himself a pirate. John Deere corrects him by calling himself a legal representative of several companies and the player a free trader but Dumb One wasn't having any of that. Dumb One tries some lies and gets called out. Other two players groan. John Deere finally tires of the circular argument and just sends an attack ship to attack. We left off there.
The Patron tables are always a good place to start, but if "challenge" is the problem you may be playing the wrong game.
>>44196312
Find an SF book from a few years back titled "Marrow".
>>44196312
Just have the enemies in hardcore armor and armed with heavy laser rifles or some other OP weapon.
What kind of armor are your PCs wearing? have the enemies wearing at least the equivalent, if not better. That should knock their effect down, or render it useless. What kind of weapons are your PCs using?
Ideally you should have a campaign story that carries the entire campaign, you shouldn't really "run out of ideas" the one idea of the story should propel the campaign forward, giving the PCs a goal to work towards. everything else is random encounters or random jobs.
If you're really low on ideas, go watch a shit load of Sci Fi: Outland, 2010, all the star treks, even enterprise, The expanse (new series), firefly, alien, etc. They're all full of great ideas
>>44196312
>implants
Yeah those are not a good idea. Classic Traveller didn't have that sort of thing in-setting because Vilani paranoia about uncontrolled technological advance combined with a general view that natural is better meant that only lunatics and criminals messed around with jamming wires in their heads.
Out of setting, the system just doesn't have much room for stacking a bunch of mechanical bonuses to represent superhumans with cyborg implants, but I guess when they were building MGT, they figured it was obligatory and put 'em in there. The end result is that it seems to break the system a lot, because this is not the first time I've heard this complaint about system breakage, although it's usually just about the Central Supply Catalogue in general.rather than
>>44204598
It is very true that having implants give multiple +1 bonuses or a +2 bonus can easily break the system.
>>44196312
>Problem: Due to lucky rolls in char creation and some implants, my players are practically rolling for Effect now. Combat is now simply 'Who rolls for higher damage faster' and the players always win because 90% of the time they're just rolling for Effect. How to mitigate this? Or not?
First, you are playing the system with some of the deadliest combat around. Your players should be afraid of death in combat.
Second, you are the goddamn GM/ref. As with any system, it is your job to balance power creep to keep things challenging. Fudge the dice, ignore stats, and have enemies land a few hits in combat. Kill some NPCs and wound some PCs to show your players combat isn't the easy way out of a situation. Remind them that /tg/ isn't a video game: battles aren't balanced and it is perfectly fine to realize when you are outmatched, outgunned, or outwitted and it's time to run like hell. They should be having fun, but feel challenged.
Third, if your PCs complain about this change or challenge results, nip that shit in the bud. Don't allow them to metagame. If their equipment is OP, find a way to get rid of it or disable it, etc.
