Well it’s so interesting to see how critiquing a person’s facial hair according to your own aesthetic preference is the thing that was on your mind to write a comment about on a video with a few thousand views and some hundreds of likes indicating it might be of some kind of value. I wonder, if I were a woman would you critique my weight? My makeup? How is it even remotely relevant? Have a nice day
@@The_CGA I find it interesting that your first thought goes to "how would this person feel about me if i were a woman" but in all seriousness, my comment probably has more value to you than you might think. I cam to your Video because i was interested in the Traveller RPG. After listening to you for 5 minutes, all that i remember of interest is that beard. Maybe there is a lesson in there somewhere for you. For example: How can i make my content more interesting to people. Specifically how can i captivate the attention of someone who came to me from a google topic search and make him or her listen to the entire video instead of boring them and having them click away after commenting on my beard? Just a thought.
Welp, you sold me! I've recently begun to enjoy a slower variety of games: going one incremental step and seeing what happens, as opposed to jumping to the next plot point. Traveller sounds like it fits with that growing taste.
it is, rolling solo with my roomie (aka coop without a gm) right now with cepheus's Solo system - while i cannot recommend the cepheous books as they read like word salad to me, the mongose 1st edition was very good and i heard great things about their second edition but have yet to read or play it
Love to hear your take more on what the GM should know or use about physics or other aspects for hard-sci-fi GMing vs fantasy (which most are familiar with).
Great videos. I'm drafting an adventure currently and you've given some interesting advice for this first-time GM to chew on. I'm looking forward to checking out your own campaign videos.
Great video! Couple of points of order: MgT1 was published between 2008-2017. That's ten years. MSRP for MgT2 core rules is $49.99 USD, which is dead average for a hardcover RPG core book in this size range. So I was caught a bit flatfooted by your statements to the contrary.
Eh, it’s alright. The goal there was to offer something on the topic of the many grumpy “acquisitive new edition” people and put that critique into perspective. I hear pretty regular the core book or starter set at $70, with that number just coming down recently. I think a lot of people are Also looking at the gulf of difference between free (by way of SRD) and paid, or LBB staple booklet prices. The main goal was to put out there with some subtlety that there is some value to art and layout (especially layout) on a level that has rarely been attempted in traveller. As for the dates, I could have sworn MgT2 started in 2015/6 but I could be wrong
For some reason, I expected you to pull a "not my system" approach to this. I don't know why, honestly. Maybe it's because a lot of old grognards from previous editions of various role-playing games (including myself) get all curmudgeon about newer stuff. But you gave it an honest look, and your take on it gave some ideas that I'm honestly going to add to my campaign. Also, just because I feel like it, I'm going to list the Films/TV series I intend to use for my campaign once I'm done with the majority of the opening, which has been premades (First time running the game). Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, Black Lagoon. I will look at the Expanse to see what I think of it (and hopefully get some ideas), and I intend to look at Lexx again as well, just to add some quirky to the game.
We went on to playing a solid campaign with about 5 adventures from here. Reflecting on that, there are a number of places where there is room for improvement moving into the future,... but overall it was not one of those campaigns where the System was a source of frustration for the GM or players. It was the best Traveller gaming I have experienced so far, I learned the most about how Traveller actually plays and what it means to be doing an RPG campaign in that universe from this campaign.
Now that we have POD options I'm wondering if it might be worth it to either go Mongoose 2e, Classic Traveller or Cepheus. My group would go either way. I'm leaning Classic makes sense for bang for the buck, since FFE are selling the whole catalog of PDFs for 35USD. Also, DTRPG has a Classic Traveller book that includes the 1+2+3 booklets and some adventures for 30$. (If you have a DTRPG affiliate link I would love to use that to support your channel).
I would impress upon players that contragravity is supremely DANGEROUS when it goes wrong. ... That nice grav car, speeding along at 200 kph, suddenly gets a power surge in the grav flux generator.... Your vector is now 80 degrees to the surface. You now have 30 minutes to fix it before you suffocate. While it's not really true, there are other ways to avoid this, it makes them THINK about it. LOL
The glaring difference between Mongoose Traveller 1st-ed. and 2nd-ed is that 2nd-ed. does not give you starship design rules in the core rulebook. None! It gives you a goodly selection of starships and non-Jump-capable spaceships and boats, with snazzy isomorphic floorplans, but no way to make custom ones. You need to buy the High Guard supplememt for that. Also, you can have wildly varying Technology Levels on planets as a result of random starsector generation (Pro Tip: get a web-utility to spit out hundreds of random star-systems for you, or use the enormous Traveller Map of the Third Imperium, www.travellermap.com ). Starports want to channel trade-products, though, and act as a sort of technology embassy importing starship tech to keep themselves going. In the extreme, low-tech planets with magical forces become just like fantasy RPG. Many homebrewed rules have adapted Traveller to fantasy "careers", and one coming out soon is "Sword of Cepheus" which is not Mongoose-2 but based on generic 2D6 Cepheus Engine.
I am generally a Third imperium enthusiast and have an only minimal enthusiasm for making new ships; seeing the canon ones move around and do their individual tricks is much more my speed. I understand Trillion credit squadron antics and the like are important to some folks. They aren’t to me, and even if they were, this video isn’t really a comparison kind of thing, it’s just an evaluation of the book as if it were its own thing. As for fantasy 2d6 gaming, I’m sure that appeals to a certain kind of fantasy genre, but the archetypal middle-aged-veteran characters that Traveller style generation prefers over all others don’t match up with many kinds of fantasy I’m familiar with. Maybe there’s some modification to bring on the plucky youth that I’m not aware of. It would be interesting to see
High Guard is the book for ship design. So for the groups that have people that want to make their own ships they can get that book, but the starter SET also has some extra on the ships and species.
Thanks for posting this! I'm running an MGT2E campaign now. If you are looking for a short video topic on something specific, could you post an example of how shipboard power use works in play? I see that the rules are designed to make the players make tradeoff decisions, but I've never found a situation where that has happened. I might be doing it wrong, unless damage to the reactor is the only thing that drops it below the threshold to fuel anything? Thanks so much!
I’ve dropped reactor output for: Bad fuel Software out of sorts (power rationing software offline) Reactor not in good maintenance So far it’s been two of these things at once, or the players deciding to scale back reactor output voluntarily to change their emissions and appear as something else (to “quack like a duck”)
They do not in any direct fashion; the close attention to drones in mgt1 has been dropped from official stat blocks for the most part…probably to preserve the purview of the referee to preserve a golden age sci-fi ambience if one desires to have an imagined future with less robotics. (Not to my taste but MgT2 closely courts the aesthetic tastes of the original generation of Traveller players) The suleiman class scout retains 10 probes. Rules are scant for their use.
It will be interesting to see how Coriolis and Alien compare. Both I think owe a bit to Traveller, but Free League's Year Zero Engine does a fine job of pushing tensions. But I do not think I have met a version of Traveller I do not like. I even owned T20 once upon a time.
If you haven't already, you might find it interesting to take a look at classic traveller (the 1979 printing is my preferred one, but the 1981 is the easier one to get hold of). That's the edition where you literally could die in character creation (and, if you rolled crappy stats, getting your character killed in a more dangerous career was a time honoured tradition).
you seem like a seasoned player with Traveller, do you know of an adventure (for any version of traveller) whereby your team has to storm a giant warship and assasinate a bad boss (like a mad general or emperor ?) after fighting all his minions ? (obviously with some plot).
The idea in the RAW is something like: 1) TNs specific to the task at hand (“is it easy?” Is it hard?” “Is it formidable?”). 2) modifiers are more or less static from skills, abilities, and rarely gear 3) boon and bane for “situational difficulties” like darkness, having someone help, etc In this way a bane makes the chance of a bad failure with high margin of failure meaningful, but doesn’t moot the roll altogether. Success and failure (at margins) are possible at once in a way that they can’t be just with sliding TN. Likewise with boon, it’s very useful when a character is getting help from another, this way the help matters but they both take the risk of a high MoF if things go really poorly. This may sound complicated but in fact it’s easier in my experience. The key is to know and commit to a difficulty associated with the core of the activity and to hold environmental stuff at arms length
I calculated that a Boon or Bane shifts the average roll by 1.54, instead of just a 7 average, but it doesn't make 2's impossible with a Boon or 12s impossible with a Bane. Get all 3 dice as 1's on a Boon and you still get a 2. Use Boons and Banes as a catch-all for significant factors that convey Advantage or Disadvantage.
CGA - would you please do a compare/contrast with The Expanse RPG (3d6 roll-high), and opine on whether The Expanse RPG is closer to Mongoose Traveller, or to GURPS Traveller? Thanks for all your great videos!!!
The Expanse game is built on green Ronin’s AGE system which isn’t much like either. AGE is something like a pulpy engine that is more concerned with “zing” than a bedrock of realism or verisimilitude. In that way, It’s more like Savage Worlds than it is like GURPS or mainline 2d6 Traveller. While an interesting premise, at present my impression and estimation is that if I were ... To do a video organized along those lines would be to discuss whether London is closer to New York or closer to Boston. The gulf of ocean would overshadow the comparison.
More or less. In the 'present day' of the setting, the Third Imperium has an 'express boat' service that serves as the nervous system and information net upon which commerce and government operate. These boats form a net leading back to capital by redundant links. Civilian and business interests can send messages for a nominal fee through the network. Each 'express boat' dunmps its data payload by direct lasercom link to the next boat that is standing by to jump as it arrives, such that there is very little downtime. Passenger service is something like stagecoaches, but only the fantastically wealthy or work-from-home types can really afford to travel for business or pleasure more than a few parsecs at a time. Most people born on a frontier planet also die on the frontier, having never seen Capital or even the local sector capital. The exception to this are migrant laborers that risk going into cold sleep for the journey, and people with a working passage aboard the trading ships that knit the Empire together...in other words, Player Characters.
@@The_CGA Very few places in this world currently, where someone can think, let alone act, as an individual. The Traveller Universe calls out to the mavericks amongst us, perhaps?
The rules are identical between the two; the starter set rules have everything that is in the hardcover (in two softcover volumes) There’s a fold out map and an adventure in the starter. Check out Seth’s channel for a flip-through and review. It’s six of one half a dozen of the other As far as I’m concerned
@@The_CGA I think that the Starter Set direct from mongoose would be best for me. Dunno which starter adventure to get after I get the Central Supply Catalogue and Highguard. I'm seeking an adventure of along the lines of Star Wars a New Hope or that 1980s video game Shadowfire i.e. a small group of adventurers infiltrating a Death Star or military complex or giant warshiip and assasinating a boss or performing a rescue or both when faced with overwhelming odds with minions and deadly "traps" and general dangerous in the place that they have infiltrated.
I must warn you: what you describe is very pulpy, the combat system is lethal and the character generation creates pretty down-to-earth characters that a long way from Star Wars level invincibility
No argument about the price The lack of art and visual panache In Cepheus/elder Traveller makes recruiting new players and sustaining the game’s future difficult. As for closed: I am really frustrated with mongoose, especially with regards to the foreven sector and reneged licensing on making in-universe content. The royalties are just too high in their content store to pay for things like art, cartography, and layout that I think are...important. Good work costs money. With mongoose, or any other DTRPg store...it’s feudalism
@@The_CGA Its a money pit system. Most of the material they write is built off of old stuff. They are all about the money. I will stick with Cepheus Engine and Classic Traveller. They made their version 1 OGL which gave birth to Cepheus Engine. That is the way top go!!! Many great writers have chosen that path
I was gonna say "Corona Beard is out of control" then i checked the date of the video ... yeah, you got no excuse, man.
Well it’s so interesting to see how critiquing a person’s facial hair according to your own aesthetic preference is the thing that was on your mind to write a comment about on a video with a few thousand views and some hundreds of likes indicating it might be of some kind of value. I wonder, if I were a woman would you critique my weight? My makeup? How is it even remotely relevant?
Have a nice day
@@The_CGA I find it interesting that your first thought goes to "how would this person feel about me if i were a woman" but in all seriousness, my comment probably has more value to you than you might think. I cam to your Video because i was interested in the Traveller RPG. After listening to you for 5 minutes, all that i remember of interest is that beard. Maybe there is a lesson in there somewhere for you. For example: How can i make my content more interesting to people. Specifically how can i captivate the attention of someone who came to me from a google topic search and make him or her listen to the entire video instead of boring them and having them click away after commenting on my beard? Just a thought.
Literally nobody here thinks you matter, Dolch. Move on. lol
Good to see you're doing Traveller videos still. UA-cam needs lots of Traveller.
I love this game. It was the first one ever to have a background generation. And the rules for 2d6 Traveller are just so damned easy.
Which version?
2e is supposedly a lot different from classic & then there's Traveller 5
@@creepadept Classic Traveller.
Welp, you sold me! I've recently begun to enjoy a slower variety of games: going one incremental step and seeing what happens, as opposed to jumping to the next plot point. Traveller sounds like it fits with that growing taste.
Seems like a great system for a Firefly like adventure. I haven't looked at Traveler since the early 80s. But am very tempted now.
it is, rolling solo with my roomie (aka coop without a gm) right now with cepheus's Solo system - while i cannot recommend the cepheous books as they read like word salad to me, the mongose 1st edition was very good and i heard great things about their second edition but have yet to read or play it
I have been playing Traveller since 1983. When I saw my first episode if Firefly in 2005, I said “OMG they made a show about Traveller.”
Firefly is basically Josh Whedon's old Traveller game put into film
@@haveswordwilltravel Thanks just started watching on Prime now.
@@griselame Quite literally, actually
Love to hear your take more on what the GM should know or use about physics or other aspects for hard-sci-fi GMing vs fantasy (which most are familiar with).
Great videos. I'm drafting an adventure currently and you've given some interesting advice for this first-time GM to chew on. I'm looking forward to checking out your own campaign videos.
Great video!
Couple of points of order: MgT1 was published between 2008-2017. That's ten years. MSRP for MgT2 core rules is $49.99 USD, which is dead average for a hardcover RPG core book in this size range. So I was caught a bit flatfooted by your statements to the contrary.
Christ, I hate to be that guy. Sorry.
Eh, it’s alright. The goal there was to offer something on the topic of the many grumpy “acquisitive new edition” people and put that critique into perspective.
I hear pretty regular the core book or starter set at $70, with that number just coming down recently. I think a lot of people are Also looking at the gulf of difference between free (by way of SRD) and paid, or LBB staple booklet prices.
The main goal was to put out there with some subtlety that there is some value to art and layout (especially layout) on a level that has rarely been attempted in traveller.
As for the dates, I could have sworn MgT2 started in 2015/6 but I could be wrong
Great game. Can't beat it in terms of simplicity, compared to many sci-fi systems
For some reason, I expected you to pull a "not my system" approach to this. I don't know why, honestly. Maybe it's because a lot of old grognards from previous editions of various role-playing games (including myself) get all curmudgeon about newer stuff. But you gave it an honest look, and your take on it gave some ideas that I'm honestly going to add to my campaign.
Also, just because I feel like it, I'm going to list the Films/TV series I intend to use for my campaign once I'm done with the majority of the opening, which has been premades (First time running the game).
Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, Black Lagoon. I will look at the Expanse to see what I think of it (and hopefully get some ideas), and I intend to look at Lexx again as well, just to add some quirky to the game.
We went on to playing a solid campaign with about 5 adventures from here. Reflecting on that, there are a number of places where there is room for improvement moving into the future,...
but overall it was not one of those campaigns where the System was a source of frustration for the GM or players. It was the best Traveller gaming I have experienced so far, I learned the most about how Traveller actually plays and what it means to be doing an RPG campaign in that universe from this campaign.
@@The_CGA I hope my campaign gives a similar experience.
Now that we have POD options I'm wondering if it might be worth it to either go Mongoose 2e, Classic Traveller or Cepheus.
My group would go either way.
I'm leaning Classic makes sense for bang for the buck, since FFE are selling the whole catalog of PDFs for 35USD.
Also, DTRPG has a Classic Traveller book that includes the 1+2+3 booklets and some adventures for 30$.
(If you have a DTRPG affiliate link I would love to use that to support your channel).
I would impress upon players that contragravity is supremely DANGEROUS when it goes wrong. ...
That nice grav car, speeding along at 200 kph, suddenly gets a power surge in the grav flux generator.... Your vector is now 80 degrees to the surface. You now have 30 minutes to fix it before you suffocate. While it's not really true, there are other ways to avoid this, it makes them THINK about it. LOL
The glaring difference between Mongoose Traveller 1st-ed. and 2nd-ed is that 2nd-ed. does not give you starship design rules in the core rulebook. None! It gives you a goodly selection of starships and non-Jump-capable spaceships and boats, with snazzy isomorphic floorplans, but no way to make custom ones. You need to buy the High Guard supplememt for that.
Also, you can have wildly varying Technology Levels on planets as a result of random starsector generation (Pro Tip: get a web-utility to spit out hundreds of random star-systems for you, or use the enormous Traveller Map of the Third Imperium, www.travellermap.com ). Starports want to channel trade-products, though, and act as a sort of technology embassy importing starship tech to keep themselves going.
In the extreme, low-tech planets with magical forces become just like fantasy RPG. Many homebrewed rules have adapted Traveller to fantasy "careers", and one coming out soon is "Sword of Cepheus" which is not Mongoose-2 but based on generic 2D6 Cepheus Engine.
I am generally a Third imperium enthusiast and have an only minimal enthusiasm for making new ships; seeing the canon ones move around and do their individual tricks is much more my speed.
I understand Trillion credit squadron antics and the like are important to some folks. They aren’t to me, and even if they were, this video isn’t really a comparison kind of thing, it’s just an evaluation of the book as if it were its own thing.
As for fantasy 2d6 gaming, I’m sure that appeals to a certain kind of fantasy genre, but the archetypal middle-aged-veteran characters that Traveller style generation prefers over all others don’t match up with many kinds of fantasy I’m familiar with. Maybe there’s some modification to bring on the plucky youth that I’m not aware of. It would be interesting to see
@@The_CGA Yes, I am sure the tried-and-true ships are all most players want.
High Guard is the book for ship design.
So for the groups that have people that want to make their own ships they can get that book, but the starter SET also has some extra on the ships and species.
Traveller is da shizzle 💜
Thanks for posting this! I'm running an MGT2E campaign now. If you are looking for a short video topic on something specific, could you post an example of how shipboard power use works in play? I see that the rules are designed to make the players make tradeoff decisions, but I've never found a situation where that has happened. I might be doing it wrong, unless damage to the reactor is the only thing that drops it below the threshold to fuel anything? Thanks so much!
I’ve dropped reactor output for:
Bad fuel
Software out of sorts (power rationing software offline)
Reactor not in good maintenance
So far it’s been two of these things at once, or the players deciding to scale back reactor output voluntarily to change their emissions and appear as something else (to “quack like a duck”)
Do the ship's sensors take in account drone probes?
They do not in any direct fashion; the close attention to drones in mgt1 has been dropped from official stat blocks for the most part…probably to preserve the purview of the referee to preserve a golden age sci-fi ambience if one desires to have an imagined future with less robotics. (Not to my taste but MgT2 closely courts the aesthetic tastes of the original generation of Traveller players)
The suleiman class scout retains 10 probes. Rules are scant for their use.
It will be interesting to see how Coriolis and Alien compare. Both I think owe a bit to Traveller, but Free League's Year Zero Engine does a fine job of pushing tensions.
But I do not think I have met a version of Traveller I do not like. I even owned T20 once upon a time.
What about traveller 5?
Great video!
If you haven't already, you might find it interesting to take a look at classic traveller (the 1979 printing is my preferred one, but the 1981 is the easier one to get hold of). That's the edition where you literally could die in character creation (and, if you rolled crappy stats, getting your character killed in a more dangerous career was a time honoured tradition).
you seem like a seasoned player with Traveller, do you know of an adventure (for any version of traveller) whereby your team has to storm a giant warship and assasinate a bad boss (like a mad general or emperor ?) after fighting all his minions ? (obviously with some plot).
@@davedogge2280 Not really; I don't tend to use pre-written adventures.
Just bought my book/PDF yesterday! Started reading... Impatient! The boon/bane, could with GM just increase/decrease the difficulty number?
The idea in the RAW is something like:
1) TNs specific to the task at hand (“is it easy?” Is it hard?” “Is it formidable?”).
2) modifiers are more or less static from skills, abilities, and rarely gear
3) boon and bane for “situational difficulties” like darkness, having someone help, etc
In this way a bane makes the chance of a bad failure with high margin of failure meaningful, but doesn’t moot the roll altogether. Success and failure (at margins) are possible at once in a way that they can’t be just with sliding TN.
Likewise with boon, it’s very useful when a character is getting help from another, this way the help matters but they both take the risk of a high MoF if things go really poorly.
This may sound complicated but in fact it’s easier in my experience. The key is to know and commit to a difficulty associated with the core of the activity and to hold environmental stuff at arms length
I calculated that a Boon or Bane shifts the average roll by 1.54, instead of just a 7 average, but it doesn't make 2's impossible with a Boon or 12s impossible with a Bane. Get all 3 dice as 1's on a Boon and you still get a 2. Use Boons and Banes as a catch-all for significant factors that convey Advantage or Disadvantage.
My thanks to both of you! Looking forward to starting a campaign... After I read the rules...😀
CGA - would you please do a compare/contrast with The Expanse RPG (3d6 roll-high), and opine on whether The Expanse RPG is closer to Mongoose Traveller, or to GURPS Traveller? Thanks for all your great videos!!!
The Expanse game is built on green Ronin’s AGE system which isn’t much like either. AGE is something like a pulpy engine that is more concerned with “zing” than a bedrock of realism or verisimilitude.
In that way, It’s more like Savage Worlds than it is like GURPS or mainline 2d6 Traveller. While an interesting premise, at present my impression and estimation is that if I were ...
To do a video organized along those lines would be to discuss whether London is closer to New York or closer to Boston. The gulf of ocean would overshadow the comparison.
@@The_CGA Thanks -- do you have your own community discord server yet? Link please if so, thanks!
News travels like Pony Express or a stage coach?
More or less. In the 'present day' of the setting, the Third Imperium has an 'express boat' service that serves as the nervous system and information net upon which commerce and government operate. These boats form a net leading back to capital by redundant links. Civilian and business interests can send messages for a nominal fee through the network.
Each 'express boat' dunmps its data payload by direct lasercom link to the next boat that is standing by to jump as it arrives, such that there is very little downtime.
Passenger service is something like stagecoaches, but only the fantastically wealthy or work-from-home types can really afford to travel for business or pleasure more than a few parsecs at a time. Most people born on a frontier planet also die on the frontier, having never seen Capital or even the local sector capital.
The exception to this are migrant laborers that risk going into cold sleep for the journey, and people with a working passage aboard the trading ships that knit the Empire together...in other words, Player Characters.
@@The_CGA Very good, thank you/
@@The_CGA Very few places in this world currently, where someone can think, let alone act, as an individual. The Traveller Universe calls out to the mavericks amongst us, perhaps?
but should I get the Starter Set or the Mongoose Core Book instead ?
The rules are identical between the two; the starter set rules have everything that is in the hardcover (in two softcover volumes)
There’s a fold out map and an adventure in the starter. Check out Seth’s channel for a flip-through and review. It’s six of one half a dozen of the other As far as I’m concerned
@@The_CGA I think that the Starter Set direct from mongoose would be best for me. Dunno which starter adventure to get after I get the Central Supply Catalogue and Highguard. I'm seeking an adventure of along the lines of Star Wars a New Hope or that 1980s video game Shadowfire i.e. a small group of adventurers infiltrating a Death Star or military complex or giant warshiip and assasinating a boss or performing a rescue or both when faced with overwhelming odds with minions and deadly "traps" and general dangerous in the place that they have infiltrated.
I must warn you: what you describe is very pulpy, the combat system is lethal and the character generation creates pretty down-to-earth characters that a long way from Star Wars level invincibility
@@The_CGA thx for the advice
TRAVELLER IS THE BEST!
I knew I liked you... Ii mean GURPS.
Way To expensive and a closed system. I will stick with Cepheus Engine and Classic Traveller
No argument about the price
The lack of art and visual panache In Cepheus/elder Traveller makes recruiting new players and sustaining the game’s future difficult.
As for closed:
I am really frustrated with mongoose, especially with regards to the foreven sector and reneged licensing on making in-universe content. The royalties are just too high in their content store to pay for things like art, cartography, and layout that I think are...important. Good work costs money. With mongoose, or any other DTRPg store...it’s feudalism
@@The_CGA Its a money pit system. Most of the material they write is built off of old stuff. They are all about the money. I will stick with Cepheus Engine and Classic Traveller. They made their version 1 OGL which gave birth to Cepheus Engine. That is the way top go!!! Many great writers have chosen that path