Hi there

On 29 January 2017 at 10:24,  <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
> My irritations are mostly with things that were show-stoppers for me in 1e and are still
> there (or are new variations on old problems). What I consider to me stupid skill
> listings for chargen are the biggest ones. For example, a spy (corporate or
> governmental) is guaranteed to get Gun Combat-1 if they get enough rank, but a cop
> might not ever get it. Why in the heck is a Rank 4 spy guaranteed gun skill when no cop
> is?

Well that's easy.  British police (and I'm sure many other countries
around the world).

Hardly a showstopper for some of us.  ;-)

>
> A Colonist ("You are building a new life on the a recelty settled world that still needs
> taming") is extremely unlikely to know how to use a gun unless they're Rank-6, where
> it's automatic (apparently colonial leadership is throughh the barrel of a gun).

Hah! I can well imagine it is on occasions.

I don't disagree with the colonist thing though generally - although
you might argue that there was a difference between a worldtamer type
and the boots on the ground getting construction/admin etc done.

(Although even builders being armed has a very, very long heritage:
Nehemiah 4:17-18)

>At least,
> unlike 1e, corporate managers now don't have guns on their career tables.

LOL!  There's certainly some managers I've had in the past that make
you want to go meetings armed.

>
> PCs do not, so far as I can tell, start with level-0 in combat skills, so if you didn't get one
> in chargen, you're hosed in most campaigns.

Hardly.

I've run seven adventures (twice over) at the last five TravCons and
in all of them bar one, there has only been one shot ever fired.
(Dispatching the pouncer in _Into the Unknown_).  (It was generating
the six scouts for that adventure that made me really understand why
scouts have a low survival rate.  Of the six, *one* has a (poor)
weapon skill.)

There was a tiny bit of shooting at the end of Three Blind Mice when
the PCs rescued Sina at the starport.

(See various After Action Reports in Freelance Traveller for details).

I've been running The Traveller Adventure for a little over six months
now and not a single shot fired.  (Though admittedly they've just
blown a hole in the church wall with explosives.)

I've also been running some fortnightly lunchtime games (just an hour
at a time) for six months and although the PCs raided a warehouse once
with weapons, they didn't use them except to knock a guard out IIRC.
They did have a bar fight at one point I suppose (and the
archaeologist pulled a knife at the end.)  Finally at the end of the
year, just to give them a bit of a denouement they did have a bit of
combat in the desert.  The archaeologist was rather pleased when she
got a headshot on the chief nasty while the other two more obviously
gun oriented PCs only managed to wound opponents.

That's it, across a lot of Traveller.  Combat really isn't the be all
and end all.  And I get no shortage of people wanting to sign up to my
games - embarrassingly so on occasions.

But on your wider point, I've never let the rules bind me on what I'd
allow players to "trade" for in character gen as long it's reasonable
and becomes part of their character.

(Perhaps I'm a bit generous... the last time we met for TTA I let the
gun bunny finally achieve Steward 0 after only a few weeks of game
time attempting to cook for crew and passengers.  But the player had
gone to such lengths to describe the efforts her PC had gone to over
meals etc and make rolls for how his cooking had gone. (Spectacularly
badly on one occasion).  I felt I was rewarding the roleplaying rather
than being strict about 'advancement' rules in Traveller.)

I'm also relatively happy to let them fudge a Mustering Out role to
get a second (or third) roll of Weapon to get the skill (once or
twice).  Many of the characters I've created have got a combat skill
that way.

> I think the game relies too much on the 'skill packages' idea to cover over these
> deficiencies, and to make up for using essentially random chargen while trying to
> promote "build a party of characters that completment each other" style play.

oooh, thanks for reminding me of the skill packages.  I often forget
them when I'm putting together a 'set' of characters for TravCon or
publication, but I was thinking that maybe this year I'd hand out the
Zhodani characters as usual and then let everyone pick one additional
psionic Talent from a list that *won't* be the core rulebook Talents.
(The hardest bit seems to me to be writing scenes/plots that let them
utilize the Talents they have - or should I just be doing the usual
kinds of things and letting them come up with the application of
skills and Talents to the tasks in hand?)

tc