Classic Traveller One-Shot Reflections

I ran a one-shot of Classic Traveller at the office after work last night.  The players crewed a Far Trader carrying a contract cargo across six parsecs, with one intermediate system being a very-low population law level 0 asteroid habitat and the other being a balkanized world with a pirate problem.  This gave us an opportunity to have one ground combat (with the "customs officials" from the asteroid habitat after the players docked to deliver a contract cargo and buy fuel) and one starship combat (with a pirate Far Trader in the balkanized system).

Sadly I did not end up running either combat by Rules-as-Written.  Having ground combat with the "customs officials" inside the starship was more of a Snapshot/Azhanti High Lightning-situation than one where abstract range bands were appropriate, and I ended up falling back to almost a B/X-style "move n squares and then attack or take other non-attack action" turn pattern.  I also used ACKS-style countdown initiative rolled per individual per round.  I did resolve attacks and damage per CT though (or as closely as I understood it).  Having all three of weapon-vs-armor, weapon range, and per-weapon ability-score modifier DM tables was...  a bit much, as a referee trying to abstract all that away from the players.  I did like the lack of adding degree of success to damage rolls like Mongoose 1e does, which meant that calculating the exact degree of success was not important.  Allocating each die of damage to an ability score was also interesting; I ended up in a couple situations going "OK I don't think there's an allocation here where this guy can remain conscious / not-severely-injured".  For the most part it was a "shotguns and SMGs vs cloth armor at close range" combat and characters felt fairly fragile.  The lack of damage reduction from Mongoose-style armor meant that if you took a 4d6 shotgun hit, there was a good chance you were going unconscious.  I could definitely see how higher-damage weapons like from Mercenary could make combat very lethal; if your armor gets penetrated by a 6d6 weapon, you're dead on average.

For the starship combat, there was no way that our conference room table was going to work for full-detail CT Book 2 vector movement with tape measures.  I ended up going with more abstract range-band combat in the Mongoose style.  I messed up pulse laser damage (per the errata, they have -1 to hit and do double damage - so a double-turret pulse laser hit should've been four damage rolls rather than the two I was doing).  Needing Gunner Interact to apply your Gunnery skill is kinda painful, and the Maneuver/Evade programs giving a tiny fraction of Pilot skill as an evasion bonus makes them hard to justify over Auto/Evade.  I do think there's the core of a fun minigame in computer program selection, but having the lack of compute for certain options basically shut down certain character roles felt a bit bad.  Overall I felt like this space combat dragged a bit but maybe it would've been more decisive with errata'd pulse laser damage.  The 9+ target and no attribute DMs for damage control was also rough.  I also mistook the "Hold" result on the damage table for "Hull"; I expected it to say something more like "Cargo".  Maybe my vision is starting to give out.

I'm not sure to what extent switching to Mayday would've helped (or Mayday plus CT's damage table including stuff like Hold).  It looks like Mayday programs are a bit less terrible (like Maneuver/Evade just giving a flat DM).  I think disengaging from combat to a planet's surface might also have been more viable under Mayday than under abstract ranges.

I did end up using the character generation systems from the High Guard, Merchant Prince, Scouts, and Citizens of the Imperium (for a belter) supplements for pregens.  Ultimately I think that I like that the expanded chargen systems from the supplements are more forgiving for survival and enlistment rolls and skills per term, but they still feel low-choice vs Mongoose's three paths per career.  It is still difficult to target certain skills; with one of the characters I was fishing for Medical on Merchant's Prince's Purser->Medic track but got re-assigned to Sales during my first term.  Attributes feel less important in the supplementary character generation systems than in Book 1 chargen; many of the career sub-tracks don't get DMs to survival and promotion throws from attributes, just from having certain skills at certain levels.  I think this might be for the better though; it makes playing 2d6-in-order a lot more viable.

Overall it sounded like the players still had fun.  One player who had never played an RPG before sounded happy.  One player who had played Mongoose Traveller 2e was puzzled at the choice of Classic (which is fair) and complained of a lack of weapon variety (which was more puzzling; seemed to me less of a problem with the system than with my picking a handful of weapons that seemed appropriate for circumstances).  Several were curious about turning it into a campaign, but I worry that I gave them too many opportunities for profit and they will have quite a bit of starting capital if I have to live with the consequences of that.  I guess they have a lot of damage from the starship combat that I would need to figure the costs on, which could soak up a big pile of cash.

I had grand ambitions about giving the party more choices of routes from the starting point to the contract destination, but discarded a couple of worlds as I ran out of time to prep interesting encounters for them and ended up with a minimal, linear path.  I had also thought it would be fun to generate like ten pregens, give the resumes to the Captain, and have him choose which four to hire, but it turns out that generating pregens with the supplementary chargen systems takes a long time and I only ended up making as many as I needed.  I also gave each pregen a secret (generally a side objective with a monetary payout for completion and a couple pieces of equipment in their bags unknown to the rest of the crew) and these were a mixed success.  I had kind of expected players to get out laptops and start communicating in secret, in a Braunstein kind of style, which would have allowed more shenanigans, but they were pretty studiously disconnected from their electronics!  What a problem to have!  I think the very tight weeknight one-shot timeframe precluded the sort of downtime for intrigue that would've made that work better.  Probably I was trying to do too many things at once here; fitting a ground combat *and* a space combat *and* some speculative trading / ship finance management *and* some intra-party intrigue into a three-hour-session in a somewhat-unfamiliar system was a lot.  I should probably consider myself fortunate that it went as well as it did.