It’s very easy to misunderstand just how huge space is and just how tiny even the biggest ships are. For an example, the Apollo missions left 1 square meter reflectors on the moon so we could bounce lasers off them to measure the distance to the moon. The laser is beamed through a telescope to maxim...

You don't need to limit armour on smaller craft, if you say that larger weapons inflict a certain minimum amount of damage irrespective of the armour on the target. That should 'discriminate' against smaller craft in the way that we want while also causing an attrition effect on larger ships so they...

IMHO the idea that standard civilian starship hulls are even comparable to tank armour is daft, given how small starship turrets are. If TL tank armour is 40 point on a MT scale I'd expect starship hulls to start at something like 10 points or so with starship weaponry scaled to match. When it comes...

What is the reason for the hydrogen cost to using the wormhole?

There's no real problem with this. Wormhole and stargate style systems are well established in SF, the only real wrinkle is the 5 day warmup time. In practice this means the optimum approach is for settled systems to have space stations maintaining wormholes continuously to common destinations. Thus...

Possible errata? The Holographic Hull states it uses 1 Power for every 2 tons of hull. Seriously? That means even a small 200 ton ship would be using 100 Power to have a holograph on the hull... as that uses more power than the basic system and Jump drive put together? Surely that's gotta be an err...

What about people who buy the PDF - rightfully assuming that it's a finished, proofread product - and then print it out themselves to discover that it's full of errors? For what it's worth I agree if you are buying a commercial product sold as final, but I have no problem with publishers releasing ...

The warp drive time traveling slingshot effect is pure Star Trek technobabble. Outside of Star Trek it has no theoretical basis whatsoever beyond any FTL travel system being equivalent to time travel anyway. The IXS is intended to use the Alcubierre warp drive. If that's the case, the inside of the ...

Well, what set me off was having to do a rebuttal of Jeff’s point of view that there’s legitimacy to the manufacturability and accessibility of d6es, in support of the idea that we should seriously consider where there are potentially more ideal dice out there to use for Traveller games. In a moder...

Also, there is a reason for Stars Without NUmber doing comparatively well: It caters squarely to the D20/Pathfinder crowd. They don't have to relearn mechanics just to play space opera. And there are _lots_ of them - easily more than for all other RPGs combined. And here we are again. Familiarity i...

I’m more inclined to think that they’d be offended by Traveller canon putting planets where they don’t belong. Who wants to go to a star system only to find out that the planet they just read about in the paper a month ago isn’t there , because some other asinine planet with no relation to the real...

Familiarity and dice availability are red-herrings. Modern boardgamers will have played with lots of unusual dice by the time they make it to Tabletop RPGs. You're addressing my incidental examples, not my actual points. I'll try to be clearer. 1. What criteria do you propose to distinguish between...

The technicalities are all very well, but I'm not seeing anyone give any reasons why a change like this would be desirable. What is broken about the current system that this fixes? The standard J-Drive has the following consequences for settings: * Ships are confined to chains of worlds within the s...

I never said d6es are wrong; I said that we should seriously think about if anything is right about them in a modern context before deciding that they are, in fact, the best choice for Traveller, moving forward. Best according to what metrics though? It's meaningless without providing a way to dist...

No, you really don’t. The player subtracts -8, but the GM adds or subtracts the more vague situational modifiers on top of that. Locking you into the most common target number isn’t a bad thing , when all the other numbers are either obvious to the player, or subtle effects hidden by the GM. It mea...

Condottiere wrote:I'm fairly sure I prefer Traveller with artificial gravity fields; medical science seems fairly convinced it's a good thing.

It's the worst explanation for how simulated gravity works on starships, except for all the others.

Simon Hibbs

Every time we roll a skill, we subtract -8 at the end of that roll. Why not just bake it into the dice, if it’s always there ? Is that somehow not an improvement to you? Aha, an actual concrete suggestion. Anybody that's ever played Monopoly knows how to roll and sum 2D6. It's almost certainly the ...

Flynn wrote:An editable document format will be forthcoming, for those interested in such...

Sold. Just picked up the PDF. Consider it a down-payment

Simon Hibbs

Tom Kalbfus wrote:I like dice with numbers on them.

My favourite die I own is a black skew D6. I use it when playing Trail of Cthulhu or Night's Black Agents so I can claim I'm doing 'non euclidean damage'.

http://www.mathartfun.com/DiceLabDice.html

Simon Hibbs

Tom Kalbfus wrote:What so great about using 2d6 as your main selling point?

They're not using 2D6 as a selling point, they're using it as a coded message that this is a Traveller compatible rules set.

Simon Hibbs