Armour and Weapon Benefits - what's the thinking behind the new figures

[M Harold Page]

I'm liking the new edition, but I am puzzled by the thinking behind the new figures for Armour and Weapon Benefits.

For Armour, the MgT1 gives you actual professional military armour. The new edition, however, gives you some armour up to Cr10,000 and T12. However, that's is an order of magnitude greater than the most expensive cheap armour (Reflec at Cr1,500), and Cr 1,000 short for the cheapest expensive armour (T8 Vac Suite at Cr 11,000).

This seems a little odd!
Are the figures out by a factor of 10?
Or do they reflect the availability of middle range armour in a different rule book?

Something similar could be said for the Weapon benefit. Cr1,000 basically gets you an Advanced Combat Rifle, which is a fairly run of the mill weapon. It's also peanuts compared to the Cash Benefits. Again, the older versions of Traveller seemed to offer more substantial choices.

Or are these, along with Blade, really intended as "consolation prizes" - "Too bad you didn't get the Scout Ship, here's a standard issue military handgun".

Am I missing something?

 

[locarno24]

There have been "intermediate " armours included in the game previously; poly carapace was a less effective version of combat armour (due to a DEX penalty), and so on.

I suspect it's just future-proofing; if the order of magnitude falls between "cheap" and "expensive" without future versions of either being likely to fall the other side of the line, I guess they've got it about right.

The Weapon benefits....I agree, they're not (financially) amazing. Certainly not compared to some of the high-value cash benefits out there. But the weapon benefit does have a couple of other advantages - firstly, it's normally meant to be specifically a "service weapon" from whatever career you got it from, which may well be a specific model unavailable to civilians, and provides advantages as a narrative hook when dealing with that organisation (proof of ID, ability to use ammo, etc), secondly, if you consider things like licensing and permissions, for an Imperial-issued weapon any licensing paperwork can be assumed to be taken care of in the receipt of the benefit (not a trivial advantage if you're likely to spend time on high law level worlds). Finally - at least with 1e - the real bonus was the ability to improve the weapon skill if you rolled the same benefit twice in a row.

 

[bluekieran]

CSCv2 has TL10 Poly Carapace for Cr10,000.

 

[M Harold Page]

Ah right. I'm working on a review of just the Core Rules, and trying to treat them as self contained.

 

[locarno24]

Possibly a mistake - whilst it's likely someone might have just the core rules, traveller - probably more than any other RPG set I know - is designed from the ground up as a 'toolkit' with vehicle/ship/world building tools and is designed to be open-ended with bolt-ons of new weapons, equipment, ship components, etc.

More importantly, at least the 'first generation' expansions (like High Guard) will have been largely written before the core book was published.

 

[M Harold Page]

Possibly. However, the scope of the core rules seems fine for playing Dumarest or Rim of Space type adventures in the referee's own universe... as long as they are not worried about making up things that will be contradicted in the supplemental volumes. In any case, it's what Mongoose sent me, so they must think it doable.

 

[AndrewW]

More importantly, at least the 'first generation' expansions (like High Guard) will have been largely written before the core book was published.

Yes, High Guard and Central Supply Catalogue in particular where in progress before the Core Rulebook was completed.

 

[Condottiere]

The weapons could be untraceable/not registered.

 

[locarno24]

The weapons could be untraceable/not registered.

It'll depend on the GM and player to agree exactly the history of the weapon. For a service rifle from a soldier, it's more likely to be the specific weapon he's served with, but I'd agree, for a police-type character, I'd happily consider a weapon benefit of a revolver/autopistol being something he's got from a store of seized weapons or similar that's otherwise unregistered.