Edition differences

[Lurker1187]

Hello, everyone! I’ve played some Traveller in the past, and I’ve collected a lot of the books and PDFs, and I’m thinking about finally running a game of my own. What are the differences between 1st & 2nd edition? I have physical copies of 1st edition, but not 2nd. My 2nd edition PDFs are often squirrelly on my iPad, while my 1st editions are rock solid. Is going with 2nd edition worth the inconvenience? Thanks in advance for your consideration.

Edit: My disposable income isn’t what it used to be, so I’m leery of having to buy lots of new material. I did get in on the recent Bundle of Holding, though, which was very cool.

 

[Vormaerin]

I'm assuming you are talking about Mongoose Traveller 1st edition and 2nd edition (there are a lot of other editions ).

The basic mechanics are still 2d6+bonuses to do a thing. Character creation and skill lists are a bit cleaner and easier in 2e. A lot of minor tweaks and reorganization of rules. There's no intrinsic reason to jump to 2e if it is a financial challenge. 2e is overall a better supported, more streamlined edition. But no OMG you have to do 2e to get it to work type stuff. Unless you really need to the Robot rules or something else that is 2e only.

 

[Arkathan]

Well, robots and the creation rules have been around since CT. (LBB-8)
I have a CT robot spreadsheet on the forum and Geir has a MGT2e Robot creation spreadsheet in the Mongoose download section. So two very low cost solutions to robots there. Either output can be used directly with MGT1e with very little finagling.

 

[Vormaerin]

My 2nd edition PDFs are often squirrelly on my iPad, while my 1st editions are rock solid. Is going with 2nd edition worth the inconvenience? Thanks in advance for your consideration.

You might see if updated pdfs are available from whereever you got them from. Mongoose spent a bunch of effort recently getting their docs to work with apple pdf readers.

 

[Bense]

The art is all in color.

The spaceship and vehicle rules are quite different from original 1E. I think they run better, for the most part. Vehicle design is much, much simpler (they used the system from the second versions of the vehicle design rulebooks made for 1E).

The other basic mechanics are mostly the same, though 2E does have the boon and bane re-roll mechanic.

The skill lists have been trimmed a bit, and the number of available careers reduced. This is generally a good thing, as there were some 1st Ed careers in the splatbooks that were maybe a little too specialized in the benefits they gave (like how much Trust your agency gave you in the Agent book). Great if your running a campaign centered on that career type, not so useful otherwise.

I like the 2E better, but I've never had trouble with the .pdfs on my Android tablet and have a good number of the books in dead-tree format.