FreeTrav
Emperor Mongoose
While I'd agree that they're not quite enough, I think the Explorer's Edition and the Merchant's Edition are steps in this right direction.
How to make Traveller more popular with TTRPG players
- Thread starter MarcusIII
- Start date
FreeTrav
Emperor Mongoose
Not exactly "compatible" with MS-Word, although the current version claims to read and create them - but be warned that it does not perfectly preserve formatting across implementations: Your Word-generated ODT won't look quite the same in any of the OpenFork* Writer implementations as it does in Word, and vice-versa - Word won't perfectly read the formatting that OpenFork writes.
* OpenFork: Any of the products that started out as "forks" or descendants of StarOffice, such as OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice, the last version of IBM Lotus Symphony, Go-OO, NeoOffice, and so on; the best information I have is that the only versions currently under active development are Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
IanBruntlett
Emperor Mongoose
I went into Travelling Man (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK) this afternoon and they had the Merchant's Edition and the new "The Great Rift" box set.
FreeTrav
Emperor Mongoose
I'd be curious as to the price of the Merchant's Edition in print; this is not listed as having a print edition on DTRPG, and the PDF is only US$1. I can't see a shop selling a print edition at comparable price point (even assuming that they're doing so with Mongoose's blessing).
MarcusIII
Emperor Mongoose
Should just make a stripped down starter pack with a familiar space adventure. Something like, Smuggler gets busted and now owes his boss big time and has to scramble and get money any way possible before the crime boss offs the party. All while dodging gov't customs inspectors.
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
Reviewed it, waste of time.
That FAQ is once again grognards talking to grognards about arguments between grognards. It's worthless to new players.
Most of the sections don't answer the questions they pose. They say, "These are the different contradictory opinions people have".
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
And this still requires a massive infodump.
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
I always start with lasering the crap out of Utoland.
IanBruntlett
Emperor Mongoose
Sorry. I didn't look at the price...
collins355
Emperor Mongoose
Agree that page isn't useful as a FAQ. But I think you'll find many of those questions/controversies come up sooner or later with new players asking the same questions - we've had here for example newer players innocently asking about relativistic weapons and reactionless drives. Same here with big ship/small ship universe questions, or size of naval budget. I've seen the piracy question innocently raised elsewhere on the web recently.
collins355
Emperor Mongoose
Saw this post on another platform today...
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
As I recall, twelve year olds want to recreate their power fantasies in a tangible manner, and tend to lose focus on game balance.
College age and early twenties want a distraction.
Grognards, I'm guessin', want to work within the given system.
College age and early twenties want a distraction.
Grognards, I'm guessin', want to work within the given system.
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
They've probably been gaming long enough to know what they like, and want to stay with that.
Wait, you’ve been on this forum and the CotI forum for a great many years and you think us Grogs don’t tweak, alter, homebrew and retcon everything in sight?
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
If one doesn't care, why would one try to justify tweakification?
Oh Buck!If one doesn't care, why would one try to justify tweakification?
The ACTUAL grognards often have PTSD from 80's and 90's edition churning and may have perfectly good reasons to go back to Classic and not trust new ones. There would be a fair few people who gave up on MegaTraveller, or having persevered through that, hated TNE. West End Star Wars was waiting for them. Those are the ones that could possibly be recruited, with a pitch along the lines of "Mongoose did what GDW tried to do in 1986, but kept the best bits of Classic and some of the good career ideas from TNE".
It could even be worth selling the MGT combat system. Classic realised fairly early (Azhanti High Lightning) that the Book 1 combat system had issues, and that armour should stop damage, not just make it harder to be hit.
But people DO like to roll dice for damage too. AHL/Striker delivered the armour side of things, but was lacking on the damage roll side of things. It was designed for groups fighting groups, not personal fights.
Megatraveller combat system? Uh, yeah. Just keep walking.
TNE had a workable combat system, but d20 roll under was not popular.
Post-GDW? Great text from SJG. Useful sourcebooks for GDW editions. T4? Ehhh... d20? WTF? T5? Um.
So... Mongoose has:
2D6 to hit with DMs, like Classic? Sweet
Roll dice to generate damage? Nice. Oh, and effect is a thing, which adds to damage, so a lucky or skilled shot is dangerous. Awesome!
Apply armour value against the damage like AHL/Striker? Mind. Blown.
It could even be worth selling the MGT combat system. Classic realised fairly early (Azhanti High Lightning) that the Book 1 combat system had issues, and that armour should stop damage, not just make it harder to be hit.
But people DO like to roll dice for damage too. AHL/Striker delivered the armour side of things, but was lacking on the damage roll side of things. It was designed for groups fighting groups, not personal fights.
Megatraveller combat system? Uh, yeah. Just keep walking.
TNE had a workable combat system, but d20 roll under was not popular.
Post-GDW? Great text from SJG. Useful sourcebooks for GDW editions. T4? Ehhh... d20? WTF? T5? Um.
So... Mongoose has:
2D6 to hit with DMs, like Classic? Sweet
Roll dice to generate damage? Nice. Oh, and effect is a thing, which adds to damage, so a lucky or skilled shot is dangerous. Awesome!
Apply armour value against the damage like AHL/Striker? Mind. Blown.
FreeTrav
Emperor Mongoose
I don't know that I'd go so far as to claim PTSD on their behalf, but whiplash and "versioning fatigue" are certainly reasonable diagnoses. I lived through most of that period (I came to Traveller while Classic '82 was the 'current' version), and while I can't claim that my perceptions are universal, or even necessarily a majority view, I do believe that a large segment of the then-community held similar views:
- MegaTraveller did violence to the setting, but it was tolerable, because it potentially opened up new roads for adventuring. The editing and rules "updates", with the possible exception of DGP-ifying task rolls, left much to be desired. It wasn't called "MegaErrata" for no reason.
- TNE's only redeeming feature to many of those who had been in since the early days was that it opened up (more) new roads for adventuring. But the violence it did to the setting and the mechanism by which it was done stuck in the craw of many - and most of us who were in IT at the time felt that it completely broke our suspenders of disbelief. Changing the System away from the classic (and Classic) 2D wasn't a good move, either; trying to adapt between the old and new systems was ... not trivial.
- Up until T4, many of us were feeling somewhat abandoned - in spite of the built-in infelicities, the Classic-plus-DGP-Task system was relatively easy to manage, and it was familiar. GURPS? Yeah, pretty clearly influenced by Traveller, but different enough that it was re-learning almost from first principles. Decent source material, though, and most of it could be back-ported into Classic-plus-DGP-Task
- T4 could have been promising. This was an error in judgement, though, as SweetPea Entertainment/Imperium Games didn't want the property to support Traveller-the-game; they wanted it for Traveller-the-movie or Traveller-the-TV-series. We see how well that worked out. What support they provided almost - almost - made MegaTraveller look good.
- T20 was an effort to draw some of the D&D crowd into Traveller, via the D20 SRD. At that time, TSR or whichever successor had them was diversifying D&D3e/3.5e from pure Epic Fantasy into ... pretty much any other kind of setting, and T20 was an effort by QuikLink (QLI) to bring Traveller into the D20 fold via the D20 Modern version of the Core Rules. No, it didn't have to be D20 Modern specifically, just a set of D20 core rules, but even QLI's proprietor recommended starting with D20 Modern (I don't think D20 Future was out yet).
- I'm not going to discuss T5 here. It's divisive, even more so than Classic-plus-DGP vs TNE. I have my opinion; it differs from the opinion that some others hold.
- Yeah, Mongoose is a good sell to those of us who "walked" some time during all the above. There were some things I didn't like about the first edition - the three "specializations" of each career were effectively three separate careers, which I disagreed with - but I admit it worked ... well enough. But its most important virtues were that it worked with my '82 notebooks and that it was actively supported with good quality material. I suppose you could describe it as "coming back in out of the cold".
This. The failure/refusal to understand this was probably the second most irksome thing that bothered me about D&D. Vancian magic was worse. But that was about it.rinku said:
(some material etceterated)
Yes. All of this. I'm not a combat type - I much prefer my characters to be able to think their way out of trouble, rather than violently break it up into little bits of former trouble, but I also like things in real life to make sense. Not only does Mongoose seem to go there, it also invites me to pull up a chair and have a closer look.rinku said:
