Lots of Dice and a little Cepheus Engine, too

[Sigtrygg]

Ok, a discussion about the original post.

I find many of the reviewer comments on drive thru and the longer review offered on one of the websites to be misleading.

CE is not based on CT, and is not some sort of OSR version of CT. It is MgT 1e SRD with some house rules tagged on to fill some of the gaps. It is a nice set of rules, especially in the word format.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Is there something more to say about it?

Anything that is left to say would just be drowned out by your derailing.

At the very least it would have been better for you to have started another thread for your dice crusade. Then you could be like Tom and post all the crap you want to on that and be ignored by everyone else. If there was some actual effective moderation around here (which it seems there isn't) then one of the mods could have either split your dice derailment off into its own thread ages ago, or told you to stop derailing this one.

But then around here it seems that most threads longer than about two pages are just long arguments anyway.

That’s a bit disingenuous. If someone had something on-topic to say, and said it, I would have contributed to that conversation to the extent I had something to say about it.

 

[fusor]

That’s a bit disingenuous. If someone had something on-topic to say, and said it, I would have contributed to that conversation to the extent I had something to say about it.

The point is that you should have started a new thread about this, given that it's pretty unrelated to the announcement of a new system.

 

[middenface]

For the record I (as in Moon Toad) will support Cepheus and any sort of 2D6 SciFi SRD.
TAS is not the way to go for me.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

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 modern context, those arguments are completely invalidated by modern margins on custom dice; making a better game is much more important than shaving cost on your dice selection; and, in the modern era of board games, “funky dice” are alien to no one. So I guess he’s just out of touch with the mainstream. But he chose to plant his flag here, so I planted my rebuttal here.

 

[middenface]

Move along there.

 

[Gypsy Knights Games]

For the record I (as in Moon Toad) will support Cepheus and any sort of 2D6 SciFi SRD.
TAS is not the way to go for me.

Agreed.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

I was bummed they didn’t release the Deck Plan Tileset as an “attribution only” license... and the artwork there was rather... meh. You’d think that requiring attribution, with maybe said attribution in the included key sufficing, would be more than enough for such a thing, but no, I guess not.

 

[simonh]

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 modern context, those arguments are completely invalidated by modern margins on custom dice;

You can point out mitigating factors and argue the severity of the issue, but 'completely invalidated' is going way too far. The experience with board games that you cite is a whole different kettle of fish. Board games come with the dice you need to play the game. The Star Wars game with the funky dice was available as a boxed set, with the funky dice in the box. One purchase. Also it's Star Wars - that trademark has a much bigger draw than Traveller so they have much more social capital to spend in terms of expecting customers to overcome barriers to entry.

In contrast the majority of low to mid-tier RPGs get most of their sales these days as PDFs. Requiring odd dice at a minimum requires an additional purchase, generally from a different merchant because the big PDF stores won't carry them. There's no way you can say this isn't a barrier to entry.

Well, ok, you can say that. You've demonstrated an enthusiastic tendency to dismiss any and all dissenting views and then claim that nobody is willing to discuss the topic with you, so clearly you're capable of claiming anything.

Simon Hibbs

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

I never used Star Wars as an example. Other people did that. There are plenty of board games using custom dice these days.

I have exclusively dismissed views related to the manufacturability of dice, which has changed since those viewpoints were last valid. From a modern business standpoint, all polyhedral dice are viable candidates for inclusion. Therefore, the dice should be discussed by their own merits alone. Which people seem unwilling to do.

 

[fusor]

I never used Star Wars as an example. Other people did that. There are plenty of board games using custom dice these days.

I have exclusively dismissed views related to the manufacturability of dice, which has changed since those viewpoints were last valid. From a modern business standpoint, all polyhedral dice are viable candidates for inclusion. Therefore, the dice should be discussed by their own merits alone. Which people seem unwilling to do.

You seem to be viewing dice as an isolated part of an RPG. They're not - they're tied into the system itself. If you change the dice used then you have to change the game engine and the way skill rolls and combat etc works. A straight 2d6 roll vs a target number works well enough because it's a simple system that most people can understand without too much effort. If you start throwing in other dice then that intuition decreases, and using say 2d8 or 3d12 without using the extra numbers available to roll for different results is just... not making the game as streamlined as it could be - and it changes the probability distributions too. Or you could use a dice pool system like the WoD games. And using multiple dice makes that even more complex (Earthdawn's step system uses all the dice types and it's not terribly intuitive as a result). Heck, you can discard dice altogether and use a diceless system like the one from the Amber RPG.

And if you really want to change the system as well, then you probably want to be playing a game that isn't Traveller.

But really all you've done here is banged on about the dice when nobody else really gives a damn about them. There are many other things that can be improved about Traveller before the dice even need to be considered.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

No, I’m not viewing dice as an isolated part of an RPG. I’m viewing Traveller as a system that needs to be reinvented, since its canon is obsolete, and, as a system, revisions have been terribly ad-hoc, rather than properly thought through. Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition has 4 different combat systems, none of which are compatible! So, clearly, if we’re going to preserve something of Traveller, we need to start with what’s good about it, and choose dice and mechanics to match; and you don’t want to choose mechanics until you’ve settled on how the dice values are distributed.

There are already plenty of systems that use simplistic dice mechanics. Risus and Savage Worlds, to name 2. There’s no value to Traveller being the game with simplistic dice mechanics, that niche is taken already. Better to use whatever mechanics that make Traveller more Traveller-like.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Roll 2d6 for a target number of 8+, been using that for nearly four decades now. About thirty years ago I decided that 12+ should be the target number for challenging stuff.
5ED&D added an advantage/disadvantage system which MGT has handily ported to Traveller as boon/bane.
So now sometimes players get to roll 3d and keep the highest 2d on a boon or keep the lowest 2d on a bane.
Put that lot together and I can run a fast, exciting game that encourages players to role play.

That is Next Gen. Traveller's dice mechanic decided - what next?

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Right, but why 2d6, and not 1d12, or 3d4? Why not 3d8 or 1d4? Why that distribution, that average number, and that range of values? You’re not making a case, just illustrating the same unjustified status quo. For that matter, why not bake the target number into the dice, so you don’t need that default target number?

 

[theodis]

Right, but why 2d6, and not 1d12, or 3d4? Why not 3d8 or 1d4? Why that distribution, that average number, and that range of values? You’re not making a case, just illustrating the same unjustified status quo.

Since you are the one who wants to change the status quo, it's up to you to come up with a case and demonstrate that your proposal is better. The rest of us gets by just fine, thanks. Also, after all these posts you _still_ are dismissing the single most important reason for sticking with the way things are. It was called "familiarity" earlier in this thread, but from a publisher's point of view it's called "brand identity". You don't give up on that. Not if there isn't any very compelling reason for doing so. And even if there is - you'd still think twice about it.
I don't know why it's so hard for you to get the simple fact that distribution, average number and range of values are simply not important if the system in place works and most people can live with it just fine. Again - Cepheus Engine is actually a step _back_ from MgT2.

The way I see it, this entire debate leads to nothing simply because you refuse to even acknowledge arguments that aren't mathematical. News flash: Out there, in the real world, "convenience" and "bottom line" are far more important. "Just works" is fine enough.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Yeah, except that the number of Traveller players compared to players of its competitors is so small as to be insignificant. By comparison, the status quo has no value over that of upstarts. And in that vein, better to be a fellow upstart by reinventing Traveller from the ground up than by conforming to the existing, deficient status quo.

 

[FallingPhoenix]

Yeah, except that the number of Traveller players compared to players of its competitors is so small as to be insignificant. By comparison, the status quo has no value over that of upstarts. And in that vein, better to be a fellow upstart by reinventing Traveller from the ground up than by conforming to the existing, deficient status quo.

Stars Without Number, which I think you mentioned as one of these larger base competitors, uses as a big selling point it's compatibility with "old school" (meaning status quo DnD) mechanics, which seems to me to say the opposite of that.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Yes, which has 1/3 the players that Savage Worlds has, which, by comparison, is clearly an upstart.

 

[-Daniel-]

Yes, which has 1/3 the players that Savage Worlds has, which, by comparison, is clearly an upstart.

So, are you suggesting Traveller should dump it's rules and pot itself over to Savage Worlds?

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Of course not. I’m saying it should throw out all the things holding it back, and be rebuilt as the best possible version, without any of its formerly necessary limitations.