Mercenary Field Catalogue

[Endie]

And yet I have players that have zero interest in ship design... it is a waste of space for them.

Some groups don’t bother with trade; some see combat as boring and are all about world-building and exploration; some groups have no interest in the world-building side and just want to be told if they need a vaccsuit or a breather mask by the referee. That core rule book will get pretty thin, pretty quickly, if “not every group wants this element” is a veto.

 

[MongooseMatt]

Some groups don’t bother with trade; some see combat as boring and are all about world-building and exploration; some groups have no interest in the world-building side and just want to be told if they need a vaccsuit or a breather mask by the referee. That core rule book will get pretty thin, pretty quickly, if “not every group wants this element” is a veto.

Pity the poor, poor publisher who has to cater for all these groups...

 

[Arkathan]

Pity the poor, poor publisher who has to cater for all these groups...

Eggs, tomatoes and wilted cabbage flying in from all directions.
Your kingdom for a parasol.

 

[nats]

I could definitely see Traveller splitting up into Referee Guide with design tables and Players Guide with the game rules, both setting-free. Then separate settings books. The present arrangement is very messy - rules and tables all over the core book, with ancillary tables and ancillary rules apread all over the other books. We used to have all this with Megatraveller ... dont know why we didnt stick with that format.

And Third Imperium setting stuff spread all over the place. The original CT game was completely setting-free originally.

D&D is much better organised than Traveller. Maybe this is how the Traveller 5E will be. We will no doubt find out very soon.

 

[Endie]

I could definitely see Traveller splitting up into Referee Guide with design tables and Players Guide with the game rules, both setting-free. Then separate settings books. The present arrangement is very messy - rules and tables all over the core book, with ancillary tables and ancillary rules apread all over the other books. We used to have all this with Megatraveller ... dont know why we didnt stick with that format.

And Third Imperium setting stuff spread all over the place. The original CT game was completely setting-free originally.

D&D is much better organised than Traveller. Maybe this is how the Traveller 5E will be. We will no doubt find out very soon.

Megatraveller literally split the core book up. And yes, it was a pain. Arguing that Megatraveller was how games companies should go about publishing their system is a very tough furrow to plough.

I disagree that the 2nd edition CRB is "very messy". T4? Sure. D&D 2014: absolutely. But the MgT2 CRB is fine. Traveller just has a lot of tables because it possesses a lot of minigames. Forcing people to hunt through multiple books for them will make it far worse, especially for those using the pdf version who can currently just ctrl-f and find the necessary page in a single book very quickly.

The time when MgT2e can be tricky to find stuff in is... when stuff is spread across multiple books! ("Now was that ship in Adventure Ships or Traders and Gunboats or maybe in JTAS...?")