T5 available in UK
- Thread starter Ewan
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Greg Smith
Mongoose
I think Esdevium are a distributor these days.
T5 is in the new releases at IGUK, for £43.
T5 is in the new releases at IGUK, for £43.
If you didn't buy in already, save your money, at least for now. Lots of problems, unless you like taking rules apart and rebuilding them... there's a lot to like in T5 but it's not a game yet, IMHO, more like a simmering pot of sci-fi awesomeness waiting for the right spice to make it palatable.
Not sure who has the spice... it's being hotly debated over on CotI
As far as availability and the staying power of rpg shops, I hope no one across the pond is relying on T5 to keep their portals open... but having typed that I realize it's a silly thing to say.
Not sure who has the spice... it's being hotly debated over on CotI
As far as availability and the staying power of rpg shops, I hope no one across the pond is relying on T5 to keep their portals open... but having typed that I realize it's a silly thing to say.
ShawnDriscoll
Cosmic Mongoose
Not worth the effort to fix Traveller 5. It still wouldn't be as complete or as elegant a system as Mongoose Traveller is. Games written to use Mongoose Traveller's rules are easy to do, and they inherently are good systems to play in because of the rule design they're using.
Now just imagine the poor guy that decides to write a game that uses the Traveller 5 rules. Or just writes a supplement book for it. It won't be fun or playable. Traveller 5 is just someone's notes for possible use in a future RPG that may get written one day.
Back in the day, people said how great Marc Miller did with Classic Traveller. In a way they are right. It was the best SFRPG for that time. It was well written in most places. It had decent page layout and typesetting, etc. But Marc Miller had help with all that. He had a people working for him at GDW that knew publishing. All of that was not available when Traveller 5 was being complied over the years. It was just him and his notes on what his final official vision of Traveller should be. Problem is, he still sells his previous versions of Traveller. All of which are better. Traveller 5 is just for collectors that are completists. That's who the T5 book was written for. Not people wanting to play such a game. Attempting to get a game of T5 going with a group (or a solo game) is an exercise in torture, to be performed only by those that insist that a game is contained in the book. No matter how fun the game may not be.
Now just imagine the poor guy that decides to write a game that uses the Traveller 5 rules. Or just writes a supplement book for it. It won't be fun or playable. Traveller 5 is just someone's notes for possible use in a future RPG that may get written one day.
Back in the day, people said how great Marc Miller did with Classic Traveller. In a way they are right. It was the best SFRPG for that time. It was well written in most places. It had decent page layout and typesetting, etc. But Marc Miller had help with all that. He had a people working for him at GDW that knew publishing. All of that was not available when Traveller 5 was being complied over the years. It was just him and his notes on what his final official vision of Traveller should be. Problem is, he still sells his previous versions of Traveller. All of which are better. Traveller 5 is just for collectors that are completists. That's who the T5 book was written for. Not people wanting to play such a game. Attempting to get a game of T5 going with a group (or a solo game) is an exercise in torture, to be performed only by those that insist that a game is contained in the book. No matter how fun the game may not be.
ShawnDriscoll said:
Games written to use Mongoose Traveller's rules are easy to do, and they inherently are good systems to play in because of the rule design they're using.[/quote]
Shawn in a huge way you are right In that MgT is based off of the core mechanics of CT. In that CT was and is a 1st generation RPG with fairly straightforward Mechanics, sparse and utilitarian with plenty of room to add what is need to make your game at home work. The converse is that T5 is based off of T4 which started with a much more overhead in terms of complexity, said overhead is much harder to get right in that there are a bunch niggling details where one can go wrong.
ShawnDriscoll said:
I don't imagine there will be the proliferation of new games from the T5 core, Mostly that isn't how the crowd who is enamoured with it think (I have known some of the people in that crowd for 20+ years). Some of them are ramping up to produce product for T5, I wish them all the luck in the world.
ShawnDriscoll said:
That last sentence is wrong, it should be working with him, not for him. While Marc did design and somewhat oversee CT, it always was a collective effort on the part of GDW. I can make a strong case that huge chunks of what was Traveller in the day wasn't written by Marc.
ShawnDriscoll said:
T5 was written in section with a different person in charge/working the parts they like the best, real the development cycle was by committee with Marc having veto power. said individuals and groups in each section are/were very territorial with their pet ideas as approved by Marc becoming Iconoclastic in their thinking... The Layout was all Marc.....
The biggest issue it that T5 is all 90s era game design, and it doesn't age well.
Yes. Marc Miller may have come up with Traveller, but he was never the real talent behind it - that was all the other folks who got involved at GDW and other companies: people like Frank Chadwick, Loren Wiseman, Don Fugate, Dave Nilsen, Martin Dougherty, and Jon Zeigler. Maybe they just tidied up the mess that Marc made into something presentable or playable, or maybe they just came up with their own ideas when he wasn't around. But T5 is what you get when you remove all that talent from the equation.
Unfortunately, the cult of personality that some people have built around Marc have blinded them to the fact that he wasn't actually very good at designing games (and also blinded them to the quality of work produced by other people involved in Traveller). Of course, those people will never admit that, and his apologists are still deludedly trying to claim that T5 is actually worth using in its current form.
"90s"? It's late 70s/early 80s, at best.
This is how I see it, too. To me the "completist-simulationist" approach ofWil Mireu said:
Traveller 5 seems very similar to the approach used by games like FGU's
Space Opera or SPI's Universe, games which inherited much of their rules
density from the strategy board games of the time (games without a refe-
ree to make rules decisions), and in my view this approach was taken to
the extreme and driven into the wall by the author(s) of Traveller 5. Add
a high degree of editorial incompetence, and the result is a game only its
author(s) could love.
Lord High Munchkin
Mongoose
Actually, I think 'Space Opera' is better.
ShawnDriscoll
Cosmic Mongoose
Infojunky said:
I would argue that Mongoose Traveller actually cleaned up and streamlined the rules from Classic Traveller, which is all Classic Traveller ever really needed. Instead, Classic Traveller was reprinted in various forms (LBBs, hardcover, boxed, unboxed, Spinward Marches map included, etc). But it was still just the same old abstract SFRPG, where guns can't hit a target the bigger the target is. When Classic Traveller finally ran its course, GDW decided to make new versions of the game instead of just fixing the original rules like Mongoose ended up doing. Mongoose is the perfect example of "keep it simple, stupid."
People that don't even know or care about the 3rd Imperium setting are loving the MgT rules. Frickin' core rules are being loved!? What the hell? Who does that? Core rules are mostly a chore in RPGs.
Lord High Munchkin
Mongoose
Both 'Space Opera' and 'Traveller 5' are examples of "pick-n-mix sandbox" rules systems.
The main difference is that 'Space Opera' had no core rule development after 1981, while 'Traveller 5' is a "modern" game... sadly your analysis is correct.
The main difference is that 'Space Opera' had no core rule development after 1981, while 'Traveller 5' is a "modern" game... sadly your analysis is correct.
ShawnDriscoll said:
And yet in the best they are slim and finite, clear and internally self-consistent, slathered with examples in play, capable of expansion and extension, and abstract enough that you can wing it in play with a reasonable chance that on-the-fly rulings are reasoned and balanced. If you want a d table, you can have a table; otherwise, go.
And, agreed about MgT.
Prime_Evil
Emperor Mongoose
Lord High Munchkin said:
Back in the day, I felt that 'Space Opera' did a better job of capturing the tropes of classic SF literature than the OTU did with all of its idiosyncrasies. However, the OTU was a more interesting setting and certainly one with better internal consistency. It also helped that the Traveller rule system was far superior to that of Space Opera even in those days.
Still...I wonder why the revived FGU doesn't build a new edition of Space Opera incorporating material from the Traveller OGC. If handled right, this might offer the best of both worlds.
On a slightly different topic, does the license held by Mongoose allow them to use material from the T5 rule system? Even if T5 is a bit of a mess overall, it sounds like there are some good ideas in there that could be grafted onto the MgT rules with a bit of effort. The next edition of MgT could conceivably become T5.5...
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