The Finest RPG design of 1978

Hey,

So I finally got my Classic Traveller CD-ROM yesterday. This time with all the data on it. Oh man, is it great. I'm seriously considering picking up the Twilight 2000 CD-ROM and the Traveller 2300 CD-ROMs as well. It appeals to the pack-rat in me because it's a complete set of everything GDW put out for Traveller, but it's super cheap and it takes up hardly any shelf space. So sweet.

It's also great to look back in time at how the games were put together and there's two things that kinda jump out at me:

1.) Weapon/Armor matrix!?!? -- you cross reference your weapon with the armor worn by the target to get a modifier. There's maybe a dozen weapons (over half of which are melee weapons) and 6-8 types of armor. It's really odd. It's great because ablative armor is fantastic against lasers, but not so hot against a club, but it does seem as though it'd be kinda goofy to track the modifiers, especially against a ragtag group of mixed-armor opponents.

2.) Characters are thin -- By that I mean that your character stats don't directly come into play the way they do in d20 (with a consistent bonus to the relevant actions). Instead, they act in a sort of "sliding scale" method. For example: anyone can use a pistol, but if your dex is too low, you suffer a -2 and if it's high enough you get a +2. But there's no standard threshold for when you get that bonus. Different ranged weapons have different breakpoints (and I suppose you could have special pistols with different thresholds as well). Some skills are affected this way as well, but those stats you start out with pretty much sit on the shelf.

Oh, and the skills. So it's a total hodge-podge of skills that you get. Often you get a thin layer of 2-5 skills all at level 1. You're a happy man if you get a skill level of 2 or better in something and it's something useful. I forget how you raise skills in Traveller, but I seem to recall it was rather long and expensive (after all, in one 4-year term the only thing you got was Carousing-1? skills are hard to learn in Traveller).

But the base system is what makes the skill system so odd. Basically, roll 2d6, add mods and meet or beat an 8. Since the average roll is a 7, you're pretty much 50/50 for anything and the single skill level translates into average success. But still, it's not that much better than 50/50. You have to angle for lots of bonuses, and since a lot of that is at GM discretion, you can expect to fail almost as often as you succeed.

And that's what I mean by "thin". You're mostly defined by a small suite of skills that only gently tip the odds of success in your favor. You're definitely going to try the things that you're skilled at before trying untrained stuff and you really want "jack-of-all-trades" as a skill, but so much of your character is completely nebulous in mechanical terms.

Still, I'm totally jazzed about pawing through all this stuff and I'm totally going to run a one-shot in the near future.

later
Tom

The Finest RPG design of 1978

Hey,

So I finally got my Classic Traveller CD-ROM yesterday. This time with all the data on it. Oh man, is it great. I'm seriously considering picking up the Twilight 2000 CD-ROM and the Traveller 2300 CD-ROMs as well. It appeals to the pack-rat in me because it's a complete set of everything GDW put out for Traveller, but it's super cheap and it takes up hardly any shelf space. So sweet.

It's also great to look back in time at how the games were put together and there's two things that kinda jump out at me:

1.) Weapon/Armor matrix!?!? -- you cross reference your weapon with the armor worn by the target to get a modifier. There's maybe a dozen weapons (over half of which are melee weapons) and 6-8 types of armor. It's really odd. It's great because ablative armor is fantastic against lasers, but not so hot against a club, but it does seem as though it'd be kinda goofy to track the modifiers, especially against a ragtag group of mixed-armor opponents.

2.) Characters are thin -- By that I mean that your character stats don't directly come into play the way they do in d20 (with a consistent bonus to the relevant actions). Instead, they act in a sort of "sliding scale" method. For example: anyone can use a pistol, but if your dex is too low, you suffer a -2 and if it's high enough you get a +2. But there's no standard threshold for when you get that bonus. Different ranged weapons have different breakpoints (and I suppose you could have special pistols with different thresholds as well). Some skills are affected this way as well, but those stats you start out with pretty much sit on the shelf.

Oh, and the skills. So it's a total hodge-podge of skills that you get. Often you get a thin layer of 2-5 skills all at level 1. You're a happy man if you get a skill level of 2 or better in something and it's something useful. I forget how you raise skills in Traveller, but I seem to recall it was rather long and expensive (after all, in one 4-year term the only thing you got was Carousing-1? skills are hard to learn in Traveller).

But the base system is what makes the skill system so odd. Basically, roll 2d6, add mods and meet or beat an 8. Since the average roll is a 7, you're pretty much 50/50 for anything and the single skill level translates into average success. But still, it's not that much better than 50/50. You have to angle for lots of bonuses, and since a lot of that is at GM discretion, you can expect to fail almost as often as you succeed.

And that's what I mean by "thin". You're mostly defined by a small suite of skills that only gently tip the odds of success in your favor. You're definitely going to try the things that you're skilled at before trying untrained stuff and you really want "jack-of-all-trades" as a skill, but so much of your character is completely nebulous in mechanical terms.

Still, I'm totally jazzed about pawing through all this stuff and I'm totally going to run a one-shot in the near future.

later
Tom

Crypto-Post

Huh,

That was surprisingly easy.

Tom

Crypto-Post

Huh,

That was surprisingly easy.

Tom