Amazon Review of Traveller's Guidebook

[Tikon]

Just left this on Amazon. I finally printed and bound the Guidebook. And I must say: Wow, does this help a lot. Too many times during play I was flumoxed trying to figure out the rules for T20.

"Go to Marc Miller's official traveller sales site and pick it up. The entire T20 Library is for sale on CD-ROM.
http://www.farfuture.net/
Although after buying I heartily recommend using the Traveller's Guidebook (for players)..
Remember the praise Pathfinder got for improving and making D&D 3.5 more fun to play? Well that's what the Guidebook did for T20, or as one of my players said "It should be called the Player's Best Friend."
While I like The Handbook, I find that the Guidebook just made everything easier to understand and therefore play. I theorize that the Traveller's Handbook was hampered by needing to adhere to the D20 OGL. That and most of the rules were framed as "Refer to the main D&D Player's Handbook." While the Guidebook makes the effort to explain every rule: It's CLEAR meaning, what situations it applies to, what difficulty numbers to shoot for, can you retry? Etc etc.

I also want to call attention to a difference I saw between this and D20 Modern. I see T20 (along with regular Traveller, GURPS, etc) as the classic engineer's version of sci-fi role playing. Where everything has to based on tables and charts. Want a turret on your ship? Well only one per 100 tons, if it's part of the right tech level. D20 Modern (and DP9's D20 Mecha) seem more effects based. Do you want 4-quad linked quantum cannons? Well just pay the point build cost. Just an observation."

 

[rich4421972]

I also want to call attention to a difference I saw between this and D20 Modern. I see T20 (along with regular Traveller, GURPS, etc) as the classic engineer's version of sci-fi role playing. Where everything has to based on tables and charts. Want a turret on your ship? Well only one per 100 tons, if it's part of the right tech level. D20 Modern (and DP9's D20 Mecha) seem more effects based. Do you want 4-quad linked quantum cannons? Well just pay the point build cost. Just an observation."

I think that the difference is perhaps due to D20 Modern's role as a "cinematic rpg" rather than a hard SF-based role-playing game. In a way, I feel that this is very good because I feel very comfortable using my D20 modern books with my Star Wars RPG books. I totally agree with the Player's guide's use of hard science concepts rather than cinematic effects. Perhaps it's all based on personal preferences.

Another interesting aspect of this issue is the fact that D20 modern tended to follow D20 version 3.0 while T20 used rules that were in many cases more similar to D20 3.5. The beauty, I feel, with the OGL (version 1.0a in this case) is that basic mechanics are open content while color, description and additional character classes (as well as paragon path characters) can be added as original content. I really like your reference to the Pathfinder treatment of version 3.5 because it is especially relevant here.