Okay, a few more questions.
First as to the armor and penetration for bullets versus swords, I just based my info on work that had gone before me in CT and Striker.
However, it occurs to me that a roleplaying game, like supposedly "realistic" movies often stretch the truth just a bit to make a good story. And it's okay for a RPG simulation to do the same. Nothing's perfect, even computer simulations.
As to Pluto, etc. Nothing planned. Just leaving things open ended for creative ref's to run with.
Finally, where did the task system come from? A little out of previous work of the brothers Keith, a knowledge of 2D6 and 3D6 statistics, and thin air.
I knew I wanted something you could do on the fly if needed, plus I wanted not only difficulties, but time to do the task. I also knew I wanted skill to be a big part, with your attributes also playing a factor.
I wanted attributes to help, but not overpower skill, so the divide by 5 thing was born. You'd get +1 if your attribute was 5-9 and +2 if 10-14, or a whopping +3 if you were lucky enough to be a rare 15, and of course, nothing if 1-4.
So it would be possible if you had no skill, but a 10-14 attribute, you could pull it off as well as someone who was a skill 2, but a 1-4 in the key attribute. Maybe a bit of a stretch, but it made having an attribute 10+ something to rave about.
But generally characters would be a skill 1 or 2, and an attribute +1, so they'd have a +2 to +3 on the roll. So the roll for a routine task to succeed became a 4+ or a 5+. Fairly easy, but still tough enough that there'd be some suspense.
And of course with difficult at 11+, then the roll would become 8+ or 9+ ... enough to make 'em really sweat!
But if you were one of those rare individuals with a +2 attribute and a skill of 3 or 4 in something, then when a task came along that fit your abilities, then it became a piece of cake for a difficult task! The roll became a 6+ or even 5+ for difficult, practically routine for you!
So it wasn't perfect, but it was easy to understand and simple enough you could make up tasks on the fly. By giving names to the rolls, like Routine for 7+, then non rules oriented gamers or newbies could relate to it quickly.
And then making the rule generally to pick one skill and one attribute, you could make 'em up on t he fly really quickly.
I also might mention it became pretty obvious when we started doing equipment sheets that adding some tasks to the sheets would be helpful.
I consider the equipment sheets to be another goodie that DGP did that really added some value to owning a given piece of equipment. You knew what it could do, and with the tech level capabilities, size, mass, cost, etc all listed -- getting a cool piece of equipment could even become somewhat of a quest on an adventure.
Glad to hear you agree with my assessment of the value of the task system. I know it was invented by me out of frustration with not having a standard way to use all these good attributes and skills easily throughout the game. Necessity is the mother of invention as they say, and that was certainly the impetous behind the task system for me in Traveller.
