Contra Grav

[kzin]

Hm. I wonder if maybe the answer to the "mechs" question is that there's really room for two products here:

1) for lack of a better title, I'll call this "d20 Space" (in comparison to "Gurps: Space"). This would be a "core rules" book which covers hard sci-fi space settings. It would have rules for cover a wide range of sub-genres, and be mostly setting neutral (perhaps hints of Traveller, in the same way that the Players Handbook has hints of Greyhawk without being overly Greyhawk oriented). Rules sections would include space combat, and vehicle building (everything from grav-tanks to mechs to star ships). This might actually be comparable to Gurps:Space, Gurps:Vehicles, and Gurps:Robots in range of material covered.


2) a setting book for "d20 Space" that would be "Traveller d20" that fleshes out the rest of the Traveller setting in terms of the rules laid out in the first book. (possibly this could actually be a set of chapters at the end of the first book, but my point is that it would be organized in a way that strongly seperated a set of rules for d20 space games from the Traveller setting, giving people the generic rules for sci-fi game building as well as rules for how to use that for Traveller)


(in a way this mirrors CT in that originally CT was a generic set of space rules, and the CT setting was added on to that ... so it's not too much of a stretch)

Does that seem appropriate? Does it seem interesting to the people working on the project?

 

[Uncle Bob]

I think it would be good to have mech rules in T20 or in Traveller, for that matter. However, the rules should be written to bias in favor of Grav vehicles.

If you run a campaign where grav wasn't invented until several tech levels higher, or grav is unreliable, or even doesn't work at all, then walkers and mechs become important.

 

[MJD]

You know, I'm fairly sure TL15 Traveller societies could build mechs. It's just that with contragrav you can build better, more efficient vehicles.

In fact, a walker type vehcile of that sort is unstable, difficult to get to move and most importantly: really REALLY hard to protect against damage.

Sure you can do it, but once you get beyond Battledress (which still has the advantages of infantry) mech-type vehicles are simply not worth using.

Unless you're fond of doing things the hard way, that is...