How deadly is T20?

[MJD]

My feeling is that Traveller is more about the setting and the general feeling of the game than the rule set.

I find the repeated references to 'not real Traveller' offensive. I also question whether it is really acceptable to refer to QLI's Traveller rules as not real Traveller on QLI's own boards.

 

[Berg]

To make T20 deadlier or grittier, just stop getting Hit Dice (stamina) at say fifth level. There after you only get +1, +2, or +3 depending on your professions hit dice or maybe just your CON bonus (negative is 0). This is similar to higher level ADnD, just happening at a lower level.
This is what I do for d20 western games... unless Clint is playin'

 

[archhealer]

Originally posted by Berg:
To make T20 deadlier or grittier, just stop getting Hit Dice (stamina) at say fifth level. There after you only get +1, +2, or +3 depending on your professions hit dice or maybe just your CON bonus (negative is 0). This is similar to higher level ADnD, just happening at a lower level.
This is what I do for d20 western games... unless Clint is playin'

That's also how the BB5 game handles it, though they never get stamina dice to begin with. Just the professional bonus, I believe heavy-combat classes get +4, but I could be remembering wrong. Some other classes only get 1 every 2 levels. Again, unless I'm confusing it with another game.

However, I haven't had a problem with T20 being not deadly enough at all; in recent games, my players have lost several characters, and most of the others have recieved serious wounds in relatively small conflicts. I've found that people being struck by vehicles can be particularly deadly. (That's struck by the vehicle itself, not by it's weapons)

 

[princelian]

Earlier on in the thread, someone or other was pointing out that a group that's used to D&D is going to have a rude awakening when they encounter the relative deadliness of T20, and that got me to thinking...

(Campaign spoiler follows, if any of you are my players and reading this thread...)

I think I'll create a pregenerated team of characters who will be exploring an alien ruin. Not Ancient, but some other long-dead alien race. They'll use their T/ and K/ skills and learn stuff about the aliens, and discover (with that good ol' Search skill) a still-functioning hidden part of the complex.

And then the Red Shirt, Assistant Archeologist Simmons, will trigger the defense systems, getting himself blown to kingdom come while doing so, and the party will have to defend itself against killer robots armed with modern weaponry. They'll be lightly armed and armored, and they'll see how important armor is because the killbots will have it...

And they'll all DIE.

This'll be billed as an "introduction to the rules" adventure, and afterward we'll generate characters and begin the "actual" campaign...

Until about session 5 or 6, when the representative of a megacorp hires the adventurers to find out what happened to their exploration crew, who never returned from Beta Icanthus IV...

I'll have to remember to mark where the first group fights and dies on my maps, so I can draw their dead, mangled, and rotted bodies on the battle mat.....

 

[mike wightman]

When I first ran Mage I had a few one off games - they were designed to decide which character was worth keeping, so they were very nasty affairs but they worked as intended. Each player ended up with a very interesting character that had survived the ordeal (except for one scenario - an Irish fishing village that became a mini-campaign in itself).

The reason behind this rambling - why not run several "learn the rules" scenarios and allow the player to choose which surviving character of theirs thay want to play long term...

 

[eclipse]

Originally posted by Berg:
To make T20 deadlier or grittier, just stop getting Hit Dice (stamina) at say fifth level. There after you only get +1, +2, or +3 depending on your professions hit dice or maybe just your CON bonus (negative is 0). This is similar to higher level ADnD, just happening at a lower level.
This is what I do for d20 western games... unless Clint is playin'

That is a really nifty idea.

 

[marvo]

Here's my 2 cents worth.

In terms of game mechanics, T20 is deadlier that D20 (D&D) but not as deadly as CT or MT. How about Gurps Traveller? I have played other GURPS games and they have always seemed pretty deadly. And assuming D&D has to be hack and slash is nonsense. I have been playing in a D20 D&D 3.5 game for the past 6 months and we have only had 3 or 4 combat situations in all that time. Game systems are just that. They provide the mechanics but how the actual gameplay goes depends on the GM and the players.

Someone mentioned that traveller is a setting, not a game. I agree with that. On and off I have been running the same Traveller campaign for about 6 years. We started out with MT, converted to T4 and am now using T20. In that time some of the characters have been converted through all 3 systems, but they are basically the same character. The same player runs them and they are roleplayed the same. All the stats and skill just seem to flesh out their abilities. Because I see Traveller as a setting, I use source books from all versions.

 

[Anthony]

The deadliness of GURPS Traveller depends on the weapons used, but is extremely high if using military weapons against targets with insufficient armor to stop the hit. You run into a problem with targets being either invulnerable or dead, though; a weapon capable of harming someone in combat armor is a probable one-shot kill on someone wearing cloth or mesh, and a weapon capable of harming someone in powered battledress is a near-certain one-shot kill on anyone with lesser armor.

 

[marvo]

Thanks Anthony, I was thinking that was how Gurps Traveller worked. It's a general problem with Gurps in general. Even with fantasy it's hard to come up with a monster that can hurt the players a bit but not easily kill them outright.

 

[RickA]

Combat in T20 is no more deadly than any other game system. One side wins, one side loses. T20 just gets to the end result faster, cutting down the time it takes to run combat at the game table, imho.

I use the T20 lifeblood system in all of my D20 games now, and won't ever go back to "hit points".

 

[BetterThanLife]

One thing people seem to forget about barebones CT. Combat back then was applied to the Strength, Endurance and Dexterity Attributes. However the first time you took damage in that fight all the damage was applied to one of those stats determined at random. (Which generally exceeded that single stat.) Reducing one stat to 0 rendered you unconscious and out of the fight. So in that way CT was more deadly than T20. However Snapshot, Striker and later incarnations of Traveller changed that nasty feature rendering later incarnations less deadly. T20 is deadly in a reasonable way though mid to higher level characters can slug each other all day long with no appreciable effect. (So as long as we are doing non-lethal things nobody really gets hurt. A Brawl, as long as nobody pulls a lethal weapon can go on for days. (Kind of makes the fight in "The Quiet Man" look like a short fight.)

Now one of the things to reduce the level of violence in your campaign, and limit the big bad characters with lots of loose cred from shooting up your entire campaign because they have all sorts of armor to absorb damage, is to have law level also apply to body armor. At mid law levels anything more than light armor would be frowned upon. And at any law level where military weapons are outlawed Combat Environment Suits and better are also illegal. (Of course that doesn't prevent the Military or local Law Enforcement from carrying military grade weapons so they may also have Military grade armor.) Further someone toting mil-spec weapons and/or wearing milspec armor doesn't get to run into the local beat cop, they get the SWAT team.

If things really get out of hand, IMTU, the Marines, or even threatening to send in the Marines generally quiets things down. Gunning down local police and fleeing through Jump-Space is one of those crimes that, IMTU anyway, gets the MOJ involved. While the MOJ, IMTU isn't the Imperial Marines, they might be accompanied by a Squad, if necessary.

I said all that to say this, if you remove MilSpec Armor from the equation, then T20 is just as deadly, when it comes to lethal force as CT. However unlike CT you can actually brawl all day long and both sides walk away.

 

[txnetwolf]

Kudos to the post stating that rulesets aren't lethal but that gamemasters are!! ANY GM can make an absolute deathtrap under even the most forgiving of rulesets. Make it fun, make it entertaining, make it edge-of-your seat but remember to make it playable.

I saw something in the Deadlands D20 gameset that I really like. It uses the routine hit dice/hit points process of regular D20 D&D, that you have to admit is simple and easy, but one big difference...

You divide each PC's hit point total by 5, allocating equal amounts of HPs into 5 sets (remainders should go into the first column.) Each column represents an "injury stage" with a corresponding negative to all game checks. First stage - 0, 2nd stage -1, 3rd stage -2, 4th -4, and final stage -8.

Example: Joe Mercenary has 32 hit points... divide by 5 and we get 6 in each stage (8 in the first.) Joe takes a body pistol round for 6 pts... he's still within his first stage (8 pts) so he's ok, some bruising and a little winded but nothing serious. The bloke pops him again for another 6 pts and now Joe is in his 2nd stage of injury... all his combat checks, skill checks, etc are at -1.

2 blasts from a combat shotgun hit our poor mercenary, bringing him to 4 hit points total... he's in his final injury stage and near death. He tries to bring his own heavy pistol to bear and can hardly line up the sights (-8) - things look bad...

 

[Laryssa]

Originally posted by RickA:
Combat in T20 is no more deadly than any other game system. One side wins, one side loses. T20 just gets to the end result faster, cutting down the time it takes to run combat at the game table, imho.

I use the T20 lifeblood system in all of my D20 games now, and won't ever go back to "hit points".

I'm not terribly fond of two sets of hit points. I have my own set of house rules where more damaging weapons get through opponent's armor easier.

I prefer there to be just one criterion to determine character death, hit points. I don't even like massive damage thresholds, I want the PCs just to keep track of hit points and thats it. To simulate the power of modern weapons, I break down the Armor Class into two components, the Touch and Armor class. If you look at the new monster manual entries, you see their is a score called "Touch", touch is simply a creature's armor class minus his armor bonus. Armor class includes this armor bonus so it tends to be a higher number when armor is worn. Roll the d20 and score below the touch score and your character simply misses his opponent, roll the Armor class and above and you score the full damage dice as indicated, but roll somewhere inbetween, then each point of damage dice acts as a to-hit bonus until the Armor class score is reached, and the damage points left over is the actual damage inflicted.

For example A warrior strikes another warrior with his sword, The opponent's Armor class is 18 and his touch score is 12. The warrior player rolls a 14 on his d20 after adding all the usual modifiers to hit and then he rolls 8 points of damage. The distance between 14 to 18 is 4 points, so 4 of those damage points are used to reach the armor class level of 18, and the 4 points that are left over are inflicted on the opponent as damage. Since modern weapons do alot more damage than medeacal weapons, the medeaval armors are of little use. A plasma gun punches right through plate male. Modern armor should have higher armor bonuses than listed, since the deduct hit points of damage rather than whole hit die, as a rule of thumb I'd multiply the armor bonuses for modern and futuristic armors by 4.

 

[TheBrain]

Originally posted by princelian:


Until about session 5 or 6, when the representative of a megacorp hires the adventurers to find out what happened to their exploration crew, who never returned from Beta Icanthus IV...

Ah the 'ol classic "we're sending you in to find out what happended to the first team we sent in" scenario my favorite second only to "your in the tavern when the dark cloaked stranger approaches your table..."

As for the lethality of different incarnations of Traveller remember...Rules system don't kill PCs, GMs kill PCs.

 

[Laryssa]

A GM experienced with one rule system might inadvertantly kill the PCs using another. "Oh they're 10th level characters. Throw in a couple dozen Orcs at them with laser rifles and combat suits and see what happens, just another routine random encounter, I'll roll up the treasure."

 

[Anthony]

Also, a system which makes one shot kills relatively easy has a tendency to produce PC fatalities even in balanced encounters which the PCs are likely to win. In less binary systems, PCs are unlikely to be killed without being wounded first, and thus get a chance to pull back after being wounded.

 

[c_osborne]

But if PCs fail to pull out, then regardless of system, fatalities are possible. I have found T20 to be generally less deadly than CT.

 

[princelian]

I can agree with Chad, having run a scenario designed to kill them all.... In CT, it would have been (1) a much shorter session (CT is fast to resolve!) and (2) deader PCs (one managed to escape my evil grasp).

I wouldn't call T20 a binary system, however, unless you roll a critical hit with >1D weapons. Then, it's over, pretty much.

(One reason I'm softening critical hits in my campaign - still multiply damage but armor still applies. It'll still be deadly, but no *CRACK* your head comes off.)

 

[c_osborne]

In my games, the PCs have learned to be pretty cautious, and generally only fight when they have superior numbers, technology, or armor. So wounding happens all the time, but combat deaths have dropped considerably.

 

[Laryssa]

What if you simply disable the Lifeblood system? Throw out lifeblood altogether and make it so characters have to reduce their opponents stamina to 0 to disable them and to -10 to kill them? Slightly unrealistic? So is Traveller with its reactionless engines and its 2d starfields, so what else is new? Its better to have a game that is fun to play that one where the GM and players alike assiduously avoid combat because its so deadly and so the game becomes nothing but a vehicle for social interaction, inwhich case any game system can be used.