CT Only: My AHL variant rules

[Tobias]

Hello. I've posted these years ago on a Traveller FB group. Generally, I consider AHL to be the best combat resolution system for Classic Traveller (and possibly MT too), but I've always had a few niggles, which I thought to address with these modifications. I've also expanded and rebalanced the weapons list quite a bit while trying to stay as close as sensibly feasible to the original.

In part 2, I've tried to integrate Book 1 movement and combat procedures with AHL attack resolution. I've also added rules for animals and included a few optional rules that I just thought were neat.

This newly revamped document had some errors ironed out and was reformatted. If anybody finds it interesting, inspirational or would even like to use it in play, that'd be great. If anybody has questions, feedback or undiscovered errors to point out, also great.

 

[Tobias]

P.S.: The expanded weapons list includes a few new weapons, mostly taken from STRIKER or JTAS articles. The heavy laser rifle is basically the TL 13 laser rifle from STRIKER.
The Gauss battle rifle and Gauss SMG are inventions of my own. For the former, the idea was to have a Gauss rifle that remains marginally competitive at combat armor/battledress TLs, seeing how it is still standard armament at those TLs as per book 4. The latter to make SMG skill a little less of a dead end.

 

[coliver988]

I'll have to read it: I always have a hard time running Traveller combat as I can never decide between classic, merge with Striker, Snapshot...usually ends up being an odd mishmash of things.

 

[Tobias]

Made some small changes to animals, reformatted with a different font and corrected a few formatting errors:

 

[agorski]

I consider AHL to be the best combat resolution system for Classic Traveller

Have you ever looked at BITS At Close Quarters?

 

[Tobias]

Have you ever looked at BITS At Close Quarters?

Yes, I own it. While I can see the appeal of the variable action point system (inspired by Snapshot) and while I have used a similar system in the past, I prefer AHL's fixed action points for the purpose of small-scale indoor fighting. Also, while technically for any Traveller version (at the time), it is in practice heavily geared towards T4.1

For outdoor or more long-range combat situations, I like CT Book 1's more freeform approach best, but I've never thought its attack & damage system was much good, so one of the things I did was to adapt AHL's basic combat to Book 1's general combat structure.

(Not to be misunderstood, I think ACQ is a high quality product, as is generally all BITS stuff, but I prefer a different direction for my CT hack.)

 

[coliver988]

Have you ever looked at BITS At Close Quarters?

I forgot this one: I bought it years after actively playing Traveller and have read through it. I'll have to re-read it and the AHL variant to see things with fresh eyes. Still hoping to run a Traveller game sometime next year (we've got about 3 other games lined up before that, so we'll see what happens. Plus, most combat via on-line tends to be a lot looser than if we were at a table. I really miss being at a table!)

 

[Tobias]

Refined things a bit more.

 

[Tobias]

A few minor fixes and additions to the latest version. I really need to muster up the energy to add a vehicle combat system next.