Questions About MegaTraveller

[IronCzar]

After many years of being a fan, and desiring for many of the more recent of those years to set up and run a serious Traveller campaign, I think I have setled on MegaTraveller as the ruleset I want to use. It seems to me that it's the ultimate edition of Classic Traveller, of which I'd like to retain as much of the feel as possible.

That said, I've had... uh, problems with MegaTraveller in the past. So I have some questions.

1) Is there an errata-corrected version of the MT rules available anywhere? I own 4 copies of the rules and none are errata-corected. Perhaps on DTRPG?

2) Regarding the craft design sequences, how well do they work for the various types of craft (vehicles, watercraft, small craft and space/starships?) Do the rules break down of have sinificant bugs in for any of the various types? Does the errata fix them? If not, what are the fixes? How viable is the design sequence for generating bunches of basic vehicles and space/starships?

3) Are there any bugs or problems in the vehicle and space combat systems? Does the errata fix them? If not, what are the fixes?

4) Is there a book which is a general resource for spacecraft designs? I know about Fighting Ships, but I don't own it and thought of it as dealing strictly with military ships. Is this correct? Also, wasn't there a Digest Group book called 101 Vehicles? How good is it?

5) In a similar vein, are there any web resources for MT craft designs?

6) Am I making a terrible mistake by choosing MT?

Thanks in advance! If all goes well, I may put up some designs somewhere on the net.

(PS: I hope this is okay to post in this forum.)

 

[Elliot]

In brief answer to your questions:

1) No - the errata is on the net and you have to manually cut it out and paperclip it to your books

2) Full of bugs i'm afraid - In essence MT design is extended Striker - when you can be bothered with the design system its quite good - but very complicated - no quick CT bk2 style designs.

3) Yes - Dont know about the errata as I use power projection or the BITS system

4) 101 vehicles is a standard RPG catalogue of land/sea/air vehicles. Its ok as far as the old cynical lets put an equipment book out style of publishing used to be. As to Space Ships - DGPs Starship Operators Manual is essential reading (and very expensive on ebay these days). No big books.

5) Try Ace and the Dogs MT starship design program, which I find to be very good - google ace and the dog and it should appear.

6) No - its a great system - Basic Char Gen is synchronised with Advanced so the skill imbalance is no longer so apparent, the task system is great, combat is a task system based Striker like affair.

As to the setting - well its your choice - you can always play CT era, TNE era with MT.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Gary N. Mengle:
5) In a similar vein, are there any web resources for MT craft designs? [...]

Try heading on over to: Mega-Traveller.com. Check out the "downloads" section. There seem to be several files there that may be of help (I'm not sure, never having used them myself).

 

[Tobias]

4) Don't bother with Fighting Ships. It's all about Gigantic Military Spacecraft, which break the design rules as well. Worst of all, only stats are given, with no real descriptions and few pictures.
101 Vehicles, OTOH, is fairly useful, but covers only ground and grav vehicles. Design rules for Aircraft and many design examples are in COACC.
5) Rob Dean and Scott Kellogg designed a tremendous number of vehicles for MT in its heyday. Drop me a PM with an email address, and I can send you two text files with several hundred designs.
6) It's a good system, but you should get some things for Classic Traveller as well - it's mostly compatible. I would recommend Striker, for more about vehicles etc., and the Alien Modules for background on various Alien races - unless you can get the rare MegaTraveller Alien books. Also, a copy of Book 8: Robots. The Robot design rules are still viable for MT.
Other stuff to seek out would be anything by DGP - especially the World Builder's Handbook and the Alien Books. Long OOP, and not going to be reprinted, I'm afraid.

Regards,

Tobias

 

[IronCzar]

Originally posted by Elliot:
In brief answer to your questions:

1) No - the errata is on the net and you have to manually cut it out and paperclip it to your books

Crap. That's what I was afraid of. I thought I remembered hearing that the last (or last couple) MT printings had the errata.

2) Full of bugs i'm afraid - In essence MT design is extended Striker - when you can be bothered with the design system its quite good - but very complicated - no quick CT bk2 style designs.

I'm actually comfortable with the complexity level. But what are the bugs?

I think I already found one, actually - batteries. The numbers don't make sense to me. When you allocate space to everything in kiloliters, why do you do batteries in incements of 0.001 Kl? Why not multiply all the numbers by 1000 and use whole kiloliters? Or was this intended to cover batteries for handheld devices as well?

3) Yes - Dont know about the errata as I use power projection or the BITS system

I thought Power Projection was the BITS system. How is it?

As to Space Ships - DGPs Starship Operators Manual is essential reading (and very expensive on ebay these days). No big books.

I've got the SOM. Great book.

5) Try Ace and the Dogs MT starship design program, which I find to be very good - google ace and the dog and it should appear.

Downloaded but I haven't tried it out yet. Thanks!

6) No - its a great system - Basic Char Gen is synchronised with Advanced so the skill imbalance is no longer so apparent, the task system is great, combat is a task system based Striker like affair.

As to the setting - well its your choice - you can always play CT era, TNE era with MT. [/qb]

I'll probably pick something around the CT era, off the beaten path in a homebrewed sector. Truthfully, I haven't decided yet.

 

[IronCzar]

Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Gary N. Mengle:
5) In a similar vein, are there any web resources for MT craft designs? [...]

Try heading on over to: Mega-Traveller.com. Check out the "downloads" section. There seem to be several files there that may be of help (I'm not sure, never having used them myself). </font>[/QUOTE]Oooh... nice site. Thanks!

 

[IronCzar]

Originally posted by Tobias:
4) Don't bother with Fighting Ships. It's all about Gigantic Military Spacecraft, which break the design rules as well. Worst of all, only stats are given, with no real descriptions and few pictures.
101 Vehicles, OTOH, is fairly useful, but covers only ground and grav vehicles. Design rules for Aircraft and many design examples are in COACC.

I don't currently own either book. I will have to add 101 Vehicles to my (extensive) to-buy list.

5) Rob Dean and Scott Kellogg designed a tremendous number of vehicles for MT in its heyday. Drop me a PM with an email address, and I can send you two text files with several hundred designs.

Wow. PM will be on its way shortly. Thanks loads!

6) It's a good system, but you should get some things for Classic Traveller as well - it's mostly compatible. I would recommend Striker, for more about vehicles etc., and the Alien Modules for background on various Alien races - unless you can get the rare MegaTraveller Alien books. Also, a copy of Book 8: Robots. The Robot design rules are still viable for MT.

The high level of compatibility with CT is one of the reasons I've selected MT - I have tons of CT stuff, and I'd like to be able to use it.

I do also have both DGP alien books and 5 of the 8 CT alien books. The rest are on the to-buy list, particularly the Zhodani book which keep eluding me on eBay.

Other stuff to seek out would be anything by DGP - especially the World Builder's Handbook and the Alien Books. Long OOP, and not going to be reprinted, I'm afraid.

It's too bad about that. Still, I have their most important books - SOM, WBG and the Alien books.
I scored a pile of the stuff at Origins last year. None of it was cheap, I'm afraid.

 

[Hemdian]

Originally posted by Gary N. Mengle:
After many years of being a fan, and desiring for many of the more recent of those years to set up and run a serious Traveller campaign, I think I have setled on MegaTraveller as the ruleset I want to use. It seems to me that it's the ultimate edition of Classic Traveller, of which I'd like to retain as much of the feel as possible.

That said, I've had... uh, problems with MegaTraveller in the past. So I have some questions.

1) Is there an errata-corrected version of the MT rules available anywhere? I own 4 copies of the rules and none are errata-corected. Perhaps on DTRPG?

There were (to my knowledge) 2 main print runs of the basic MT rule set. They can be distinguished by the style of spine on the Players manual: in the early printing the Players manual had a fold-over spine; in the later printing this was replaced with a glued-edge spine like the other books in the box. A large amount of errata was fixed (in all the books) between these 2 printings ... but there is still a lot of errata.

Others have already pointed out some sources of errata. My advice is to be flexable in play. Personnally I use what I'd describe as MT-lite rules with CT era background.

2) Regarding the craft design sequences, how well do they work for the various types of craft (vehicles, watercraft, small craft and space/starships?) Do the rules break down of have sinificant bugs in for any of the various types? Does the errata fix them? If not, what are the fixes? How viable is the design sequence for generating bunches of basic vehicles and space/starships?

3) Are there any bugs or problems in the vehicle and space combat systems? Does the errata fix them? If not, what are the fixes?

Starship combat in MT is very High Guard (CT Book 5)-like. As such it can be a pain to battle large ships manually. PowerProjection (from BITS) is High Guard-based and deals quite nicely with Cruisers and similar sized capitol ships.

4) Is there a book which is a general resource for spacecraft designs? I know about Fighting Ships, but I don't own it and thought of it as dealing strictly with military ships. Is this correct? Also, wasn't there a Digest Group book called 101 Vehicles? How good is it?

Avoid Fighting Ships. It was the worst MT supplement (possibly the worst Traveller supplement) ever.

101 Vehicles, on the other hand, was pretty good. As was any other Digest Group product. One of the Digest magazines even had a nice walkthrough of the ship design system.

5) In a similar vein, are there any web resources for MT craft designs?

Not just for craft designs, but as an MT resource in general:
- Get hold of anything you can from Digest Group (including the magazines).
- Most BITS products are generic but MT compatable. If your FLGS doesn't stock them try Gnometrader.
- The HIWG CD is a good resource if you can find it
- And you might find the odd scrap at StuffOnline.

Regards PLST

 

[kaladorn]

Just a thought: drivethrurpg.com now has most of the Traveller MT books as watermarked PDF (rather than with the obnoxious DRM). Thus, you can, as I recently did, get electronic copies of your books. Or, if you don't have the books from the olden days (beaten like mine), then you can get *missing* books you wish you could buy a *heck* of a lot cheaper than ebay, even if you have to take them into a local printer to get a printout. (Can print them at home too, if keen).

 

[rogermccarthy]

Seconded on Fighting Ships - although it is a toss-up whether it or the T4 Starships and Emperors Vehicles books are the worst ever Traveller supplements - I'd vote for Emperor's Vehicles.

IIRC Fighting Ships has a battleship (not even a superdreadnought - a battleship) that needs 70,000 crew - which gives you a fair idea of just how broken the design rules are at that level.

While COACC aircraft and 101 Vehicles are perfectly useable if you look too closely at the lower Tech vehicles and compare them to RW examples you soon see how broken the system is at the lower end as well.

Apart from the official errata various other odd bits of errata also popped up in the Travellers Digest (they were probably still finding it right up to the system's demise) and are reproduced on the net in several places.

Personally find the MT combat and task rules far too fussy and prefer Azhanti High Lightning.

Not altogether true that BITS products are generic they are mostly written for T4 and thus NPC's have terrifying high skills (although some attempts has been made to genericise skill names so astrogation beccomes astronavigation for instance) - nevertheless this is easily fixed by knocking off a few points.

Probably the ideal Traveller ruleset is MT chargen + High Guard or T20 ship design + Power Projection starship combat + a much simplified MT task and combat system.

 

[kafka47]

Avoid Fighting Ships. It was the worst MT supplement (possibly the worst Traveller supplement) ever.

Nah, that honor must be for COACC. Fighting Ships was just so bad because we compared to the CT book which upon reflection was not so great in terms of illustration and what came after which was vastly superior in Challenge, DGP, and TNE.

 

[aramis]

Fighting ships is worse than worthless. It's misleading! (The fill text is essentially contradictory to other sources, too...) If you want it, get it as a curiosity...

Craft design, IF YOU TAKE THE TIME TO LEARN IT (and rework some of the tables to more useful presentation, like those batteries in Liters... is particularly powerful. It's slightly easier than FF&S, with almost as much detail.

If you can find it, 101 vehicles is a nearly-must-have, if you plan on more than "Port to Port" play (though some do just that). I used it as the basic reference when running an MT active duty campaign.

There is no comparable book for starships, tho'. (The Dean Files had a lot of good designs, both vehicle and ship, but I don't know where they live, if anywhere, these days.) If you are using the Ref's manual HG-variant for starship combat, you can use the HG stats for anything out there.... MT USP's are derived directly from HG. (Just like T20.)

MT is a good, solid, flexible ruleset, that is often misunderstood by those who haven't seen it run well. Combat is simple. Interrupts are a pain. Add an Initiative stat (I use TNE's calcs) to determine who acts first, and THEN allow interrupts.

 

[daryen]

I only know this because I tripped over them while looking for something else.

The Dean Files can be found on Joe Heck's website.

 

[kaladorn]

COACC before the errata was *awful*. Chargen was just plain broken. Worse than any of the bad errata in the Player's Manual. And they did misname "FS"... it should have been "Shattered Ships of the Fighting Imperium" given the number of errors in it. Not worth the money (as someone who paid, I have to say, it sucked...). COACC was at least a good idea, just a poor errata-ridden execution.

For MT, if you get Ships for Windows III, suddenly craft design ain't so hard.

101 Vehicles is good, 101 robots not so much. Mostly the art sucked in 101 robots. YMMV.

Starship Operator's Manual was fantastic.

Combat could be better (though for me, ACQ is just about the perfect fix, better even than AHL), but how could the skill system seem complex? I'm at a loss. With just the skill system in my head, I've run entire games....

I mean, what can be simpler than a task statement?

To understand the MT Task System, Routine, Gambling or Admin, Int or Edu, 1 minute, (Uncertain).