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Rule most needing a fix.

Originally a thread on Lone Star. I will ask moderator to close it there if I find out how.
Dear all, I lurk a lot and have posted now and again. Hopefully starting T20 with gaming group soon. Have played CT before but T20 this time as no one wants to learn / re-learn new rules set and are 3.5 D&Ders. As I prepare to start what are the broken rules that I need to give consideration to houseruling, (and any suggestions of fixes) of course there might not be any
Thanks
 
my recommendation is to sit and read the t20 books as many times as you can and make notes... lots of notes. things that dont seem to work but actually do will jump out at you early on and it takes a few reads to see they do actually work, and the more you reread them it will make sense.. the converse is also true, as you reread them the rules that make no sense what so ever will make themselves clear and you will see which ones you need to house rule. the biggest fault of the T20 book i see is the apparent randomness with which the book was put together... a good portion of the rules that ought to be in the same or similar sections are spread far apart and that makes it difficult to find them as you need to while in a game session. other rules are mentioned in feat descriptions but never clarified in the book, and iirc there may be one or two which contradict each other, but dont hold that as gosphel i could be wrong.

browse thru the forums and you will find the many threads discussing the various issues in the book. good luck, i hope your attempt to run this is more successful than mine own was..WoW killed the rpg star...
and dont forget to check the errata.

ps...do not attempt to mix and match the design sequences. you will end up in the looney bin....
pps...do try to read the d20 modern rules, it gives a good contrast to the d&d3.5 rules and helps to integrate T20
 
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Rule most needing a fix

Dan,
Thanks for the added clarification. I will need some time to figure out all of those rules. I like your idea however of the second rule to call the first one.
Rayed
 
I ran a T20 campaign weekly for over 2 years, so some advice. :)

If you have the Traveller's Guidebook for Player's, you can ditch the D&D rules. (In fact I recommend it, not because they don't have the same rules but because it will help to get the player's heads out of D&D mode.) Also note that T20 was written with the 3.0 not the 3.5 rules as a base. (And there is a difference.)

Most broken? Gunnery Skill doesn't make much sense for lots of reasons, if you drop it and use BAB for gunnery as well as other combat. it helps. (Naval gunners take the martial feat to make up for the lack of BAB and things work pretty well. Large ship combat is too nasty, especially with the Gunnery skill in place (Spinal Meson + PMOS + Average Gunnery = Automatic Critical Hit and total destruction of any ship under 800,000 tons, and reducing SI to <0 of any ship over 800,000 tons but under 7.5 million tons.), but at least typical RPG level starship combat is in good shape.

Also note that Fighter craft are not Single operator craft (But since they all have a bridge (required) and therefore at least 2 seats, not a big deal.) due to the combat rules all ships require a Pilot and Gunner to be effective in Space Combat (Minimum, 4 plus one gunner per battery is better.). You can fly it or shoot it, but not both with only one crew member. Also note that the light fighter in the THB has space for a crew of 3. :) Unlike LBB5, 2 equal fighters can engage in combat and damage each other.

For Players:

Most important Attributes are Intelligence and Dex (in that order), everything else is secondary regardless of class.

Characters MUST Specialize. It is tempting, especially if you are coming from CT to spread things around and multi-class all over the place. This produces characters that are poor at everything and less than satisfying to play. Players that followed the advice of specializing and placing Int and Dex as 1, 2 had a much better playing experience.

About 5 terms in Prior History is normal. More than that quickly hits the point of diminishing returns.

Weapon combat is exceptionally deadly and the system produces the desired results in most cases. Coming from D&D players won't realize that, Traveller Players always knew this. It may be best to have everyone create throw away characters, or let them play some characters that you create and introduce them to fire combat before starting to play with their actual characters.

Unarmed combat, on the other hand, is exceptionally long and boring with a typical group of characters trying to beat each other senseless taking most of a playing session and no results. :)

Note that in Vehicle combat, at higher tech levels, armor is better than weapons so high tech armored vehicles are notoriously difficult to damage unless they are getting fired on by starships.

Overall, with this in mind, the system is definitely playable. It has a CT feel using the D20 rules and aside from the gunnery skill the only house rules I used was my typical Cost is per parsec not per jump for travel and cargo house rule.
 
I think ditching gunnery as a skill is probably a good idea, since it's too gamey and easy to exploit. A better system would be to have bab subbed in, although that can lead to strange results too - like a level 20 Marine having a better affinity at gunnery than a level 20 Navy gunner - solution to that is to have different ratings for different gunnery stations.

For vehicle weapons, or heavy weaponry (like say a heavy machine gun on a tank) use BAB modified by Dex, with some kind of negative modifier due to the difficulty in aiming a heavy weapon and dealing with the recoil. I'm not sure if all vehicle weapons should be like this, say aiming the tank's turret shouldn't necessarily take Dex for instance, but some kind of observation (Wis maybe).

For space ship weapons, use BAB but instead of using Dex as a modifier, use something like Int or Edu or Wis, plus the USP rating for the installed computer model. With negative modifiers due to range, possible sensor jamming and electronic warfare, and relative velocity differences. (hitting a stationary target should be easier than hitting a moving target that's taking evasive action - to simplify this, just use the evasive action rules in THB)

Thoughts?
 
http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/d&d-calibrating.html

I'm of this school of thought. I think players in my game hit big skill numbers too quickly in their specialised skills and never improved the out of specialty ones. Some classes didn't have enough points to spread around and others had loads.

I'd be tempted to limit skill ranks by using the cross-class maximum for all skills. The players can now afford twice as many skills, there is less variation meaning more chance for other players to contribute and the players don't hit levels where everything becomes too easy, too quickly. I'd drop the extra skill points for high intelligence, to de-emphasise that score and not hamstring lower int players.

Some of the DCs may look high, but aren't on closer inspection. To fix a jump drive the DC is 40. The damage control feat brings that down to DC35. But that is the DC to fix it in six seconds. Fixing it over the course of a space combat turn drops the DC by 20 to 15.
A level 5 PC engineer can have 8 skill ranks, a plus 3 for stat bonus is common enough, meaning he needs to roll a 4, even without feats to raise the skill. Every other component of the ship is even easier to fix. A player coming out of character generation can easily be 5th level, 7th or 8th is also quite likely.

Using the cross-class maximum also halves the value of the gunnery skill as a side benefit.

Lower maximums also increases the value of aiding another, technological aids and homeworld skill, all good in my opinion.
 
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