Running Classic Traveller
- Thread starter OldSalt
- Start date
The "Instahit"
issue
is not an "instadeth" issue, mainly because the weapon damage in CT is not affected by the margin of to-hit roll.
No matter the to-hit mods, a hit still only does the base damage. No matter the narrowness of the hit roll's success, be it by 0 or by 18 points... it always does the listed dice of damage.
A graze with a PGMP still usually kills by a wide margin.
A solid hit with a body pistol still only does 2d damage. No matter what the to-hit is, it always does no less than 2 and no more than 12 damage.
If there is a major flaw in CT combat, it's that there is no link between skill and damage per successful attack, only between skill and number of successful attacks over time.
It was an issue that, for me, rose to problematic. (And was solved by some later editions.) But it was definitely not an "instakill" situation with anything under 6d damage versus hale characters.
No matter the to-hit mods, a hit still only does the base damage. No matter the narrowness of the hit roll's success, be it by 0 or by 18 points... it always does the listed dice of damage.
A graze with a PGMP still usually kills by a wide margin.
A solid hit with a body pistol still only does 2d damage. No matter what the to-hit is, it always does no less than 2 and no more than 12 damage.
If there is a major flaw in CT combat, it's that there is no link between skill and damage per successful attack, only between skill and number of successful attacks over time.
It was an issue that, for me, rose to problematic. (And was solved by some later editions.) But it was definitely not an "instakill" situation with anything under 6d damage versus hale characters.
Ty Beard's "Double Tap" variant mitigates this to the extent he describes in the first post here.
YMMV in how much more realistic or complex that is.
Cloth armour is available from TL 6, so it approximates the body armour we know today, except that it's a full suit. There are standards for body armour, which describe what it's expected to stop at each level. To stop a rifle requires Level III armour, and the defining characteristic of Level III armour is hard armour plates made of steel, ceramic, or composite materials.
The testing standard for Level III armour is to stop 7.62x51 mm rifle ammo. The Traveller Book tells us that the auto rifle is modelled on the FN FAL, which fires that very round. It also happens to be the first rifle I was trained on (FN C1).
Essentially, cloth armour without plates is made to stop pistol bullets, shotgun pellets, and shrapnel. To stop rifle bullets, you need to add plates. The rules don't mention plates, but even if we assume they're included, they cover only the torso, front and rear. (Otherwise, that cloth armour is going to be very heavy and uncomfortable....) The upshot is that our man in cloth is more exposed than our man behind the rock regardless of whether he has plates.
Not substantially. Someone firing from behind cover exposes head, neck, arms, and shoulders ... but the arms are in front of the body and the head is tucked down on the weapon. He presents a small target ... a much smaller target than our man in cloth.
Fair enough, but remember I referred to "the right gun" ... the most ridiculous example being the Gauss rifle. (When more powerful weapons were added to an already unbalanced system, it made things much worse.)
Now, the first blood rule does save people from dying, but we still have a problem with weapons that are guaranteed to hit. Which leads us to....
Which means that with the right gun, that automatic hit automatically incapacitates the character and ends his day. Not instakill, admittedly, but instadone.
I agree with your point re skill having no effect on damage.
I liked the combat system in Twilight:2000, but in the first ed. it suffered badly when a vehicle was hit ... there's a balance to be struck between detail and ease of use. Unfortunately CT leans too heavily on ease of use here.
Thanks. I'll take a look at that. Now all I need is a new space combat system.
creativehum
SOC-14 1K
Hi Welsh, thanks for the reply.
Quickly, I agree with you about the addition of later weapons throwing the game out of whack. Escalation in RPGs often does that!
More on point for our own conversation:
I have always assumed that though Cloth armor is TL 6 is a "Science Fiction Version" of ballistic armor -- if only because the Weapon/Armor Matrix makes it clear that Cloth armor is so much more effective against all weapons than being unarmored and the other armors.
If we assume that Cloth armor is the equivalent of today's armor then the table makes no sense. One could bring the numbers of that Matrix column into alignment with today's tech... but that's not what is there.
And so I have always assumed that while Cloth armor can be manufactured at TL 6, it involves technology that has spread through the stars. It is better than our 20th Century ballistic armor. (I mean, it has to be for the table to make sense.) So there is a stopping power for that armor that is much more effective than today's tech.
I'm not asking you to buy this, keep in mind. Just laying out my own reading of the material.
In my reading of all this...
The guy standing still in Cloth armor is probably will get get hit, but he's got a slightly better than 50/50 chance the amor will absorb the impact energy and distributing the blow over his body. On the other hand, he is just standing there, so if he gets hit, there's also a 42% chance the hit will penetrate the armor or hit an exposed area and do effective damage against him. (Again, all of this is predicated on Traveller's Cloth armor not being similar to contemporary ballistic armor but rather an armor Miller came across in an SF novel and adopted into the game.)
Meanwhile, the guy shooting from behind the rock might or might not get hit. He's a smaller target, sure, and behind cover. But the PCs are awesome Science-Fiction Adventure Heroes (per the original intent of the rules) so they might pull the shot off. But the more important thing in this case is that the poor guy has no armor. If the PC hits him the odds of effective damage are dramatically higher he'll take effective damaged compared to the dude in the Cloth Armor. Are the odds are good the target will go down from a headshot as he shoots from behind the rock? In this system, yes. But for me that's fine.
Again, I'm not expecting to sell you on this. Simply stating how I see it. And note that our emphasis on what we're focusing on and emulating are baseline of our concerns are very different. You are working from your training (and rightfully so). I'm working from the baseline of the SF stories of Jack Vance, E.C. Tubb, Poul Anderson, and others.
As for Classic Traveller leaning too much on ease of use... I'll disagree. But I would suggest it's fine. Different people want different things from RPG play and want to focus on different things. What "makes sense" for one person is an unneeded complication or lack of important detail for another. The fact that different games offer different focus for play is a good thing in my view.
Quickly, I agree with you about the addition of later weapons throwing the game out of whack. Escalation in RPGs often does that!
More on point for our own conversation:
I have always assumed that though Cloth armor is TL 6 is a "Science Fiction Version" of ballistic armor -- if only because the Weapon/Armor Matrix makes it clear that Cloth armor is so much more effective against all weapons than being unarmored and the other armors.
If we assume that Cloth armor is the equivalent of today's armor then the table makes no sense. One could bring the numbers of that Matrix column into alignment with today's tech... but that's not what is there.
And so I have always assumed that while Cloth armor can be manufactured at TL 6, it involves technology that has spread through the stars. It is better than our 20th Century ballistic armor. (I mean, it has to be for the table to make sense.) So there is a stopping power for that armor that is much more effective than today's tech.
I'm not asking you to buy this, keep in mind. Just laying out my own reading of the material.
In my reading of all this...
The guy standing still in Cloth armor is probably will get get hit, but he's got a slightly better than 50/50 chance the amor will absorb the impact energy and distributing the blow over his body. On the other hand, he is just standing there, so if he gets hit, there's also a 42% chance the hit will penetrate the armor or hit an exposed area and do effective damage against him. (Again, all of this is predicated on Traveller's Cloth armor not being similar to contemporary ballistic armor but rather an armor Miller came across in an SF novel and adopted into the game.)
Meanwhile, the guy shooting from behind the rock might or might not get hit. He's a smaller target, sure, and behind cover. But the PCs are awesome Science-Fiction Adventure Heroes (per the original intent of the rules) so they might pull the shot off. But the more important thing in this case is that the poor guy has no armor. If the PC hits him the odds of effective damage are dramatically higher he'll take effective damaged compared to the dude in the Cloth Armor. Are the odds are good the target will go down from a headshot as he shoots from behind the rock? In this system, yes. But for me that's fine.
Again, I'm not expecting to sell you on this. Simply stating how I see it. And note that our emphasis on what we're focusing on and emulating are baseline of our concerns are very different. You are working from your training (and rightfully so). I'm working from the baseline of the SF stories of Jack Vance, E.C. Tubb, Poul Anderson, and others.
As for Classic Traveller leaning too much on ease of use... I'll disagree. But I would suggest it's fine. Different people want different things from RPG play and want to focus on different things. What "makes sense" for one person is an unneeded complication or lack of important detail for another. The fact that different games offer different focus for play is a good thing in my view.
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To be clear, I'm a big fan of ease of use, which is why I stick with CT. But in the case of the personal combat rules, I think the system leans too far in that direction.
YMMV.
creativehum
SOC-14 1K
YMMV.
It does!
I've added the differing text on first blood to my section by section comparison document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jsH-EgKvaR0mdbtJMj_Xj7X3TcYyZTqQGf-Gwu58PX0/edit?usp=sharing
(Note, anyone who wishes to be able to make comments on the document may request such access from the document viewer).
I do see differing text, but I'm not quite sure what you see as the difference. The text has always indicated incapacitation or death was possible, so the damage must be able to overflow in some way and the text in The Traveller Book and Starter Traveller make sense from this perspective. The word "entirely" dropped after the 1977 edition does add some confusion.
I'm also curious what happens if you apply a damage die with a 6 to a characteristic that has less than 6 points remaining. My gut feel based on the rules is that is goes to 0 and the excess is ignored, allowing clever players to take a (non first blood) hit that in total would kill them and distribute the dice such that a lot of damage is "wasted". Of course that would assume you also get to pick the order of applying the damage (so you can pile up all those small dice to a characteristic bringing it to 1 and then apply a big 5 or 6 die shedding 4 or 5 points of damage...). Again, my gut feel is that players may play such games, the rules make no statement of constraint on the choice of which characteristic to apply any given die of damage to, and instead states in The Traveller Book and Starter Traveller "The wounded player may decide which physical characteristic receives specific wound points in order to avoid or delay unconsciousness for as long as possible."
p.s. And I just found the text that indicates how to deal with the damage modifier (+4, -1, etc.) from 1977: "further modifications may be distributed against, or added to, such wound groups as desired (players do this themselves; the referee does it for non-player characters)." That text is gone from later editions and realizing that, it's clear it refers to the +/- N modifiers.
creativehum
SOC-14 1K
Hi Frank,
The text is squishy in all three editions, and so I was being unfair in my statement. I have my interpretation of the 1977 rules that I have in my head that is now concrete... but honestly, it's just an interpretation. That interpretation, as mentioned above, is that a single characteristic dropping to 0 is unconscious/shock/debilitating wound for PCs and important NCPs, and death for some NPCs. That's how I get the "even death" component into play.
I like the ease of this application. And it sort of meets the criteria of the text. But if pressed, it's clearly an interpretation of a text that needs interpretation.
Yes. Which is my point. Things do get fuzzier after that. The easy fix is to re-write it:
"This first wound is first applied to one of the three physical characteristics (strength, dexterity, or endurance) determined randomly. If that characteristic is reduced to zero, then any remaining hits are then distributed to the other physical characteristics on a random basis. As a result, first blood may immediately incapacitate or even kill."
That does clear it up and might well be a finalized writing of the original intent of the rules.
But I actually like the rule that will risk important characters falling unconscious rather than killing them outright. For one thing this maps more precisely to most gunshot wounds in combat.
More importantly for the RPG context it keeps the PCs alive while retaining a high cost for getting hit. For this reason reason in particular I'm fond of the original interpretation I came up with.
I see this as another mini-game in Traveller (a good one) and agree with this interpretation.
And this is where the First Blood rule comes into play: It prevents the Player from dividing up Damage Dice to avoid falling unconscious, and increases the odds the first hit will drive his character to the ground.
Good thoughts about how and why to interpret the rules.
Also a good reminder that so often when we are arguing about the rules we are arguing OUR PERSONAL VERSION of the rules, the collection of our exposure, input from others, and our own interpretation of how we read the rules.
Frank
creativehum
SOC-14 1K
True that.
Willie Dewitt
SOC-11
Of the grogs I have gamed with who have gamed the entire time, most have come to despise the "Gygaxian Spew"
Some of the grogs do like it... but many more don't.
The existence the last several years of the Old School Renaissance, that was based to a large degree on OD&D and 1st ed (and the Open Game License relating to them), I'm not sure those last two comments bare out. 1st edition, with all it's mess, is a system that has been defunct for decades, but still gets a lot of play. It's fandom is still a fairly strong community. And my group of the last 9 years or so was put together primarly as a 1st edition group. Those of us who love it love it for its flaws and all. And it's not just nostalgia. It just works for us, and maintains the "feel" of old school games.
I have personally loved certain games that do have strict crunch that you can't mess with too much. Hero System and Call of Cthulhu have always been part of my big 3 faves along with old D&D. While CoC doesn't need much crunch, Hero system does, and you need to hew to the rules. But for pure gonzo fantasy high magic, for me, a system that can be fiddled with extensively, with many calls and rulings being made on the spot because the rules don't specifically tell you what to do, is pure creativity for me as a GM. And makes a world feel more real to me, which is saying something considering that gonzo I mentioned.
BTW old school Runequest was also a fave back in the day. Love the elegance of the Basic Role-Playing system. Once I threw out Strike Rank, that is
Yes, It does. Azhanti High Lightning also has action points and a hit/damage resolution system like Striker.
Not sure what you mean by details of skill rolls, but maybe High Guard has what you're talking about. There was also a starship combat game called Mayday.
The combat systems in Snapshot and Azhanti High Lightning used an action point system. Snapshot has a hit/damage resolution mechanic similar to Book 1 and AHL has a hit/damage resolution system similar to Striker. Many folks use some or all of these systems as expanded combat systems for Traveller.
The scout belt secret doesn't ring any bells with me. Maybe some other folks might know what you're referring to.
Of the grogs I have gamed with who have gamed the entire time, most have come to despise the "Gygaxian Spew"
Some of the grogs do like it... but many more don't.
The existence the last several years of the Old School Renaissance, that was based to a large degree on OD&D and 1st ed (and the Open Game License relating to them), I'm not sure those last two comments bare out. 1st edition, with all it's mess, is a system that has been defunct for decades, but still gets a lot of play. It's fandom is still a fairly strong community. And my group of the last 9 years or so was put together primarly as a 1st edition group. Those of us who love it love it for its flaws and all. And it's not just nostalgia. It just works for us, and maintains the "feel" of old school games.
I have personally loved certain games that do have strict crunch that you can't mess with too much. Hero System and Call of Cthulhu have always been part of my big 3 faves along with old D&D. While CoC doesn't need much crunch, Hero system does, and you need to hew to the rules. But for pure gonzo fantasy high magic, for me, a system that can be fiddled with extensively, with many calls and rulings being made on the spot because the rules don't specifically tell you what to do, is pure creativity for me as a GM. And makes a world feel more real to me, which is saying something considering that gonzo I mentioned.
BTW old school Runequest was also a fave back in the day. Love the elegance of the Basic Role-Playing system. Once I threw out Strike Rank, that is
It is a very subjective thing: what is true in my circle is the opposite of Aramis's, and yours seems to overlap more with my experience. Matter of taste, of which there is no meaningful argument. Not that one couldn't happen anyway...
Thanks. I'll take a look at that. Now all I need is a new space combat system.
To possibly save you time: the crux is in Ty's first post, as the thread quickly veered off course into combat casualty statistics, combat experiences, hunting vs. combat, etc. You'll understand everything in the first post: instead of conflating all modifiers into one roll, you split it into two (hence the "double-tap"):
one roll to hit
one roll to penetrate
Having published a few OSR products myself I am pretty knee deep into it so to speak. The basic gist is that OD&D was written for the wargaming community as it existed in 1970s. It a great game but also a game that doesn't both to explain many things that community assumed. Since OD&D "escaped" into the larger public who were not miniature wargamers, Gygax and TSR were playing catch up ever since.
Once you learn about those assumptions than OD&D is definitely playable. Doesn't mean you will like it everybody has their preferences of course. Thanks to the internet the ability for people from "back in the day" to talk about all this stuff has gotten way easier. Which is one of the factor that led to the resurgence of classic D&D in the form of the OSR.
As a side note, Traveller never really had a big break in continuity like D&D. TSR kept trying supplant the previous edition with the latest. Along with stuff like Dragonlance and AD&D 2nd editions large number of settings. All of which worked to relegate the past into a forgotten dustbin. That is until the Internet spread everywhere.
Traveller in contrast had a pretty tight knit community with the various zines of the 80s, the TML and later the Internet. There was never a time I can recall where it was hard to find material for a previous edition. Or find out how Traveller was played back in the day. And I been buying and playing Traveller since 1980.
I have personally loved certain games that do have strict crunch that you can't mess with BTW old school Runequest was also a fave back in the day. Love the elegance of the Basic Role-Playing system. Once I threw out Strike Rank, that is
Just about all the older games have fan communities surrounding. Espeically those what were in the top ten sales back in the day. Runequest or example had a RQ 2e reprint recently. It also has the Mythrus rules which was Runequest 6th edition.
And now the Traveller community has the Cepheus Game Engine which means the fan can do their own thing in regards to the game itself without having to wait on what the current license holder does. But then again, FFE has those great CD-ROM deals so it not hard to find the exact edition you want to play.
I say Traveller future as whole is pretty solid.
With a multitude of editions many of which cover the same thing way in slightly different ways, I am not surprised people cobble together their own custom version of Traveller.
With Classic Traveller, you have Striker, Azhanti High Lightning, Snapshot, and Core books to choose from. Then you could throw in stuff from MT, MgT (1e or 2e), T4, or T5.
Personally I view that as a good thing not a problem.
creativehum
SOC-14 1K
An excellent point. And basically the assumption I've been working with since I began looking at Traveller Books 1-3 again a couple of years ago. My thesis is the game is fine if you play it the way it was designed to be played, but a mess if you try to play it with the assumptions of RPG play that took firm hold in the 80s. (Again, that isn't to say the 1970s play style will be for everyone... simply that it does work.)
If anyone is interested I reference some of the gaming culture and assumptions in this post about halfway down the post under the "Historical Context' header.
Edited to Add: A recent realization for me.
If one is playing Classic Traveller in the context of the time of its publication (that is, with a strong Referee making ad hoc rulings modeled on Referee driven war games) the glaring weakness in Books 1-3 is the lack of this table somewhere in the pages:
Yes, it later showed up Book 0: An Introduction to Traveller. But really, to make the game work for the Players and the Referee, getting a handle on what those dice odds are for that 2D6 bell curve is vital. Perhaps those odds, too, were something that everyone at the time had floating around in their heads. But it seems of all the core assumptions required to make the system work, everything was hanging on a clear understanding of those percentages.
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Oh, it certainly is a good thing, as long as people understand that is happening and people aren't talking past each other because of their different personal Traveller rules.
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