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How easy (or hard) would it be to use supplemental materials developed for MgT with T5? Has anyone had experience in trying this?
How easy (or hard) would it be to use supplemental materials developed for MgT with T5? Has anyone had experience in trying this?
How easy (or hard) would it be to use supplemental materials developed for MgT with T5? Has anyone had experience in trying this?
Think of brands and versions as supporting Traveller, rather than competitors. If you have a ruleset you know and love, there's no reason or mandate to ditch it.
As for GURPS and Mongoose Publishing: cross-pollination seems to benefit Traveller.
And along those lines, consider that Traveller5's core book is many resources rolled into one. Its content is modular and can be useful to other versions of Traveller.
The big question I've got to put forward, is which is best/better?
Personally I haven't stepped on the Mongoose band wagon due to the fact that Marc is still actively involved in Traveller and I found it a bit weird that with the actual Classic and all the great material now available from Farfuture, why anyone would try and re-invent the wheel.
The last Traveller I purchased(and got a few of the books too) was the T4 books, which I thought were terrific(yes there were the odd rule quirks but for crying out loud, I'm sure most players can simply modify those rules that don't tie in with classic back to classic. The important aspect is THE GAME and having fun. Everyone wins in an RPG when everyone puts there all into it and has a great adventure in the process).
Thinking about it I thought to myself "Why re-invent the wheel and who would know Traveller better than Marc???". I'm also loving the fact that this next edition looks set to be the ultimate version. If there's one thing that's annoyed me through out the years, it's copy cats. I shunned D20 and Gurps traveller because once again it's re-inventing the wheel. I'm all for other companies putting out official sanctioned adventures and supplements for a game but why change from a standard that everyone knows???
In some ways that's why I like 'Star Frontiers'. The rules are the rules, there's been a lot of add ons(there still coming) and it's an all round fun scifi game. What distinguishes Traveller from Star Frontiers for me is that it's far more expansive and surprisingly the rules pose limitations which help to pin down aspects like starships and space travel in a defined way leaving plenty of scope for your own creativity while also preventing the chaos from what can quickly end up an out of control nightmare when the scope of the game gives good character detailing but thins out on the details of the universe and it's make up. Star Frontiers is terrific for laid out adventures, but if I was going to have a game with a lot of planet hopping(piracy attacks on the way), charts to make it more ordered and crazy bars amidst asteroid fields in the middle of nowhere, then Traveller would be the system I would choose. Why? because it's had the mechanics to handle these things and a lot more, for years and does them well.
Possibly the only thing I would change is the D6 system, to a D10 system(the only reason I can fathom as to why it started and never changed was because that's all that was really readily available at the time and if it aint broke don't fix it philosophy). For myself I always find straight percentage systems such as that in Star Frontiers for example with just 2D10's so much easier. But hey, tables and D6 will do the job too and at the end of the day, the dice used are but an aesthetically pleasing thing. Some of us like metric others use imperial it's really that minor an issue. What matters is the system and Traveller to me has always been a real quality SciFi RPG system and the inspiration for many ideas and creativity which to me is what RPGing is all about. Traveller is a SciFi rpg and that excites me as someone who despises fantasy games. It promoted thinking about technology and surviving in space, something which one day will be something many more people than just enthusiasts and professionals will be thinking about.
Please share your thoughts fellow Travellers, I'd love to know what you think on this? Is T5 going to be THE standard and ditch the rest(keeping the adventures and campaigns only) or is there forever going to be flavours of traveller polluting what to me should be a collaborative internationally supported system.
Rehyrdrated Food for thought,
Sean A. Curtin
Spaceresearcher
I forget if it's already in there or not, but IMHO the most useful chapter T5 could have is one detailing how to convert PCs/guns/whatever to and from other editions.
4. The huge backstock of Traveller publications
remains very relevant. One of the reasons that I
- page-change -
started my campaign was because I‘d started read-
ing through my collection of Traveller books that
extends back over 30 years. I wanted to use all of
that old material, and I was delighted that I could.
Over the course of the game, I ran two classic
adventures, Nomads of the World-Ocean (TA #9)
and Research Station Gamma (TA #2), half of a
double adventure in Death Station (TDA #3), and a
few Amber Zones from Journal of the Traveller’s
Aid Society.
I also pulled background material out of the
great GURPS Traveller line (especially their Spin-
ward Marches book, which got used almost every
week) and some of the DGP Megatraveller books
(their Vilani & Vargr book comes to mind, as it‘s
one of the very few looks at the Vilani anywhere in
the literature).
This material all worked best as background.
There‘s more than one evening that I searched
through books to find an adventure seed for the
next day‘s gaming. However, for the Traveller and
MegaTraveller books, I could pretty easily convert
the systems (on the fly, by the end of the cam-
paign). Traveller was a pretty straight conversion,
while skills got a little higher in MegaTraveller and
thus needed to be toned down a little.
With that experience in hand, I heartily suggest
a good library of old Traveller books if you want to
expand any Mongoose Traveller game.
T5 uses a very similar die mechanic as T4 does. So skill levels are scaled to that type of game system. Classic Traveller 2nd Edition and Mongoose Traveller seem to transfer characters and skills back and forth better.
Ships may be different in every version of Traveller though.
Bk is Book. Book 5 is High Guard for Classic Traveller. Some people say CT when they really mean CT + all the books for CT.
Ah. I see. Well, I only own the core-rulebook (ISBN-3-89064-100-8; German version/ translation printed in 1985)
Best wishes!
Liam