Vent-Rant MegaTraveller what I hate about it.

[infojunky]

I have been pondering MT a lot this last month, there isn't a lot wrong with it, in that if one goes back and fixes the issues in CT then propagate forward from there into MT a lot of the silliness tends to disappear.

Realistically the more I look at MT, the more I consider it to be Advanced CT.

My biggest issue with character creation was skill proliferation, which was happening throughout the run of CT, thus MT exacerbated the problem, but a little judicious trimming can solve that issue.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Is that what happened? Or was it simply that what they did publish was just too "meta" (vs "get the plans from the abandoned space station, and, oh, don't open the door to the lab -- just saying" adventures).

I don't know, but I can't really say that it died out, rather they usurped it with the House system and TNE. There was the transitionary module "Survival Margin" that acted as a bridge between the two, right? But how long was it between SM came out and the previous module came out? Meanwhile, Challenge was still going strong and had consistent Traveller content.

I just don't recall there being some long lull.

Eh, but Challenge and the other periodical that replaced JTAS had more gizmos and settings; cybernetics, sickness, critters, that new bodily hit-chart, and their version of AMBER Zones, stuff like that. The few issues that I bought there was one adventure about going after pirates, and it was pretty prosaic CT oriented stuff.

 

[Hyphen]

The Raise Dead cast on this thread has made me realise I never showed my workings.

BTW, you say the Blaser has a range of 1250 km. Where do you take this number from? in the table in page 80 of the PM it is listed as Far Orbit range (so about 0.5 Mkm).

Ship-mounted TL 13 beam laser

TL 13, Pen 75/7, Damage 60, Range 1250 km.

Striker says the laser has an input of 250 MW (Striker Bk 2, p 41, para. C.1.).

Laser output is input/4 = 250/4 = 62.5 MW (Striker Bk 3, p 19, para. H).

The ranges are (ibid, p 19, para. I):
Effective = output x 2 = 62.5 x 2 = 125 km
Long = output x 4 = 62.5 x 4 = 250 km
Extreme = output x 20 = 62.5 x 20 = 1250 km.

EDIT: Perhaps I should point out that this is for interface and surface combat only. The ranges for space combat remain the same.

 

[aramis]

Is that what happened? Or was it simply that what they did publish was just too "meta" (vs "get the plans from the abandoned space station, and, oh, don't open the door to the lab -- just saying" adventures).

I don't know, but I can't really say that it died out, rather they usurped it with the House system and TNE. There was the transitionary module "Survival Margin" that acted as a bridge between the two, right? But how long was it between SM came out and the previous module came out? Meanwhile, Challenge was still going strong and had consistent Traveller content.

I just don't recall there being some long lull.

Traveller's Digest and MegaTraveller Journal were dedicated MT & 2300; Challenge wasn't really even a house organ, often having non-GDW games support, and many people playing Traveller didn't get it.

As for Survival Margin - it was a lot of Library Data, closing up the rebellion storyline in a very Deus Ex Machina manner. (Dulinor dying on Capital from a Virused Combine, for example)... Virus was intoduced but not mechanically defined. Mechanically, it merely provided conversions from MT to expected TNE compatible stats (Really, to TNE 2.2 and Dark Conspiracy stats). Generally, conversions have more skill levels than native TNE characters, but not enough more to be unbalancing. (TNE and DC give more skills per term than does TNE.)

About that time, DGP quit doing Traveller, and Challenge was the only support for some time. I seem to recall about 8 or 9 months. I know my local group of Traveller fans were generally put off by the setting; we tried it, I had a successful campaign... but was unfun for me. For those used to DGP's regularity, and who knew DGP did MT under work for hire as well as supplements under license, DGP shuttering its Traveller effort, plus GDW abandoning both rules and largely destroying the setting...

It felt to me like Traveller died the day Survival Margin was published.
It wasn't until T4 and T20 that I felt that the line was Traveller again. 2300 felt more Traveller to me than did TNE.

Mind, I started with CT. I liked CT. I liked it a lot.... but I loved MT. Survival Margin felt like a betrayal, and then Regency Sourcebook a further one.

 

[Hyphen]

Oh, and Pen is calculated as Output x [TL Multiplier from Laser Penetration Table] = [cm steel] ==> then look up Armor Ratings table.

Effective range (i.e. out to 125 km): 62.5 MW x 12 = 750 cm steel ==> AR 75
Long range (i.e. out to 250 km): 62.5 x 6 = 375 cm steel ==> AR 67
Extreme range (to 1250 km): 62.5 x 3 = 187.5 cm steel ==> AR 59

I've just looked up my Weapons Tables and they're correct for this weapon.

(Thank goodness, otherwise that would have been embarrassing. I mean, I used to know all this stuff when I was compiling my consolidated MT weapons tables together!!)

http://members.tip.net.au/~davidjw/tavspecs/maint/combat/hyp_wpn/stshpwpn.htm

 

[Blue Ghost]

I guess you mean this thread

Indeed, that is the very one.

 

[Vargas]

It felt to me like Traveller died the day Survival Margin was published.

I may get howls of protest for saying it but it started with Hard Times for me.

Aside from the switch to TNE, the Traveller content in Challenge just never hit the same high marks that I felt JTAS did. I might be looking through rose colored glasses but even in the early issues the number and quality of Traveller offerings seemed to fall off sharply.

 

[aramis]

I may get howls of protest for saying it but it started with Hard Times for me.

Aside from the switch to TNE, the Traveller content in Challenge just never hit the same high marks that I felt JTAS did. I might be looking through rose colored glasses but even in the early issues the number and quality of Traveller offerings seemed to fall off sharply.

For me, that's the point it went to hospice care... but I like HT...

 

[mike wightman]

I like Hard Times too, as I have said many times before.

They were grim, dark, grown up, but surprisingly my players always tried to do the right thing rather than just exploit the suffering of others.

We actually had hope that from Hard Times a new setting would emerge based on lots of subsector sized former polities expanding and exploring, re-contacting etc.

 

[Ahmad Romanov]

I like Hard Times too, as I have said many times before.

They were grim, dark, grown up, but surprisingly my players always tried to do the right thing rather than just exploit the suffering of others.

We actually had hope that from Hard Times a new setting would emerge based on lots of subsector sized former polities expanding and exploring, re-contacting etc.

And that was basically T4, Milieu 0, for me (albeit set long, long before the Hard Times and the Rebellion).

I accept the entire canon of Traveller, starting with T4 and going through TNE and wherever it goes next. MegaTraveller (the game as well as the setting) is my home though and that is where my Scout ship will always return. It's probably the smallest Traveller community out there (well, TNE might be smaller), but I'm ok with that too.

 

[RainOfSteel]

I despised the mountainous errata of MegaTraveller.

I really liked the task system.

 

[AtlanticFriend]

Aside from the switch to TNE, the Traveller content in Challenge just never hit the same high marks that I felt JTAS did. I might be looking through rose colored glasses but even in the early issues the number and quality of Traveller offerings seemed to fall off sharply.

Probably because I discovered Traveller through MT, and devoured Challenge Magazine for years before I realized there was such a thing as JTAS, I cannot agree there. Though I have been impressed by the quality of earlier Classic Traveller, I was really taken away by the Blue Eyes campaign, and by Challenge's TNS section which I read like a novel and never could get enough of (I always wondered if someone ever compiled ALL the TNS despatches, from Classic Traveller to The New Era - what great scenario nuggets that was!). But I'll readily admit I might be donning my own pair of rose-tinted glasses there myself.

My major bug with MT was (apart from not having enough players interested in trying it!) the hexadecimal universal profiles, and the feeling that sometimes the rules were indeed seeking to codify situations that to me would be best left to pure role-playing. My reluctant players felt the system where skills were rarely over 3 at creation left too much room to the dice result and kind of "levelled down" characters since they saw little difference between a novice, 0-skill character and its "elite", 3 or 4-skill counterpart. Dammit, if only I had known about Far Future's system at that time!

 

[GypsyComet]

About that time, DGP quit doing Traveller, and Challenge was the only support for some time.

Survival Margin felt like a betrayal, and then Regency Sourcebook a further one.

DGP ceased writing for Traveller when GDW told them they couldn't start another setting-destroying crisis that would, nonetheless, let them keep talking about what was lost instead of what was happening. DGP made a lot of material that was the equivalent of touching human-interest stories from three days before the nukes fell.

 

[infojunky]

Traveller's Digest and MegaTraveller Journal were dedicated MT & 2300; Challenge wasn't really even a house organ, often having non-GDW games support, and many people playing Traveller didn't get it.

Actually the early edition of Travellers Digest where all CT. Actually the best version of Book8 was in the first three issues of TD.

 

[Murph]

I just pulled mine out, and you are correct. Regency Sourcebook was awful, just bad. Survival Margin was also a betrayal of all the CT players. Plus MT took a simple easy to use starship design system, and made it something you should get 9 hours of College credit for. Plus why in the world would you have a TL 15 warship with M-2/3 drives instead of M-6 per TCS rules? The ship design system was completely broken, it was no longer fun to design ships, too much work. Sort of like learning to use VIM or EMACS in Linux. I prefer Nano.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Plus why in the world would you have a TL 15 warship with M-2/3 drives instead of M-6 per TCS rules?

Because you also needed room for armor and the power plant (though at TL-15, not nearly as much room for the latter...)

HG is supposed to be a 11-dimensional game of rock-paper-scissors with spreadsheets -- armor vs agility, mesons vs particle accelerators, etc. High TL enables avoiding some of those trade-offs. It may not have entirely worked out that way in practice, but that was the intent.

The LBB2 rules were similar, but for things desirable to player characters (jump range, payload capacity) and maneuver wasn't as critical to the combat system as it was in HG.

 

[mike wightman]

The fatal flaw of the MT design system is they got the power plants and their fuel requirements "wrong" by trying to base everything off Striker.
Rather than adjust scale efficiencies and fuel use rates they had to
scrap agility as it was in HG
reduce jump fuel in order to allow for pp fuel
make armour "weightless"

And as for the ship movement rules in MT - what a steaming pile of

 

[infojunky]

The fatal flaw of the MT design system is they got the power plants and their fuel requirements "wrong" by trying to base everything off Striker.
Rather than adjust scale efficiencies and fuel use rates

I am currently thinking that if one ditches the scale efficiency chart in striker and propagate it into MT things would look better.

 

[trb456]

I'm been following this thread and I may have a post of my own, but right now I have some questions. My background: bought CT in 1977 (my first RPG), and refereed both CT and MT through the mid-80s. I have been working on organizing my old notes, and have produced an errata-patched and enhanced version of MT for my own use (e.g. added Snapshot combat rules), so I have been very deep in the MT weeds for the last several months. With that, here are my questions/comments:

Introducing heavy Striker integration was a mistake absent a lot of explanantion, examples, and playtesting. That said, the actual errata-free implementation seems mostly fine to me after a lot of analysis of the rules.

@mike wightman: Several questions/comments:
1) MT basically modularizes jump drives, maneuver drives, and power plants to be additive. That seems mostly sound. It does result in lower jump fuel and higher power plant fuel, but this mostly cancels at a practical level. Also...
2) The solution to the higher fuel of power plants was eventually solved (too late, like a lot of MT), by realizing that much starship equipment isn't constantly running and doesn't need 24 hour fuel, So manuever drives are probably running 50% of the time (i.e. when not in jump), and weapons and screens MUCH less than this (maybe only a day of fuel is needed at a time). Yes, this is more complicated than High Guard, but by allocating power plants to sections (maneuver 50% usage, comms/sensors/bridge/accoms 100%, weapons/screens 3%), fuel can be managed.
3) When I re-read the HG Agility rules, I forgot they did not include craft tonnage. This seems like an obvious mistake: larger craft should have lower agility. MT is a better implementation.
4) Re. Armor, did you mean "volumeless" rather than "weightless"? Armor is the single biggest contributor to hull weight in MT. But I like Armor as an addition to the outside of the hull, adding weight but not volume.
5) Ship movement: Isn't MT movement a variation on Book 2 vector movement but with even more flexibility? What do you not like?

@infojunky: When you say "ditch scale efficiency", do you mean to replace it with something else? Because ditching it makes power plants worse in MT, which I assume is not the intent.

Thanks in advance for any consideration.

 

[infojunky]

@infojunky: When you say "ditch scale efficiency", do you mean to replace it with something else? Because ditching it makes power plants worse in MT, which I assume is not the intent.

Power. cost in MT are based off of 250mw per power point that was generated from Striker for a ship scale power plant including the scale efficiency chart.

The rest of the power silliness derives from that. Or in essence straight across the board power requirements need to be reduced by at least 66%. Even with that the amount of power a bunch of things use needs to be reduce further.

With just the reduction in Power and Power costs will dramatically drop the required fuel, in that fuel use is based on the per MW produced figure.

On a related note one should probably state somewhere in what the differences are in the electronic suites between Civilian and Military ships. As it stands there isn't any in the provided examples.