Vent-Rant MegaTraveller what I hate about it.
- Thread starter Murph
- Start date
I did spend an awful lot of time in college designing vehicles with Striker...but to me it was fun (one of the reasons I really like Traveller: there is so much solo stuff you can do. some of which can even be used in games
)Another thing I just realized, is that the Aslan, Vargr, Sword Worlds, are at most TL 11/12 as a general rule. That would be like having a pre-WWI pre-dreadnaught battleship squadron go against a current Aircraft Carrier battle Group. Guess who would lose before they even got into range? It would be the same thing, so the invasion even if they were TL 14 ships, and most Traveller Canon seems to show Imperial Navy as well as sector and subsector fleets are TL 15. Now granted if you have 100 pre-dreadnaughts vs 10 modern ships, the old ships would lose and would never get within range to shoot.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
Sure. In a standing fight the higher TL will generally win. The differences near the top are not so great that it's a guarantee though.
The Rebellion made sure that the frontiers didn't have as many standing fights, though. In order for the higher TL fleet to win, it has to be where the lower TL fleet is. Corridor's fleets were pulled by Lucan, as were Lishun's. The Reserve Fleets left behind are not TL15 (or not young and in full fettle), so the advantage lessens, assuming the big powers don't also steal all your personnel.
Adding to this is the fact that, behind the Claw at least, none of it was conventional warfare for conventional targets. The Vargr and Aslan weren't looking for capitals to silence, so a fleet designated to protect Regina, Rhylanor, or Trin isn't out swatting low tech flies who are busy looting or absorbing territory.
The Aslan attacking in Reavers Deep and Daibei are not ihatei flying leftovers; they're Tlaukhu assets at TL14. The Solomani in the same region are also TL14 designed specifically to face Imperials they've been watching for decades. The Vargr attacking Lishun are also not backcountry types, and the Vargr are quite capable of TL15 when they want to be.
All that said, the Rebellion as a setting did leave much to be desired.
The Rebellion made sure that the frontiers didn't have as many standing fights, though. In order for the higher TL fleet to win, it has to be where the lower TL fleet is. Corridor's fleets were pulled by Lucan, as were Lishun's. The Reserve Fleets left behind are not TL15 (or not young and in full fettle), so the advantage lessens, assuming the big powers don't also steal all your personnel.
Adding to this is the fact that, behind the Claw at least, none of it was conventional warfare for conventional targets. The Vargr and Aslan weren't looking for capitals to silence, so a fleet designated to protect Regina, Rhylanor, or Trin isn't out swatting low tech flies who are busy looting or absorbing territory.
The Aslan attacking in Reavers Deep and Daibei are not ihatei flying leftovers; they're Tlaukhu assets at TL14. The Solomani in the same region are also TL14 designed specifically to face Imperials they've been watching for decades. The Vargr attacking Lishun are also not backcountry types, and the Vargr are quite capable of TL15 when they want to be.
All that said, the Rebellion as a setting did leave much to be desired.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
The Confederation is likely upgrading equipment to technological level fifteen by whatever time the Rebellion takes place, and probably has been building key starwarships, battleriders, and fightercraft to that standard for some time.
I could just never get over the feeling of a lost rudder, no one really having any vision of where it should go, and Deus Ex Machinas being used to force the players into a realm not many really wanted to go. There was a feeling that even if it was XYZ today, tomorrow they would change it to ABC, and the day after to PQR so that you could never be sure where it was heading. CT at least had consistency.
It is almost like someone said "Hey I have a great idea" and everyone said, "Wow neat let's do it" and then once they blew up the universe, they had no clue where to go, and it just degenerated into dark, dark, darker and no one knew how to rescue it. I hear; "Hey! Let's try this and see if it works! Oh Nuts! Nope, let's try this! Nope, ok, here is something else we can try!"
It is almost like someone said "Hey I have a great idea" and everyone said, "Wow neat let's do it" and then once they blew up the universe, they had no clue where to go, and it just degenerated into dark, dark, darker and no one knew how to rescue it. I hear; "Hey! Let's try this and see if it works! Oh Nuts! Nope, let's try this! Nope, ok, here is something else we can try!"
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
How to have fixed MT if there had been the interwebs back then so we could have contributed.
1 - only one character generation method - either expanded for all careers or just stick with the basic careers plus special duty, decorations could be tied to the result of survival and special duty rolls.
2 - no task library - emphasis should be placed on only rolling the dice when absolutely necessary and the majority of "tasks" should be made up on the spot.
3 - ship construction - get someone who knows what they are doing - keep jump fuel at 10% per jump number, adjust pp output with an additional scale factor - armour should reduce available hull volume
4 - ship combat - get someone who knows what they are doing - base PC scale ship combat on vector or range band using damage from the PG (some adjustments will be needed) - for big ships use a modified USP based system
5 - start the campaign in 1116 either with the Lt Windhook scenario or a PC group comes to the aid of a naval courier carrying very important information
1 - only one character generation method - either expanded for all careers or just stick with the basic careers plus special duty, decorations could be tied to the result of survival and special duty rolls.
2 - no task library - emphasis should be placed on only rolling the dice when absolutely necessary and the majority of "tasks" should be made up on the spot.
3 - ship construction - get someone who knows what they are doing - keep jump fuel at 10% per jump number, adjust pp output with an additional scale factor - armour should reduce available hull volume
4 - ship combat - get someone who knows what they are doing - base PC scale ship combat on vector or range band using damage from the PG (some adjustments will be needed) - for big ships use a modified USP based system
5 - start the campaign in 1116 either with the Lt Windhook scenario or a PC group comes to the aid of a naval courier carrying very important information
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
They would have only needed to do the extended Other career (fast becoming my favourite) to have extended versions of the basic 6 - supplements could have handled the CotI careers.
See I like the treatment of Basic character creation with the special duty rolls.
My problem is with the over specialization of skills, but I am a fewer broader skills school. Actually that isn't totally true with the edition of characteristic DMs a broader selection of skills acquired at Zero level makes more sense.
I rather like a simple house-rule that I believe ATPollard introduced here on CotI (I can't find the post) for Advanced CharGen that lets you take advantage of all of the additional detail of that system without generating characters with skill-levels that break the 2D6 bell curve during task resolution checks:
- Generate characters as normal using the Advanced CharGen system;
- During a 4-year term, simply tally off to the side what skills were actually rolled (per roll) during CharGen for that term;
- After CharGen is complete for the term, look at what was rolled for skills for the entire term:
- Pick 2 rolls as skill+1 to add to what you already have;
- The rest are all specified 0-level skill familiarizations for your character (and they do not add anything if you already have it noted)
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That’s a pretty good one.
Mine for CT is basic three skills plus commish/promo skills per term, first skill level is zero. Career/rank skills remain skill-1.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
They were a layer over Striker in many specifics. While that certainly had effects that were less than desirable the basics were strong enough to have worked properly. The problem was that they presented that pile of tables with very little context and substandard guidance.
The product line's fits and starts, and its announced failures, make it clear this was the case. A pattern emerged of DGP lacking the internal talent to write war stories, and them discovering that very little of the potential outside writer base could either. Entire fronts of the Rebellion went neglected after launch. The denouement of the Ihatei "invasion" of the Marches was written on the TML of all places, and the Vargr activities behind the Claw stopped with Nail Mission, essentially. Knightfall spent 80% of the book ignoring the war. Black Duke never appeared. The enormous Onnesium Quest, of which only one book of three was written, gave a bit of lip service to the war zones but otherwise ignored the basic nature of the period. It took Chuck Gannon, Dave Nilsen, and the return of control to GDW to get any more war stories out of an era of war. We barely have a decent timeline of some major engagements on some fronts.
And to me, Striker was utterly unusable unless you wanted to spend all your time doing vehicle minutia, and were interested in where the turbo-flush went on the grav tank. I just faked it with the High Guard rules, where a Grav Tank was 20-30 tons, and used the ship design rules for the most part. It was quick and very dirty, but my players were bored with math, math, charts, and more math. They wanted to get on with the story, not do how many punched cards does it take to run that program and how to build an F-15 from scratch. I know some loved it, but we were not and never were gearheads.
DGP made some amazing products, possibly among the very best of the Traveller products (along with FASA and Gamelords) which made me sad when they could not make things coherent. Personally the Keith brothers written FASA and Gamelords stuff, almost read like a novel. They were the Gold Standard.
DGP made some amazing products, possibly among the very best of the Traveller products (along with FASA and Gamelords) which made me sad when they could not make things coherent. Personally the Keith brothers written FASA and Gamelords stuff, almost read like a novel. They were the Gold Standard.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
And yet Striker worked for what it was because it recognized itself as a technical manual. The MT craft design chapter tried to NOT be a technical manual and failed, but deleted 75% of the instructions anyway.
It sounds like you would have appreciated the pre-Striker vehicle design system that appeared in Space Gamer. Only slightly more complex than High Guard.
DGP did an admirable job of updating the look of Traveller, recognizing that the industry (that wasn't TSR) needed to leave the sparse and spare 70s look behind. They covered their weaknesses by exploiting their strengths, and we all loved it. In retrospect, however, they did their edition a disservice or two.
It sounds like you would have appreciated the pre-Striker vehicle design system that appeared in Space Gamer. Only slightly more complex than High Guard.
DGP did an admirable job of updating the look of Traveller, recognizing that the industry (that wasn't TSR) needed to leave the sparse and spare 70s look behind. They covered their weaknesses by exploiting their strengths, and we all loved it. In retrospect, however, they did their edition a disservice or two.
Weirdly though the best design sequence DGP ever wrote was their 1st draft of Book8 robots, which they released in the first three issues of Travelers Digest.
Not knowing Striker in depth, at least it gave vehicle rules, as for CT has no good rules for them...
