Vent-Rant MegaTraveller what I hate about it.

[Grav_Moped]

The whole Empress Wave, destroy the universe so we can play Aftermath/Morrow Project was really bad IMHO. You could have a great, and I mean great campaign in the Far Frontiers, or Reavers Deep sectors they were wonderful.

Said it before, will undoubtedly say it again: they didn't need to break it, all they needed to do was set new campaign material in earlier eras and other regions that had the tech and development situation that they wanted for the game.

Problem was that they were also players, and were thinking about what needed to happen to change their then-current campaign setting into what they wanted it to become, rather than thinking about times and places in the 5000-year fictional history that they'd so painstakingly constructed* that would suit their needs.

----------------
*ok, "accumulated in an ad-hoc fashion" probably better describes the process. But still, it was there!

 

[Spinward Flow]

Trick question.

Describe the difference between the Long Night and the Empress Wave, in terms of effects upon interstellar society?

The Long Night was the (natural) result of an inevitable collapse of the Rule of Man/Ramshackle Empire, which resulted in over 1700 years of retreat/die back across regions of space controlled by humaniti.

The Empress Wave was the (entirely unnatural) fabrication of authors who didn't want to continue writing for the setting AS WAS ... so the "tide came in and swept everything away out to sea" with it. Of course, the Empress Wave ALONE "wasn't enough" for that purpose, so the people in control of the franchise ALSO had to launch the Virus (with mystical pseudo-psionic plot armor thrown in for good measure!) in order to REALLY drive home the collapse and ruin of the Golden Era OTU, because if you're going to utterly WRECK an entire setting, you'd better do it "properly" ... eh wot?

they didn't need to break it, all they needed to do was set new campaign material in earlier eras and other regions that had the tech and development situation that they wanted for the game.

Simplest thing to do would have been to shift the narrative focus into the Long Night era, where civilization was in retreat/collapse because the Rule of Man "died of natural causes" (in other words, parochial squabbling). Would have been MUCH more effective (and interesting!) to develop that era of the OTU in more detail.

 

[mike wightman]

We don't know what the Empress Wave really was. Nor did it flatten the setting, it was to be a future event in the TNE timeline.

The Empress Wave had no affect on MT, (it was never introduced as an idea until they had been working on TNE for a while) it had little to no affect of TNE other than causing the Zhodani (partial) exodus.

We have third party retcons galore but we have never been told what it really was or what it would lead to post the war with Lucan's Imperium.

The Imperium fell from the moment Strephon was assassinated to the apocalyptic end heralded by Hard Times. Virus wasn't even needed, the Empire had been shattered.

Virus was introduced as a mechanism to ensure the Solomani didn't just sweep in and retake whole swathes of the Imperium, Vargr raiders and the Juulian Protectorate expand into Imperial space etc.

I hope Mongoose just waves a magic wand and retcons the wave out of existence, rather that than the retcon Don introduced and Marc appears to have got on board with. or better yet, pick up the phone to Frank Chadwick and Dave Nilsen and find out what the original plan was if there was any.

Back you your trick question.

The long night was a historical event in the setting, the empress wave was a planned future event for TNE (it has nothing to do with the fall of the Third Imperium).

I think it was Frank who once stated he wished that Classic Traveller had been set during the Long Night...

 

[mike wightman]

If MT is ever resurrected by Mongoose, or at least the Rebellion setting, here is how i think they should do it.

Have a series of adventures that take the PCs to core sector post FFW. Have a book all about Capital, the Imperial court and the Moot - concentrate on the Moot and its shennanigans.

1. The PCs learn about the assassination plot - which side do they take? Note it could all be over right here if they prevent the assassination.
2. The PCs are involved in the assassination plot - as above
3. The PCs are totally unaware of the plot until it is too late and must now navigate the events as they unfold
4. The PCs are involved in the plot to assassinate Lucan and Varian
5. The PCs learn of Varian's murder and encouter Lt Windhook
6. The PCs escape the lunacy and encounter Lt Windhook along the way.

If all else fails have the PCs come to the aid of an Imperial courier from whom they learn the news and is being hunted by assassins /bounty hunters/spooks who do not want their information public knowledge.

TL|DR - involve the PCs from day 0 (better yet involve them in that days leading up to it) rather than 5 years of grand fleets, grand armies, even grander fleets and then... it's 1121 what do you want to do.

 

[Rupert]

We don't know what the Empress Wave really was. Nor did it flatten the setting, it was to be a future event in the TNE timeline.

The Empress Wave had no affect on MT, (it was never introduced as an idea until they had been working on TNE for a while) it had little to no affect of TNE other than causing the Zhodani (partial) exodus.

We have third party retcons galore but we have never been told what it really was or what it would lead to post the war with Lucan's Imperium.

The Imperium fell from the moment Strephon was assassinated to the apocalyptic end heralded by Hard Times. Virus wasn't even needed, the Empire had been shattered.

Virus was introduced as a mechanism to ensure the Solomani didn't just sweep in and retake whole swathes of the Imperium, Vargr raiders and the Juulian Protectorate expand into Imperial space etc.

It was also introduced to wipe away all the warring factions, thus ensuring that all faction fans were equally unhappy, because Dave Nilsen (line manager at the time) felt that to have any of them survive or 'win' would be to in some way to validate all the killing and dying. So they all lost (Regency excepted, and it had avoided all the fighting).

I hope Mongoose just waves a magic wand and retcons the wave out of existence, rather that than the retcon Don introduced and Marc appears to have got on board with. or better yet, pick up the phone to Frank Chadwick and Dave Nilsen and find out what the original plan was if there was any.

There was one, at least vaguely.

Back you your trick question.

The long night was a historical event in the setting, the empress wave was a planned future event for TNE (it has nothing to do with the fall of the Third Imperium).

I think it was Frank who once stated he wished that Classic Traveller had been set during the Long Night...

I wouldn't have been happy if TNE had been moved to the Long Night, leaving the MT arc hanging. The long night is all very well, but it caps out at TL12, which is great for some game, but not for all. A collapse from TL15 makes for much more interesting (for greedy, power-mad PCs and players) loot and tech toys. What's more, the New Era setting lets you play a TL9-12 game if you want.

I liked most of MT. The standard chargen was good, the task system was good, the combat system was good. That's most of what players will be interacting with right there.

What I didn't like was the extended chargen - that should've either been fully universalised or taken out the back and shot. It was extremely abusable and characters made with it were often stupidly better than those made with the normal system.

The design system was... not good. Needing TL15 to make way too many normal ships function, etc.

Then there was the travesty that was FSotSI.

The choice of the Merchant Prince system for cargo trading wasn't the right one - it took what flavour there was out of trading (and TNE retained it, when in the New Era trading should've been made far more random and quirky).

I think TNE is a better system, and that its authors had a better idea behind how to manage an advancing timeline than MT showed, but to me MT is the high point of the CT-family of Traveller rules (MgT, either edition, is not an improvement).

 

[mike wightman]

Frank did not intend TNE to be a game set in a long night. My comment was his interview answer that if he were to write a setting for CT over again he would not have picked the 1105 beginning of the end of the Third Imperium but rather have used the long night following the collapse of the Ziru Sirka.

 

[Spinward Flow]

The long night is all very well, but it caps out at TL12, which is great for some game, but not for all.

TL=15 "everything" is an incredibly bad CRUTCH to lean upon for a game setting.
Yes, it makes a lot of things "easier" but it also makes enough things "trivial" that it's often times going to be counter-productive in the long run when it comes to making a campaign enjoyable for Players and Referees.

Lower tech levels (particularly TL=9-12) forces Players to be a lot more "scrappy" and resourceful with their thinking and their attitudes about the game, which in turn makes the experience much more rewarding. You get more of a "frontier" feeling for things at those tech levels, which helps a LOT with immersion. Stuff is still "high tech" (relative to reality), but it isn't so futuristic as to become Technomancy.

 

[aramis]

And yet still wrong. The main reason the TL to current earth year is pointless is the rate of progress since WW1.

[snip]

If you want an updated TL table, play Mongoose. (I don't know just how much it's been tweaked.)
Or Rewrite the table for your game.

for better or worse, CT, MT, and TNE hold to a tech paradigm that advancement slows way down after practical fusion... it's a game artifice to avoid the "If you ain't the first, it's all taken" axiom, and the "We ignore you like alien beasts until you present a wide threat, then we eliminate your species to the man" as presented in The Orville in the Kaylon War arc.
Nicely matched foes are, to be blunt unlikely. the TL A-F tech in all editions is intentionally slow change.

A few things got intentionally stopped in progress by Marc et al... Gravitics never "cheapens out" to prevent the commonplaceness of Gravitics, and so when a GM places it, it's got to be a society that really wants to fly.
Fusion hits some special technique (I have always assumed gravitic based compression into a magnetic well as the mechanism for fusion fusion for TL9+ drives), until TNE put nerfings that make the gravitic/magnetic hybrids I'd described well out of reasonable levels of gravitic force for the canonical OTU.

 

[aramis]

Trick question.

Describe the difference between the Long Night and the Empress Wave, in terms of effects upon interstellar society?

The Long Night was the (natural) result of an inevitable collapse of the Rule of Man/Ramshackle Empire, which resulted in over 1700 years of retreat/die back across regions of space controlled by humaniti.

The Empress Wave was the (entirely unnatural) fabrication of authors who didn't want to continue writing for the setting AS WAS ... so the "tide came in and swept everything away out to sea" with it. Of course, the Empress Wave ALONE "wasn't enough" for that purpose, so the people in control of the franchise ALSO had to launch the Virus (with mystical pseudo-psionic plot armor thrown in for good measure!) in order to REALLY drive home the collapse and ruin of the Golden Era OTU, because if you're going to utterly WRECK an entire setting, you'd better do it "properly" ... eh wot?

Simplest thing to do would have been to shift the narrative focus into the Long Night era, where civilization was in retreat/collapse because the Rule of Man "died of natural causes" (in other words, parochial squabbling). Would have been MUCH more effective (and interesting!) to develop that era of the OTU in more detail.

Virus came first.

 

[Tobias]

Not really. I am a CLASSIC TRAVELLER fan, so I just mine MT for things I can port back into STRIKER or BOOK 5.
I already posted somewhere a whole TOPIC dedicated to Traveller TLs and my "Group of three" progression, so HERE is not the place for that.

Technically, they are CT, since they were directly (AFAIK) pulled from Grand Census. ;-)

 

[mike wightman]

If you want an updated TL table, play Mongoose. (I don't know just how much it's been tweaked.)
Or Rewrite the table for your game.

The MT TL table was updated from CT, they didn't just add more things, they moved stuff on the scale. So if they can do it in the mid 80s to refelct changes since 77 (the disappearance of a huge computer being noticeable).

I quite happily use MgT stuff these days, it has improved a lot. And now they own Traveller their universe is the OTU.

I have pencil all over my old copy of LBB:3, but this is a thread about what you dislike about MT.

I dislike their TL scale.

for better or worse, CT, MT, and TNE hold to a tech paradigm that advancement slows way down after practical fusion... it's a game artifice to avoid the "If you ain't the first, it's all taken" axiom, and the "We ignore you like alien beasts until you present a wide threat, then we eliminate your species to the man" as presented in The Orville in the Kaylon War arc.
Nicely matched foes are, to be blunt unlikely. the TL A-F tech in all editions is intentionally slow change.

A few things got intentionally stopped in progress by Marc et al... Gravitics never "cheapens out" to prevent the commonplaceness of Gravitics, and so when a GM places it, it's got to be a society that really wants to fly.
Fusion hits some special technique (I have always assumed gravitic based compression into a magnetic well as the mechanism for fusion fusion for TL9+ drives), until TNE put nerfings that make the gravitic/magnetic hybrids I'd described well out of reasonable levels of gravitic force for the canonical OTU.

I'm not a fan of grav focusing either.

 

[Murph]

The older I get, and the more I look at it, TNE should have been placed in the Terran/Vilani wars/Ramshackle Empire era, I have discovered that TL 9-12 worlds are a LOT of fun to play. And it would have prevented the sillies which occurred that are so hard to swallow.

 

[kilemall]

If you want an updated TL table, play Mongoose. (I don't know just how much it's been tweaked.)
Or Rewrite the table for your game.

for better or worse, CT, MT, and TNE hold to a tech paradigm that advancement slows way down after practical fusion... it's a game artifice to avoid the "If you ain't the first, it's all taken" axiom, and the "We ignore you like alien beasts until you present a wide threat, then we eliminate your species to the man" as presented in The Orville in the Kaylon War arc.
Nicely matched foes are, to be blunt unlikely. the TL A-F tech in all editions is intentionally slow change.

A few things got intentionally stopped in progress by Marc et al... Gravitics never "cheapens out" to prevent the commonplaceness of Gravitics, and so when a GM places it, it's got to be a society that really wants to fly.
Fusion hits some special technique (I have always assumed gravitic based compression into a magnetic well as the mechanism for fusion fusion for TL9+ drives), until TNE put nerfings that make the gravitic/magnetic hybrids I'd described well out of reasonable levels of gravitic force for the canonical OTU.

Muon catalyzed fusion could be a cheaper/smaller upgrade.

 

[mike wightman]

Where do you get the muons from?

 

[kilemall]

Where do you get the muons from?

That’s the high tech part, along the same lines as nuclear dampers.

Speaking of which, that might be another iteration of improvements, nuclear damper tech repurposed to facilitate fusion.

Alternatively, muonium. I’d go alloy that emits muons when hit by neutrons or some such.

 

[aramis]

That’s the high tech part, along the same lines as nuclear dampers.

Speaking of which, that might be another iteration of improvements, nuclear damper tech repurposed to facilitate fusion.

Alternatively, muonium. I’d go alloy that emits muons when hit by neutrons or some such.

Dampers + gravitics, IMTU.

 

[infojunky]

The older I get, and the more I look at it, TNE should have been placed in the Terran/Vilani wars/Ramshackle Empire era, I have discovered that TL 9-12 worlds are a LOT of fun to play. And it would have prevented the sillies which occurred that are so hard to swallow.

To be clear, TNE is closer to my games than MT ever was. Though I must state that I started with the '79 edition and a stack of SF and Pulp Novels.

 

[atpollard]

To be clear, TNE is closer to my games than MT ever was. Though I must state that I started with the '79 edition and a stack of SF and Pulp Novels.

"Vampire Fleets and Uber-Viruses" or "Hard Science and Pocket Empires"?

 

[kilemall]

Dampers + gravitics, IMTU.

Sure, along with He3 aneutronic fusion options making for less shielding/smaller plants but expensive fuel at least initially. Anything aneutronic is what should be in vehicles.

I became enamored of the muon type as it seems like just the thing for the massive power spike/fuel use implied in the jump drive. So perhaps the next power plant level after jump is invented is that type.

 

[whartung]

"Vampire Fleets and Uber-Viruses" or "Hard Science and Pocket Empires"?

Hard Viruses and Pocket Vampires.