saundby
SOC-14 1K
Actually, I don't even believe that a particular rules set is closed, or that there is a contract that I accept or abide by those rules. Which is why I can like MGT and enjoy it.
I don't have to have my sensibilities of what is right and wrong with the game offended by the inclusion of foolish weapons or bad stats in a rule book. I just see it, laugh, and move on for something I can use in my game. (Though I might decide to provide such equipment for an appropriate group of NPCs in-game, for a laugh. Nobody ever said something had to be practical to get used.)
Naturally if the signal to noise ratio drops =too= low, I'll have less interest in buying future books. As it is, I feel that Traveller delivers a greater value than any other rules system with current releases, in spite of its misses.
But RPGs aren't poker. The "rules" aren't the sort of rules we're talking about with other games. They're guidelines. In fact, I feel that RPG rules written to allow flexibility are of far greater value than those written with the sense that it all comes as a package.
The Traveller rules, since the very beginning, have been one of the best, possibly even the best, sets of rules for taking pieces out and putting your own pieces in.
I really, really like the addition of new milieux for Traveller that we're getting from Mongoose. This is more toys for the toybox, more tools for building scenarios and campaigns. Want a new secret tech to give a crackpot scientist? Pick up a supplement outside your current setting and there it is! Want to have different civilizations clashing? Give each one the tech from different backgrounds. Heck, read a few physics papers and put them in colliding universes with different vacuum pressures and use that to make it so that half the tech from each universe won't work in the other, though the mundane "Newtonian" and chemistry laws remain the same!
Traveller is the "Swiss Army Knife" of rulesets, IMO, including both CT and the current Traveller rules (not mentioning the others only because I'm not yet familiar enough with them to comment.) The ease with which a wide range of times and technologies can be incorporated is incredible. The power of the core rules in both CT and Mongoose's Traveller is likewise incredible, even more so when coupled with their simplicity. I can state from my own experience that simplicity is never the easiest or most obvious result of design.
Another reason I like MGT--my prized old boxed set of LBBs 1-3 will last a lot longer now. I've been dreading the day when a 2-liter soda bottle finally makes a successful combat roll against them, but now they get to live in a safe place, where I can refer to them on a regular basis but not expose them to the dangers of roleplayers.
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