Originally posted by Bill Cameron:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Bob Weaver:
Please forgive the question, I don't mean to start any arguements, I'm just curious as to others' perspective; to wit, what was so bad about the COACC book?
Mr. Weaver,
While I liked the idea of COACC, I just never had a reason to use it. There were some other problems with it too.
- As you and others mentioned, it followed a more 'Striker-ish' design sequence. Nothing wrong with that; I love Striker, but MT didn't design anything the way Striker did. So, in MT you designed steamships, air/rafts, starships, and nearly everything else one way and you designed aircraft in a totally different way. COACC didn't fit the rules set it was supposedly written for.
Bill </font>[/QUOTE]This is an interesting assertion, given that MT incorporated the Striker take on much of what it addressed. The MT vehicular weapons tables are directly reproducible using Striker, the powerplant assumptions are from Striker (which is what led to the reduction in Jump fuel in MT, to make room for all those standard ship design choices), the armor definitions are Striker-based, and sensors, commo, and most of the rest of the fiddly bits of vehicular design were lifted from Strike whole. Starship combat went back to HG, and did so badly, mind you.
All in all, the heavy adaption of Striker assumptions was what made MT starships the absolute mess they were. The reason all the example designs were at TL15 was because that was the only TL they worked at, given the Striker assumptions.
The TL extensions of MT were also what made the Darrian TL16 fleet the "paper tiger" it was later described to be, instead of the real tiger it would have been in the TL15-poor Marches had it been much larger. MT made it plain that TL"16" was really the top end of TL15, and that TL17 was the next actual step.
In general DGP made a mess of the Traveller universe. What allows DGP to keep it's reputation intact is that it was a "shiny" mess at all times. Very good production values, generally good writing, and some of the best artists in RPGs at the time successfully hid the TL problem (born from the Striker assumptions), hideous editing issues (it was called MegaErrata for good reason), and a metaplot that was heading to several disparate nowheres ("baddies from the Core"? Yecch!) simultaneously.
That said, much of this was only evident in retrospect, and I do not regret purchasing any MT product except Shattered Ships.
T4, on the other hand, was a long list of regrets built on noble goals sacrificed on the altar of cash & expedience. I do not blame Courtney Solomon (he of the D&D movie, and owner of Sweetpea Productions, who bought Imperium Games) for T4s failure, I blame Ken Whitman (Gaming's very own snake-oil salesman) for dragging Marc and the Traveller fandom along for the ride, then selling it off to Mr. Solomon and running for cover. I do not regret *all* of my T4 purchases, but I do regret most of them.
well then.
On the plus side, The Traveller Adventure (CT) stands as one of the best RPG supplement/adventures ever done. Period. It sits in the same class as Midkemia Press' "Cities" (later Chaosium's "Runequest Cities"), and Hero Games' "Lands of Mystery", as *real* groundbreaking products of their day.
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