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Old 06-15-2020, 10:53 AM   #16
Fred Brackin
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Default Re: Tech books are cumulative

Quote:
Originally Posted by Stormcrow View Post
To put it yet another way: If someone told you they were interested in running a game set in World War II and wanted recommendations on which books to get for equipment rules, would you recommend just High-Tech or both High-Tech and Low-Tech? And you're not recommending something just because it would be nice to have it. It would be because you thought they needed it to accomplish their goal.
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In your specific example I do not believe you need LT to run a WWII game. Items found in LT but not HT or Basic are few beyond some relatively exotic weapons.

You're also right in the middle of modern industrial warfare. Pretty much all the stuff you need is going to be mass produced in huge quantiies in distant locations and shiped to where you are, also in very large quantities. Sometimes it's going to fall out of the sky as if you were part of a cargo cult.

I can imagine a WWII game where you sort of needed LT but it would be on the margins of the genre. Maybe you're stuck behind the lines in the Phillipines are are cut off from TL6 civilization. You still might spend more time stealing what you needed fro the Japanese or scavenging it from tL5 scrapyards than going back to the Stone age.

People at TL5-8 use _categories_ of things that were invented at TLs 1-4 but specific items are normally highly updated and mass produced as well. No, you don't ned LT as a genral thing for higher tL games.
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Fred Brackin
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