Is GURPS Traveller the best Version?

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by Tom H.

I was interested to hear that.

I feel this way about the background of Warhammer and 40K, but it is so popular. I have a good friend and a nephew who really like it. I am surprised that such a setting would be so effective in role playing and also novels (though I've never read them.)

Do you have more thoughts on the style of background you mentioned? How does it diminish your experience?

Yeah. Let's see if I can articulate it. Hmmm.

Okay, Warhammer 40K setting is dark - but it is also a bit tongue in cheek and it is very colorful. Combat is full of weird weapons, different units with their own exotic heraldries and personalities, hero-like or villain-like characters. It is also very personable. Numerous novels give you a sense of how an inquisitor or space marine or chaos marine or whatever acts in their over-the-top ways. The setting is cartoonish but also fairly deep and it has always been focused on cheerfully brutal slaughter - that's the way it is.

Megatraveller took a setting that had limited war (mercenary operations, for instance) but also focus on trading, exploration, crime etc. and replaced it with one where war was the main focus. Moreover, the war was not a war of human vs. alien (mainly) but rather a grinding civil war in which there were (at least not until near the end) no real good guys. It was a war closer to world war one (in its start and essential pointlessness) or the thirty years war (or the last war in Syria) - an interneciine conflict largely fought for political power which escalated out of control in slaughter of countless billions, fought largely by factions which had very little identity or personality of their own. It was a war so big that the characters mattered little, and a war, like world war one, that was basically a bloody meat grinder. (Worse, perhaps: at least WWI, from an "interest" perspective introduced the airplane and the sort-of "knights of the air" heroics of the Red Baron and the like, as well the terrible but interesting new weapons of machine guns, early tanks, and poison gas. The megatraveller war largely lacked that sort of innovation)

Now, the Imperium is a good setting and even when you wreck it and focus on one element you can still tell interesting stories. MegaTraveller lasted a while, the people involved were talented, and a fair number of decent scenarios and sourcebooks appeared in the period. But for me at least the Megatraveller war scenario was less interesting that previous Traveller war scenarios (like Fifth Frontier War, for instance) which both had some flavor (radically different ideologies - Zhodani/Vargr vs. Imperial Human, psionics vs. non-psionic, equipment mixes and goals), a clear agressor, and the fact that the war only took part in some parts of the imperium so you could ignore it. In MegaTraveller the war, while not necessarily everywhere and ignorable if you really wanted to ignore it, was still omnipressent in the background.

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by ak_aramis

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Mr. Pulver's experience with CT combat is not universal. I found no issues using Bk4 weapons... other than that they are appropriately deadly.

I had systemic issues with Bk1/Bk4/Snapshot combat overall - same issues I have with D&D/AD&D combat - armor as to-hit modifier, rather than damage reduction. The bigger damage weapons in Bk4 make that more visible. But within that framework,

I also have always been a fan of consistent task systems across all uses - starting with my first exposure being T2K 1E (albeit, only 3 difficulties), then 2300... at which point, CT lost it's charm. The setting, however... I used MT to run CT setting.

MegaTraveller's use of a consistent task resolution system was certainly good. It was perhaps a bit over-detailed but it was well explained and a nice change from the confusion of CT's task resolution. If you had all the errata the combat system in MegaTraveller worked reasonably well.

My problem with the CT system was that it didn't work for me. Consider:

(a) Combat was simultaneous - both sides fired at once if no one had surprise.

(b) A completely average character - say, a typical regular soldier, or a PC who had some weapons training - has skill 1 and not characteristic bonus.

(c) Assume each side is armed with the standard TL 12 weapon, a gauss rifle. Effective, but three levels below the Imperium's maximum TL. The standard rifle of the imperial army or the zhodani regulars - no fancy Imperial Marine or jump commando plasma/fusion guns here, just a standard service rifle of that TL. Give them better-than-average armor -- TL 11 combat armor, the best non-powered armor.

(d) Assume two opposing units (a small squad or team of a 3-4 men each) blunder into each other while on patrol at long range (say, 200 meters (long range). Each side fires simultaneously and use full auto firing 10-round bursts (giving them three rolls to hit each).

So: You need an 8+ to hit on 2d6. The modifiers are: +1 (average skill 1), +5 (gauss rifle on full auto at long range), +0 (foe in combat armor, the best armor possible at TL11-12; if it's battledress, it's the same). No DEX modifier as they have average DEX. Total modifier is +6 on 2d6 and so they can't miss: even a roll of 2 is modified up to 8!

Result? Despite being at long range, each character hits his opposite number three times. 4d6 damage from a gauss rifle with 3 hits averages 42 hits, more than enough to reduce STR, END, and DEX to 0. Even if the damage dice rolls are bad, 95% of the time you'll reduce at least one characteristic to 0 and knock them out. (Moreover if they are grouped together you'll get additional secondary hits (group hits from auto fire).

Suppose each side was in cover? That's missing in some editions but if you have the right one it's a -4 to hit reducing your modified roll to +2. Which means any die roll of 6+ on 2d6 hits. Since you get three attacks, the odds of rolling a 6+ are on 2d6 with three dice are very, very good. Almost certainly you'll hit at least once, and on average, that one hit is more than twice the damage you need to reduce two of the soldier's stats to zero, leaving him seriously injured. You'll more likely hit him twice or three times, killing him. There's a small chance he might be knocked out. If you're lucky and four men fire on four men, maybe one or two person will be KOed instead of dead or dying. And that's at a few hundred meters away against targets using hard cover!

Of course, this is the gauss rifle against the _best possible_ armor. If the target is in vacc suit, ballistic cloth, combat environment suit or any lesser armor than having spent $20,000 on a full suit of heavy combat armor, he's nearly automatically hit even if he's at long range and in cover, as there's another +3 bonus to hit on top of things. In fact, even at very long range he's probably toast.

Now, remember all fire is simultaneous! So, what happens between our best-protected, completely average shooters firing at 200 meters away against foes in cover? Right, they utterly slaughter each other, simultaneously. Or, one side gets the drop on the other and a free surprise round and since their attacks can't miss, they kill the enemy.

This is "gauss rifles vs. combat armor" (the equivalent TL11-12 weapons and armor mix). But the same effect occurs if you use "advanced combat rifle" (e.g., ALIENS pulse rifle) vs. "combat environment suit or cloth armor" (the standard TL10 gear). It's also similar if you use either gauss rifle or plasma/fusion guns against battle dress at TL12-15.

If you're at short or medium range (under 100m) the slaughter is worse. You have to be at least 500 meters away and in full cover, or charging into grappling range in close combat, for any chance of survival, and even then the odds strongly favor getting hit.

Now, the rules more or less work okay if you restrict yourself to TL7-8 weapons and e.g., semi-automatic rifles, submachine guns, shotguns, etc. If you're a bunch of Book 1 characters who despite only a MCr 30 starship that routinely pulls in a few hundred thousand bucks every port stop and you have somehow never found a law Level 1-3, TL10+ world and somehow forgot to upgraded your ship locker with the ultra-tech equivalent of an AR 15, you may find the combat is balanced. This is, indeed, what almost every Traveller published adventure recommended: a bunch of guys in mesh or kevlar jackets armed with shotguns and pistols. But if your party of player characters upgrade to the snub pistols, gauss rifles, and whatever, to say nothing of FGMPs or battledress, they will kill anything in line of sight and if you retalatiate with similar gear above the level of 1970s-style firearms you will kill them.

I am not speaking theoretically here. First Traveller campaign I ever ran, after plenty of GM prep, the party gets into a fire fight. PCs have some advantages, better skills - and still on round one everyone on both sides were dead or knocked out. Adding to the monty-python quality the one PC and one enemy NPC who managed to be merely KOed both were, according to the rules, able to wake up 10 minuts or so later. They resumedl the fight and shot each other dead. End of campaign.

The second campaign was less of a farce as I carefully stacked the combat in the party's favor, made sure the adversaries have poor weapons and so on and encouraged the party to use stealth and cover and surprise. Even so, the heavy firepower of the PCs made most combats feel silly as they literally couldn't miss unless I piled on arbitrary modifiers ("okay, the fight is taking place in a sandstorm as you balance atop a speeding truck, so take an extra -3 penalty''). Amusing, but a headache to constantly have to do this.

The problem wasn't entirely the result of CT using a D&D style armor class system. It was the result of poor rules that (for instance) gave weapons both huge bonuses for auto fire to hit AND allowed autofire weapons multiple attacks (they should have picked one of the two rules). It was also a system that instead of just penalizing attacks vs. even heavier armor decided it also had to give weapons bigger and bigger bonuses against light or no armor, making lack of armor utterly suicidal. The rules for futuristic weapons were just broken.

Striker and Azhanti High Lightning weren't perfect, but they did modify things so that simultaneous auto-kills didn't happen all the time, though the wound level system was poorly integrated with the rest of the rules, it at least pointed the way ahead. MegaTraveller also fixed the problem, as did every later version of Traveller.

But it's a flaw in Classic Traveller, and unless the GM is aware of it and carefully takes steps to avoid it, or sticks to book 1 weapons only, or just avoids gun fights. (CT space combat is even worse if you don't use the simplified system in, say, Starter Traveller).

That said, if you graft in the megatraveller task system and some sort of improved combat system, and use High Guard or Starter Traveller for space combat, the rest of CT works really well. But these days, that is basically just a description of what Mongoose Traveller did, so you might as well play that (or GURPS Traveller, or MegaTrav, or whatever) instead...

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

Yeah. Let's see if I can articulate it. Hmmm.

Okay, Warhammer 40K setting is dark - but it is also a bit tongue in cheek a.

Yes, I played in a couple of medium to long Dark Heresy campaigns where we worked for the Inqisition and it was absolutely black farce. I can't even imagine a way to duplicate it in Traveller.

[Tom H.]

Originally Posted by David L Pulver

Yeah. Let's see if I can articulate it. Hmmm.

Great, thanks for the explanation.

Sounds like war narratives can be compelling if they transcend the misery, editorialize the drama, or introduce innovative elements.

It's also interesting how you find it more satisfying when the moral motivations are more distinct.

~~~

Maybe this is not the time or place to share this, but I'm going to anyway out of convenience.

Of the little I've read of the Traveller background from GURPS Interstellar Wars, I was taken by the contrast between Terran and Imperium societies.

I think it was vogue to see Terra as more successful because they were driven by innovation and competition; whereas, the Imperium was more held together by tradition and bureaucracy.

My current bias on the state of the real world is that the chosen style of this unfettered competition may be leading to its own demise.

The turmoil of perpetually jockeying for position may be more consequential than the complacency of operating within a defined structure.

In fact, with the rise of dominant global corporations, their goal ironically seems to be to impose their own stability by mitigating competition and uncertainty.

It's a great outlet to play with these ideas in the fiction of a massive world like Traveller.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Tom H.

I think it was vogue to see Terra as more successful because they were driven by innovation and competition; whereas, the Imperium was more held together by tradition and bureaucracy.

My current bias on the state of the real world is that the chosen style of this unfettered competition may be leading to its own demise.

The turmoil of perpetually jockeying for position may be more consequential than the complacency of operating within a defined structure.

In fact, with the rise of dominant global corporations, their goal ironically seems to be to impose their own stability by mitigating competition and uncertainty.

It's a great outlet to play with these ideas in the fiction of a massive world like Traveller.

But the corporations of our day and the leaders of the ancient Villani wanted their power and authority to be forever unchallenged. The Villani built themselves a prison in the name of order and propriety. It was still a prison. If a prison is built for any reason it is still a prison. Chains are still chains even if they're for your own good.

[Tom H.]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

But the corporations of our day and the leaders of the ancient Villani wanted their power and authority to be forever unchallenged. The Villani built themselves a prison in the name of order and propriety. It was still a prison. If a prison is built for any reason it is still a prison. Chains are still chains even if they're for your own good.

Yes, hopefully there is a middle ground.

Because at the opposite end of the continuum, the energy you may have to expend to perpetuate all the challenges could itself be just as bad a prison.

[copeab]

I have CT, MT, GT and MgT 1e. I do have several supplements for TNE, but not the core rules.

I never really used the 3I (I prefer my own pocket empires settings). If I have players familiar with GURPS I would go with GT, otherwise MgT. While I have a lot of nostalgia for CT, there are too many problems, and MT creates as many as it fixes (it also has the "messiest" starship design system of the four editions I have, which is a major downside).

[revshafer]

Well, yes it is.

[warellis]

How do you guys feel about Cepheus Engine, considering it was made in response to MgT 2e's restrictive licensing?

[Rupert]

My favourite actual 'Traveller' rules set is TNE - I'm okay with the rules, and I love the setting. Following that, probably a blend of CT and MT - MT's task and combat system, CT's High Guard and Striker for making stuff. GT never really quite worked for me, in terms of TL and equipment and so on, though the systemless material is great. T20 was okayish, and I've not played or even read Hero Traveller. T4 I avoided. T5 I don't have yet. MgT annoys me in many little ways (fusion guns that cause radiation, colonists that can't use guns, starships that seem to be gratuitously changed from their original form...).