10-15-2021, 12:18 PM | #11 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Portsmouth, VA, USA
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Re: Fractional TL's
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Picking them apart to break them down further is generally not a good idea. If you must then the best the system has to offer is "early" "mature" and "late". And those should work just fine.
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10-15-2021, 05:15 PM | #12 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: U.K.
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Re: Fractional TL's
There’s also the problem that TL qualifiers on skills don’t work that well on the detail level (and skills certainly shouldn’t gave fractional TL qualifiers). To take an obvious example — I, like many people here I think, lived across the TL 7-8 transition. But I can’t say I noticed at the time.
Supposedly, by the GURPS rules, a lot of people who learned to drive in the 1970s, or on older cars in the 80s or even the 90s, should be mildly befuddled when driving modern cars. But they aren’t, partly because much of the thrust of technological progress in that time was to make cars easier to drive, partly because the basic technologies didn’t actually change much, and partly because interfaces were deliberately kept much the same because why change them and alienate your customers? Conversely, stick a young driver of today in a 70s car and, assuming that they’d learned on a manual gearbox, they’d just grumble a little about the crankiness of the thing and maybe flood the engine once, but they’d probably get there. (Now, stick even me in a 60s car with no synchromesh on first, and you can expect some screams of frustration. But let’s not move the TL boundary for that one technology around…) I gather that similar comments would apply to planes and guns, to mention two technologies of some interest to gamers. Quote:
But I digress.
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10-15-2021, 06:47 PM | #13 |
Join Date: Sep 2014
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Re: Fractional TL's
I agree that fractional TL’s are needless (if not useless) for actual gaming. I can maybe see an argument for using them just for some variety if used solely in formulas for Vehicles or whatever, particularly if it was a situation where you wanted to generate a lot of designs spanning centuries or something and wanted them to be subtly different in a consistent way. But I’m not sure the trouble would be worth it when you could just make more advanced things a few percent lighter or more efficient and the result would nearly the same
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10-15-2021, 08:12 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Fractional TL's
Not planes. There was a big shift around 1940 with metal-hulled monoplanes with lots and lots of instruments which meant that just crewing an aircraft had become a different kind of task which required less intuition and physical sense and more reasoning and quantitative thinking. I think there have been similar things with the transition from mechanical to electronic instruments and the introduction of automation. Flying a small plane might be pretty similar in the 1940s and 1990s but flying a cargo plane or a jet fighter I am not sure.
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10-15-2021, 09:00 PM | #15 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Fractional TL's
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You do get the generational revolutions with aircraft but the new aircraft fly in different regimes of speed and range while the old aircraft keep flying in their old niches. Guns and particularly pistols are different. There hasn't been anything like aircraft's revolutionary advances in gross performance. You get much more evolution . Revolvers kept being viable choices against semi-autos for such a long period for decently valid reasons and not just conservatism. Before 1980 you just did not trust semi-autos to reliably load HP ammunition. Around 1990 you could start trusting HP to reliably expand even at pistol velocities so the old game mechanics about expanding HP from High Tech 1e weren't necessary any more. Some time between then you start getting affordable semi-autos with double digit magazines so the "Wondernine" was born for comercial purposes even though the FN HP went back to 1935. But in terms of basic operation? It'd be much easier to take someone from using a M1911 to a Sig 320 than to take them from actually shorter period of time between the DC-3 and the C-17.
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10-15-2021, 09:03 PM | #16 | |
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Sumter, SC
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Re: Fractional TL's
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We have enough problems nailing down just when an automobile (TL6) gets improved to the next level (TL7) so trying to push the TL system any further than that is just asking for a migraine. Never mind where certain inventions go is an issue even in canonical sources. High-Tech puts personal (desktop) computers at TL8 while High-Tech: Electricity and Electronics puts the IBM PC (ie IBM Personal Computer) at TL7. Look at the steam engine. What separates a TL5 steam engine from a TL6 one? I have no idea and I don't think my players would give a darn.
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10-15-2021, 10:24 PM | #17 |
Join Date: Mar 2013
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Re: Fractional TL's
You know, this is what I get for posting ideas before I go to bed, sure I don't need up checking it every half-four for the rest of the day hoping for replies and instead wake up to a bunch of replies, but it seems like I always miss a thing or two, in this case I forgot to say that I'm only thinking of using it for formula's for gear (and the like), that is for stuff like weights, volumes and costs in Vehicles
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10-16-2021, 07:27 AM | #18 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: Fractional TL's
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10-16-2021, 08:08 AM | #19 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: New York City
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Re: Fractional TL's
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It seems counterproductive to start splitting tech levels when it's not all available in the setting. |
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10-16-2021, 02:07 PM | #20 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Portsmouth, VA, USA
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Re: Fractional TL's
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