This weekend my friend and I *finally* got around to
trying out MegaTraveller. Our objective was not to
start a game, but merely to exercise the rules a little
bit to see if we understood and/or liked them. Several
questions, observations, and potential modifications
suggested themselves, which I would like to submit for
your analysis and commentary:
(1) How many printings are there? This isn't really a
rules question, but during the course of play it became
clear that there were discrepancies between my manuals
and my friend's. The discrepancies we noticed were in
the combat section. His copy has a typo about the
maximum DM to any roll being *18*. However, his copy
also has some additions and/or corrections to the
personal slug throwers table on p76. We bought our
boxed sets in the same store, about 4-6 months apart
(mine first). This isn't really devastating or
anything, since we tend to be "house rules" players
anyway. However, I was extremely annoyed that not only
do I have to live with inexcusable editing, I have to
live with conflicting sets of inexcusable editing. What
gives?
(2) Surprise roll: Surprise is a DIFFICULT task and on
exceptional failure, the defending party has surprise
instead. This seems utterly nonsensical to me. Since a
difficult task is an 11+, which makes exceptional
failure a 9-, it is far more likely for the party making
the first agressive move to be surprised....
Tom: "Let's hide in the bushes and ambush the sentry
when he comes by!"
Fred: "Don't be a fool! We'll stand out in the open and
wait for him to make the first move. Then we'll
surprise him for sure!"
Am I missing something here?
(3) Exceptional???? Why is "exceptional"
success/failure only +/- 2? It seems to me that with
such a small spread between success/failure and
exceptional success/failure, then the latter is going to
occur more often than the former. In other words,
the exception is not exceptional after all, but normal.
We decided that +/- 4 would be exceptional
success/failure. This also has some sort of symmetry
with the +/- 4 division between various difficulties of
tasks. That is, exceptional success on a difficult task
requires the same effort as regular success on a
formidable task.
(4) Starship computers in combat: Even in old Traveller
I disliked how much the ship computer affected starship
combat. I'd rather have the outcome be determined by
the skills of the crew, not how much the owner layed out
for a computer. On the other hand, I don't want them
factored out entirely. I picture the real heavyweight
ships (battle cruisers, dreadnoughts, and so forth) as
having computers which are powerful enough to affect
combat.
Our solution to this was first of all to replace all
DM's for computer level by appropriate skills (piloting,
gunnery, sensor ops, and so on). Optionally, the
computer level *divided by three* can serve in place of
the appropriate skill, fractions rounded down. Our
experience has been that this rule does a good job of
simulating the balance between human skills and
computers that we want in our games (heavily slanted
toward the humans).
(5) Starship agility: We don't like this attribute at
all. Scientific or not, we want the ship's maneuver
drive capabilities to represent it's combat agility. So
a "fast" ship is one with a 6-G Maneuver drive, not one
with a 1-G drive and an oversized power plant. (Of
course, it will take more power plant to support the
bigger drives.) Our house rule is that agility =
Maneuver drive. Seems to work for us so far.