It was a little frightening. I amazed myself with the speed
at which I picked up the boxed set of MegaTraveller. I had
told myself I wasn't going to buy the boxed set. I had already
bought a copy of the first of the three books individually, I
was going to wait for the other two books to be released singly
before grabbing them.
Hah! Somehow the thinking, rational part of my brain was
short-circuited and the reptile base of my brain forced me to
grab a copy off the shelf and shell out thirty bucks for it.
The MegaTraveller boxed set includes a 102 page Players' Manual,
a 104 page Referee's Manual, and the 'Imperial Encyclopedia' -
a 96 page book of background material. Also included are a
pair of dice and a fairly spiffy map of the Spinward Marches.
I have yet to actually run MegaTraveller, I have read through
the rules, played with the character generation stuff, vehicle
generation stuff, etc. It looks pretty playable. It wasn't
hard to figure out. I think if you have some experience with
Traveller, MegaTraveller will look pretty familiar to you.
MegaTraveller is the first major rewrite of the Traveller rules.
Over the years GDW has repackaged the game in big boxes, little
boxes, big books, little books, and so forth. Each of these
formats included pretty much identical text. MegaTraveller has
been changed to try to fix some areas where the original rules
were lacking.
The whole game makes use of a task system, much like Twilight
2000 and Traveller 2300. This is a system to codify certain
objectives of the players. The idea behind this is to break
down the player's immediate objectives into a series of simply
defined tasks that are described in a predetermined format.
The Traveller combat system has been replaced with one that
is task based. I have always hated the original combat system,
anything different was a welcome change. The new system takes
into account penetration values for armor; it also unifies
personal and vehicular combat. I haven't used this in play
yet, so it's hard to evaluate it at this point.
Traveller's separate starship, aircraft, and vehicle genera-
tion systems have been replaced with one general system. This
system seems to work well, and is pretty straight forward.
Everything has been rewritten for added clarity and understanding.
They make frequent use of step-by-step procedural instructions
of how to move through a particular system.
My biggest complaint is with the frequent typos and editing
problems present in MegaTraveller. It looks like GDW has
skipped the entire step of proof-reading their work. The only
spelling errors that appear to have been caught are those
noticeable to a spell check program. This is fine for casual
correspondence, but in my mind not for professional work such
as theirs.
I am looking forward to using these rules as a referee. I think
they are a positive change in Traveller. I would recommend them
to anyone with a passion for the game.