Also, never forget that we're telling a story. If a misjump is certain death 99% of the time, the protagonist in a novel or the PCs in an RPG are unusually likely to find themselves in that remaining 1%. A good author or GM has to balance bending the odds to tell a good story with maintaining plausibility overall. If *every* event takes an implausible turn, the players won't have any sense that they can understand or predict the universe. If the GM doesn't intervene to force things now and then, the characters will tend to either die of adventure-related injuries rather quickly, or die of boredom after game-years of wandering from planet to planet rolling for available cargo while never meeting a mysterious stranger in a bar, nor a dying spy in an alley. :)

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 12:37 PM, Orffen <xxxxxx@orffenspace.com> wrote:


On 18 Feb 2016, at 6:59 AM, Greg Chalik <mrg3105@gmail.com> wrote:

A misjump in canon is not an 'adventure' but certain death with no out option. It is a game feature incompatible with Traveller design thinking as I knew it in the 80s. It is therefore something to be fixed, because no group of PCs would want to be told 'game over, all dead from boredom'.

PC death without recourse is a feature seen in other 80s RPGs also. In fact, CT character creation rules support this "high mortality rate" style of play by making it simple to roll up new characters. There are a number of other RPGs (e.g. early editions of D&D, Call of Cthulhu and the Warhammer 40k games) where character death is a feature of the systems themselves.

An argument could be made that newer editions of Traveller perhaps retain the mis-jump rules out of nostalgia, but probably more accurately they are there because they exist in the OTU.

As has been mentioned already, mis-jumps are easy to avoid with basically maintenance, but if they don't fit into YTU then just ignore them. There are plenty of gamers who prefer their games quite gritty and their GMs unforgiving, and the chance of character death high.


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