On 22Jun2020 1118, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:

> Now I know that, in AD&D, Gary said 'change what you want to' and I'm  > sure Marc would say the same, but we were trying to play the game we
 > imagined the creator wanted us to experience. We didn't even temper >
what we all felt were really rough or insufficient parts.
Gary said that in the original D&D, but in the AD&D1 DMG his forward had
a rant about how when you changed stuff, you were no longer playing 'AD&D'.

> We found the combat to be odd (as described when it came to similar  > weapons, but also a lot of DMs and such were seemed very arbitrary >
yet we, being trying to be true to the game we thought it was, tried >
to tell ourselves that the creator had carefully though out and >
calculated all the effects those DM tables provided with great care >
and attention. We felt sure there were equations and probability >
curves and so on behind it all.
I'm sure there were, when they started. I also suspect that later
weapons (i.e. those in Mercenary) had their stats done by the old "well
this needs to be a bit better than that" and some interactions were not
considered, or if they were, should have been explained to referees.
Gauss rifles were more than a little bit silly.

> And when the 'advanced' careers came out, we saw it as 'more  > specificity' and thus more completeness, not really thinking that it
 > was a bit of a patch on that didn't balance with the basic system (in
 > terms of outputs). We expected that level of detail everywhere (as >
you got in wargames) because a) they did it for systems, ship >
building, space combat, etc. and they b) did it for careers and c) >
they had wargames (Mayday, AHL, Striker) so all those things moved >
towards a particular view of what Traveller was - it was an RPG with >
(poorly integrated) wargaming and with great detail in all parts of >
the game.
There really, really needed to be a discussion with those about how
they'd produce characters that were more competent, on average, than
those made with the basic tables.

> It really, really feels like we were playing different games by a  > long shot, drawing from the very same corpus of books. And of
course, > we all remember how we saw it as how it was.
With groups not in any sort of communication with one and another, and
with very limited opportunities to talk to the creators about their
games, it could hardly be any other way.

> So when we moved to MT, we found the complete, integrated (also  > broken in lots of ways, but so was CT's intrictate bits, so nothing
 > there different) game that we thought CT was supposed to be. Task >
system, enough skills to represent the things that had seemed to be >
missed and consolidations (for the weapons) into groups of similar >
ones that made sense. HERE was the game that CT we imagined had >
finally been laid out in all its finished (well except for bugs in >
every LAST table or paragraph) glory.
I was fine with it, errata aside. Well, that and being frustrated that
so many of the basic ships had to be made at TL15, which meant that
actually very few worlds were making free traders, etc. DGP really
should have made sure that their system could design sensible versions
of the common smaller ships at lower TLs.

> Now my breaking point was Hard Times and then TNE and Star Vikings  > with an entirely different rules engine. If they'd used that engine
 > from the start, it might have been fine, but we had a long history of
 > 2D6 and a particular general shape of how we did characters and that
 > was a lot different in TNE.
I felt that way to start with, but as I also played a lot of
Twilight:2000, I got over it. I do wish that they hadn't gone with
HEPlaR though. Not because it was physically impossible for such a drive
to be that good, but because it using hydrogen as a reaction mass had
unfortunate effects on ships' FTL ranges. You see, you needed so much
fuel for combat that any military ship that wasn't going to fight could
make two or more jumps between fuelling stops, and that increases the
speed of information and strategic ship movement quite a lot.

> And I think, to me, that is not a strength in presentation. I think  > that if presentation had leaned a little more into the breadth of >
source material and if the presentation had been a bit less sterile > to
hint at a flavour of what a game might look like or if the > 'resolution
mechanics' didn't seem like they ought to be as formal, > complete, and
specific (and consistent) as the various construction > and trade
systems... then maybe our group might have had a more > common
experience with a lot of you on the list.
On the other hand, not channelling people into a particular direction 
gives a sense of freedom and wide open spaces.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>