On 20Aug2020 1541, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:
> They were writing Traveller as an augmentation to an existing GURPS
> body of rules that was extensive and for which there were many
> bolt-ons (rules wise or gear wise) that you could import from other
> GURPs products (I bought a bunch of those for GT even though I never
> played GURPs itself). The Traveller stuff felt enough like Traveller
> yet enough like GURPs that likely anyone who liked GT and was
> interested in giving Traveller a try would be incentivized by
> familiarity with the parts that felt GURPSy in GT. Traveller players
> who wanted to have more supplements and such could just adapt them
> easily enough to their own preferred rule sets and as they weren't
> buying GURPs stuff beyond GT likely (or not much), they may not have
> been a target market.
>
> That also explains the extensions to the timeline (justifies more
> supplements, make the universe feel alive.... aka 'a decent business
> justification').
>
> As much as Phil is curious about who used GT TLs... I am curious about
> who generally uses TLs much above 15? A fair amount of effort was put
> into build systems and tech trees to describe techs beyond the
> Imperium (other than in rare instances) and an expansion out to TL-33
> would clearly be more of same in T5. Who uses that in their games? And
> if you do, would you just have easily kitbashed something 'uber tech'
> if you needed it and they hadn't spent all that extra time and effort
> on things beyond TL15 (or 17 if you wanted to keep a wee bit of super
> advanced stuff)?
>
> Do people ever play at TL-20+? My guess is no, so I often wonder why
> the effort was put in to speculate and develop such low usage parts of
> the game setting....
I use GURPS 4e and I use GURPS' TLs, specifically 4e's, which are
slightly different from 3e's. I pegged early space travel and J1-2 as
GTL9, J3-4 as GTL10, and J5-6 as GTL11. GTL12, which is the highest that
4e attempted to define and use is reserved for the Ancients. I also use
a rule option that all computers are pretty primitive, so a GTL10
Traveller computer is about as powerful as one of today, despite being
+2TL (and thus their GTL8 computers are rubbish).

One thing that interests me about Tech Levels is that GURPS tries to use
them fairly 'evenly', so TL1 is the bronze age, TL2 the Iron Age, and so
on, being a 'generic' game. Traveller, on the other hand, has TLs that
are clearly written by some TL9+ scout or social scientist to define the
tech differences that they see as meaningful. Thus Traveller TLs are
very coarse at low TLs (TTL1 covers GTL1-3, for example), but much finer
at high TLs (TTL9-11 go into GTL9, for example). Thus Traveller sees
pretty much all melee weapons as being TL1+, but has a large range of
fusion reactors of varying performace over 6+ tech levels (because
that's what the people writing the UWP, etc. rules cared about, both in
and out of universe).

--

Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>