Some Traveller Comparisons

There are quite a number of blog posts out there comparing the various versions of Traveller. This post won't be anywhere near as definitive and is really just my opinion.

I started Traveller in the early 80s, getting the Deluxe Boxed set with the maps of the Imperium and the Spinward Marches, Adventure 0, and the really more important than you would think Book 0. Got these in high school. I was a loner: I knew people who were playing D&D, and even invited me over, but I was not particularly outgoing. So I could barely figure out what Traveller even was as it was my first introduction to RPGs. But I read and enjoyed the books, tried rolling up characters, but that was the extent of it,

Cue college, where I also brought the box along and played more solo types of creation. Someone mentioned that a guy down the hall had those little black books, so I found him, and through him, the college gaming club. There I played all sorts of RPGs for a couple of years, but Traveller was my favorite. We would play at the university until we got kicked out of the building, then go to someone's apartment and play Traveller to 4am or later. Some of the best and most bizarre games as a result of sleep deprivation mixed in with college ingenuity. But I learned how to use those systems, and bought everything I could for Traveller and a few other games. I stopped getting stuff about the time of MegaTraveller, because....

Cue girls, then RPGs took a very backseat. I kept a lot of my gaming stuff but a lot got lost along the way. All the Traveller stuff I kept, and oddly the Metagaming Fantasy Trip stuff, other than the actual role playing book (which I either never had or lost. The old Advanced Melee and Advanced Wizard are in my big box of the re-release of that game, and still useful).

Cue divorce, and I found the Asheville gaming club. No Traveller, but older and well-versed gamers. I spent a year or so gaming with that club, then girls again...

Years later, my Traveller stuff still near my desk, I found COTI. And fell back in love with Traveller. I started software again for it (hence this blog), and played with making worlds, characters, and just fun stuff. The T5 Kickstarter was my first Kickstarter, and I was really excited by it. Even though I was still not playing Traveller, I was playing with Traveller. I had kept in touch with one of the guys from the gaming group - we both also liked movies and would see the occasional movie. I got started back into the gaming club, but only in the summer due to a conflict with Scouts. Years later, my son makes Eagle Scout (and I am so proud of him!) and my time is freed up, so back to gaming once a week! Woot!

Somewhere in the middle of that, Mongoose came out with their version of Traveller. I got a lot of the source books, and even plunked down $20 to be part of the early tester for the 2nd edition years later. So I also played with that system a bit which is pretty close to Classic.

So, the comparisons.

First, I still mostly prefer the Classic Traveller: it is a simple system that originally you could do anything with. As the setting got more concrete, if you played in the OTU things, while easier, were not quite as open-ended. But there were, and still are, a huge number of resources and any number of ways to interpret the Imperium and still play in the OTU to take advantage of all those now digital resources (yay TravellerMap!) My issues with the classic version fall into the combat: it is basically a to hit & damage roll all in one and when I first started playing, it was hard to see how a knife could still damage someone in combat armor. When I got Striker, I adjusted to more that combat style, so that the to hit roll was separated from the damage roll. And while I actually prefer the mostly random character generation, a lot of people in my group pretty much hate it. I do modify it so that you have an extra roll to replace any roll in the stats, which are rolled straight and as is. And I also allow you to roll then select the table for skills so that you can shape the character but still have that random generation going on. But character roll ups were easy and pretty fast, although that could be from doing it for years...

Mongoose Traveller is mostly a revised Classic Traveller in my opinion. It uses more of the advanced generation techniques, but not quite as much. The skill levels are between classic and classic advanced I think (and that's just a feeling). And I really do like that connections part: at allows players to connect before they hit the space bar. And if you use the package set of skills, that is also a nice bonus. I've not played much of the 2nd edition, but I think I do like the boon/bane roll. It is a similar pattern to fantasy games when you are blessed or cursed mostly.  What I don't like is how Mongoose is really sensationalizing a lot of things: they bring in things that to me are just not Traveller. Warhammer maybe, or Judge Dread, but not Traveller. Perhaps it is a British thing.

Now T5 was not a playable game. There are a lot of very interesting bits and pieces in it, but it is not a cohesive game book. And I do not like the inversion of the rolls, where you have to roll under and there are dice pools. Like the Fantasy Trip, part of the vibe of the game is the dice mechanics. While a 2D6 roll does not have a lot of curve and granularity, it is simple and a +1 or +2 go a long way. I've used a few pieces in my games that I have run in the last couple of years, but my games also tend to be pretty rules-light.

The 2nd version of T5, T5.10, will be here in a few months. So we will see if that becomes a playable system. My fear is that it will just sit on my gaming shelf, looking pretty.