Traveller Combat

Traveller combat started off very D&D like: your armor affected how easy it is to hit you, but damage was not adjusted. So a sufficiently dexterous and skilled knife wielder could take down someone in powered armor. Over the years, several versions of combat came up. Here is a (very) brief synopsis of the ones I've actually used.

Classic combat, of course. I was never happy with that as I always thought armor should help absorb damage. Later, I understood that this was a simple abstraction. To hit required looking up a matrix of weapon versus armor, so that every weapon had a different chart essentially. Of course, Traveller was written by wargamers, so charts were the normal way of handling things at the time. Ranges were also more abstracted out, and maps were not really needed.

Snapshot the board game made it a grid-based system but was essentially Traveller combat played with action points based on the characters dexterity and endurance. As with classic (if I recall) both are 15 second rounds. The lowest AP actually goes first, but higher AP characters can go before if they choose. This gives higher AP (DEX + END) characters more control over the situation as they have more choices as to when to act. Movement and actions are all the same in terms of player turns.

Striker came out as a miniatures game, with extensive vehicle and weapon building rules. This version, while more suited for miniature wargames, is what I ended up using more for combat. The basic 8+ to hit and armor absorbing the damage made more sense to me. And I really enjoyed creating fusion powered vehicles for some reason: it was the vehicle version of High Guard.

I never played Megatraveller, but I believe it was more or less classic. Could be entirely wrong.

While I also have most of GURPS Traveller, I never got it for the rules, but for the fluff. Although Far Trader was, I thought, really good if you wanted a big ship universe. As I prefer a small ship universe, I usually just divided those trade values (cargo tonnage, passengers) by 10 or so.

Mongoose Traveller uses armor as damage soaks and maintains the 8+ to hit. It has some additional rules for reactions, and breaks things into significant and minor actions. Initiative is determined by choice of INT or DEX and use the effect as the initiative order. Effect is basically the difference between the target roll (8) and the roll. A negative effect is possible obviously. See p59 as with no index, the Mongoose v2 book makes things harder to find than it should. Did not realize there was no index until the middle of a game, and as I don't have the book memorized or bookmarked...

Traveller 5, or T5, uses dice pools and a fairly complex set of things to figure out to determine the to hit target. However, I think once you dig into the T5.10 rules, it is actually explained a bit better, and there are some really good ideas in there. Part of the modifiers for the to hit include the distance and the size of the target: a huge target far away is easier to hit than a much smaller target closer.

I'll be presenting the Snapshot & Mongoose summaries for combat next session and we can decide ahead of time which version they would like to play. They all have basically cloth armor on so that will help either way - harder to hit or absorbs damage.