Book 1: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9
Before digging into the last part of the Book 1 review, I found some nice world-building sites from a weekly newsletter I signed up for a while ago. World Building is of particular interest to me though I've yet to read any of the magazines. Though curious if a PDF, even if formatted as a magazine, can really be considered a magazine?
The Armory
The gun-bunny's favorite haunt! We start the Armory chapter with several very brief examples. A single line though will give you all the information you need to use that weapon: an abbreviation, then the long name which includes what it is, the range, TL, and type of damage it can do. Though not entirely sure R is range, as there is a submachine gun with range 0. Hopefully the chapter will explain things. There is a also a table of protective armor, ranging from a TL 9 vacc suit to a TL-16 advanced combat dress (for the low, low price of Cr320000!)
P-5 Pistol -5 R=2 Cr150 1.1 kg Bullet -1
Re-4 Revolver -4 R=2 Cr100 1.2 kg Bullet -1
C-5 Carbine -5 R=4 Cr400 3 kg Bullet -1
After the examples, there are some rules and suggestions for acquiring your weapons. Oddly enough, no mention of law levels, and the examples seem to find high-end weapons at a disposal site, still in the box. And give some rolls without referencing where those rolls are getting rolled again, but my guess is a table later or buried in that master list of tables. Really wish they would put the tables used as at least a reference before giving examples of the process. Still, don't think I'd play a game like this except on a very, extremely rare system:
“Aren’t these illegal? HPsiPj-11, Heavy Psionic Amplifier Projector-11. This makes my skin crawl. Ugh!”
“No, look, the manual is in Zhodani. How far is a gdasht? About a kilometer? These could reach us in orbit! No, that can’t be right. That’s a gdint. OK. Now I see. They can only reach to the horizon.”
Category = 1 Guns. Type = 2 Gun. G TL 6
Descriptor 2D = 6 Plasma P TL 6
Burden 2D = 7 (blank) TL 0
Stage 2D = 6 (blank) TL 0
PG 12
(referee looks further, and adds a portability code = MP).
“What’s in here? Plasma Gun Man Portable-12. These are still new in the crate. See if there are any BattleDress crates. How are we going to get this stuff back to the ship?”
Yeah, probably not my Traveller game (though that may explain why my games are drier than I like. Maybe I do need to loosen up a bit!)
We have 2 pages of weapon images, and really badly drawn people for some reason. Then 12 pages of 1-line weapons. Like a lot of the book (and my games!) it is pretty dry reading, and really just the starting point. Reminds me of the Merchant Prince trade rules: too dry and, well, bland. But I digress! But we have pages that look like this:
Spoiler: one of the books has the makers, and that includes the weapon makers. Which is when all these things actually make sense. I may have missed it, but it would have been quite beneficial to indicate please see the weapon makers for what all this actually means type of thing. I really feel that too much of this was assumed by the few people who were editing this after reading it over and over. For someone reading through it the first time, you have to read a few hundred pages to find the references needed to understand things. And that is, to me, just bad editing and design.
And that is all the actual chapters. Next, though, we have a series of appendices
Appendix - Dice
We have an entire chapter dedicated to dice rolls. If anyone remembers the BBB (Big Black Book, draft 1 of Traveller 5) this was actually the first chapter! This appendix covers why we even need dice and tries to emphasize that results are random but understandable. It does cover some Traveller-specific dice rules, such as flux and positive or negative flux. And then gets very confusing (to me) that a positive DM is a negative mod, and a negative DM is a positive mod. Because T5 uses the roll-under mechanic, so a smaller target is easier. Going back to my struggles with
inversion of control that I am trying to use at work, it is no wonder I am constantly confused! We then have several pages of the odds of various dice combinations, a table defining easy as 1D through beyond impossible at 8D, and more tables for randomly selecting characteristics, QREBS, special throws and even distribution (aka flip a coin). Lots of tables that honestly, though important in some ways, are not really useful I feel. For one, most gamers, after rolling dice for years, have a basic understanding of all this. And few people really care for that level. If they really wanted you to figure a percentage chance, just use percentile dice.
More Appendices
Here we have more charts and oddball things: the Imperial calendar (I may still have that from the old JTAS magazine wrappers, as those always had a chart on them! Now THAT is the way to do game magazines!), randomly creating birthdates, then all the Master Mod Tables. Without a lot of info on how and where they are used: we have several Typical Mods tables (21!) and you have to read through the table to figure out what it *may* be a mod for!
And this is the crux of the usability issue for me and T5: a LOT of complexity but also a LACK of coherence on how to apply that complexity. While it may all fit inside of Marc's head, I feel few people will take the time to even attempt to master this. While parts of the rules do make sense, the inability to link the appropriate tables to the appropriate use this table for mods makes for an awful lot of page turning. Perhaps it gets batter if you actually play it a bit, as I have read there is at least 1 member of COTI playing T5. But I will note there is also a dearth of threads on the T5 channel (well, I say that, but these statistics are pretty high; however, I think most are probably from the various Kickstarters T5 has gone through)
And a lack of any other material for T5 is also disappointing.
Having said those negative things, though, there are some really good aspects I think buried in there. And I do use some of the mechanisms in some of my games but not the whole thing.
Will I do a Book 2 chapter by chapter review? Probably. While I doubt my not-quite-stream-of-consciousness style posts are particularly erudite or eye opening, I know some people do enjoy them. And it helps me to write about things and sort of get organized (speaking of, I really need to get back to my library project. Yet another semi-abandoned project!)
And hey - the old JTAS end of message omega. I am easily amused!
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