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'.
He went back and forth on that fence, over the years, but the 1st edition AD&D DMG had an afterward that said:
"
IT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE GAME, NOT THE LETTER OF THE RULES, WHICH IS IMPORTANT. NEVER HOLD TO THE LETTER WRITTEN, NOR ALLOW SOME BARRACKS ROOM LAWYER TO FORCE QUOTATIONS FROM THE RULE BOOK UPON YOU, IF IT GOES AGAINST THE OBVIOUS INTENT OF THE GAME. AS YOU HEW THE LINE WITH RESPECT TO CONFORMITY TO MAJOR SYSTEMS AND UNIFORMITY OF PLAY IN GENERAL, ALSO BE CERTAIN THE GAME IS MASTERED BY YOU AND NOT BY YOUR PLAYERS. WITHIN THE BROAD PARAMETERS GIVEN IN THE ADVANCED DUNGEONS 8 DRAGONS VOLUMES, YOU ARE CREATOR AND FINAL ARBITER. BY ORDERING THINGS AS THEY SHOULD BE, THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER, YOU WILL BE PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEONS 8 DRAGONS AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE. MAY YOU FIND AS MUCH PLEASURE IN SO DOING AS THE REST OF US DO! "
I did find another quote from 2004 where he lamented how the current then iteration of the game made the game about combat and broke other things and how it made the GM merely an entertainer...
He had opinions and some were useful to think about, others less.
> 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.
Yeah, if you don't have expanded for all careers, and NPCs about the same, it doesn't come out very even.
> 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.
Yes, the new world of the Internet also has let us ask questions, to communicate across continents. and make friends and game with folks from other places you could not have thought of in the early 1980s (even getting on to Compuserve from where I was with a 300 bits/s modem was a real costly venture). And email wasn't ... in any place I encountered. Unis maybe... but not in the public consciousness.
> 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.
Here is another disconnect. Many low to mid level planets, in most far out regions, Tech E/F are rare.... so why were all the ship designs TL-15? And if you think some standard designs are not effective money makers for trading ships, imagine if you drop the TL!
Yes, I agree that there ought to have been more attention to the actual texture of the known sectors (and esp the ones players would play in at the fringes) when they thought out balance points in ship building.
> 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.
Oddly, so did I, BUT T2K 1.0. I was out of it by the time they came out with the system in T2K 2.0 which was the same-ish as TNE.
My T2K experience was even further from 2D6.. ;)
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.
Yes, it did. Part of that impact is the vast density of fairly habitable worlds in the OTU. If you'd had a real look around, the distances between even vaguely convertible to habitable planets may be more like 10s of light years or more, not just 3.
> 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.
It does, if you are the sorts to colour outside the lines. Back then, we felt we were supposed to play the game as it was to get the experience.
Nowadays, I freely lay out what I think will make a better game (such as 'ships and ship combat as a plot device rather than an accounting problem').
--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
-----
The Traveller Mailing List
Archives at http://archives.simplelists.com/tml
Report problems to xxxxxx@simplelists.com
To unsubscribe from this list please go to
http://www.simplelists.com/confirm.php?u=RDHE7iRpfwqlHvVvWBIhpJZsbTiD5NnL