Donald McKinney wrote:
> This question came up in a design discussion with Marc Miller, Robert Eaglestone and myself the other day, and I wanted to see what the TNE experts would have to say.
>
> Imagine it's 1992, and you're designing T3... All of the same elements that create TNE are there, except it's D6, not the GDW House System. Does much change (other than the die type)?
>
> For example, it's my belief that Traveller was already heading towards FF&S -- the interest in building Traveller from the ground up with the Striker materials spread across it, was already there. It's partially in MegaTraveller.
>
> It's just idle speculation, but Marc is interested in your thoughts.
>
>
It's my feeling that even had GDW not gone to a T2K-based system with a
d20, it would still have looked quite similar at the base. The 'other'
in-house SF system of the time was 2300AD, which used a d10 based
version of the UTP used in MT for task resolution. Thus, I think we'd
have seen a version of MT's task system, but with elements from 2300AD
(and thus T2K) - linear armour values expressed in dice of damage, and
T2K's combat engine or 2300ADs. We'd certainly have seen MT's design
system cleaned up and done as FF&S - it was just too many not quite
compatible systems glommed together to continue the way it was. It can't
see space combat remaining on a HG system, either - it just wasn't
interesting at the level of a PC party with a single small ship, and
wasn't integrated into the rest of the system.
Overall, aside from some detail differences in the combat system I think
the only significant changes would be the use of MT's task system, and
the use of semi-random skill assignment per term rather than selecting
skills from a list.