Re: What would TNE have been like without the GDW House System?

Part of thread: What would TNE have been like without the GDW House System? · 1 reply ↳ In reply to Re: What would TNE have been like without the GDW House System? — allen carpenter Re: What would TNE have been like without the GDW House System? — Donald McKinney


On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 07:17, 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)?

Not much really. Character generation in TNE and a lot of the feel of
earlier editions without the fiction of the die roll.

> 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.

Partially!?! Most of the howlers in MT where because of Striker. The crowd
working on the technical aspects (Engineering constraints mostly) had no
clue of what the units they were throwing around interrelated to each other.
To make matters even worse they failed the scaling test, starships were a
seeming afterthought.

Actually from what I have seen of T5 and MgT, the MT mistakes are being made
all over again in new editions.

One word, Scale.

The other thought is ditch a direct equation of real world units, while
knowing them and using them to guide your end desions is a good thing. Using
them and producing Howlers a'la MT is a very bad thing.

--
Evyn