I'll take a turn and chime in on this one.
I agree HG rules were never player friendly, and only remotely useful
to GMs designing ships from the ground up. TNEs FF&S was perhaps the
pinnacle of a gearheaders delight. It worked well in the design process,
actually making the ships seem like an even more vital and living part of
the game, but the combat system for starships in TNE was cumbersome to put
it lightly, and brilliant lances did little to resolve it. The inherent
issue wasn't the dice standards in play, it was damage resolution in
general. There was brilliance in making damage directionally based, but
calculating the damage points to specific subsystems was a nightmare. A
simplified system could have been much more useful in that regard; as in cg
lifters on a 100tn ship have X for hitpoints, with a tech level modifier for
higher tech ships. (superior redundancy and damage control subroutines.)
with a simplified hit point calculation standardized for ship sizes. With
damage points standardized to size and tech level, a simplified damage
allocation chart similar to that used in star fleet battles could have been
a universal tool for space combat. that is a workable path to being able to
maintain a D6 system in an otherwise complicated aspect of the game. The
damage calculation of lasers, while not exactly friendly to the average
player, were no obstacle to an unmitigated gearhead such as myself.
I am at a cointoss as to which system I prefered for space based
movement, Brilliant Lances or another game system called Full Thrust, by
ground zero games. <
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Thrust>
On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 6:48 PM, Rupert Boleyn <
> wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
--
"Here at Ortillery Command we have at our disposal one hundred megawatt
laser beams, mach 20 titanium rods and guided thermonuclear bombs. Some
people say we think that we're God. We're not God. We just borrowed his
SMITE button for our fire control system"