Twowolves said:
That's it. My books are buried deep in the closet, and that's how I remember it. But since stats were what, 1 to 15, average of 7, most players got at most +3 to those rolls. And again, skills may have been "up to" +4, but using the random terms-of-service character generation, getting anything higher than +1 was kinda hard, and I've never seen (in my admittedly limited experience) anything as high as +4.
Up to +4 was the Classic range - skill awards were truly random, you had to be a bit lucky to get two skills per term on average, and so it was pretty unusual to see anything higher. MegaTraveller allows a lot more freedom to select skills, since many of the awards are skill cascades (which basically means you choose one of a group of related skills), and characters gain more skills each term. So MT characters have more skills at higher ranks. Looking at the stats for the last group I ran, among 5 characters only one of them has his highest skill at 1, and he was the guy who put most of his skill choices into stat increases so his lowest stat is 7.
I understand that for the vast majority of tasks, just having the skill at all was enough, and rolling dice was not something done for every little thing, it still seems that on a 2d6 roll, the average person (7 stat = +1 to the roll) trained in a skill (+1) will only beat a 7 (and IIRC, you had to beat the target number, not match it)
Incorrect. If the target number is 7+, that means you need 7 or higher. Given that groups typically have the best suited character attempt a task, it's pretty common for routine checks to be situations where they only fail on a 2. IME, Routine tasks only really get exciting (outside of combat) when somebody unskilled is attempting them, or when a normally long task has to be done
right now and so the player bumps the time increment down (raising the difficulty in the process).
I guess I wasn't articulating myself well. What I meant was not that 2d6 for every action wasn't universal, but rather that every single use for every single skill was, at least in MegaTraveller, defined by a 2 line summary, which included the skill, the target number, and the time increment to try it. I found it very frustrating that all these pre-determined tasks weren't found under the skill description either, but instead sprinkled all over the rules and adventures.
I'm looking at my copy of MegaTraveller now, and most of the skills have example task definitions given in the skill description. Those that don't are primarily combat and starship-operation skills, in which case the tasks are in the appropriate section of the rules. I don't find this a particularly frustrating setup, YMMV. Of course, the whole point of the task system is that the ref can quickly assign a task when it's needed rather than crack the books and look at a preprinted list, and I know some folks are more comfortable with the list approach, that's just a difference in style. Calling the approach with less rules lookup less streamlined does seem odd to me.
Even with these points about CT/MT cleared up, I still feel the 2d6+skill/stat>TN method is too choppy and rough, and would have hoped that in 30 years of game design, they would have found something they liked better.
Actually, I believe they have. Traveller 4 used a die pool approach that emphasised stats over skills, and I believe Traveller 5 uses an iteration of that system; Mongoose's Traveller is being positioned as the "basic" version of T5, so I expect it will have the die pool system. I personally didn't care for it, so I'll stick to the MT method, I only responded to your original post to clear up some of the errors you made in describing that system.
