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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4731054" data-attributes="member: 82106">Personally I'm not convinced that power sources really fit into a sci-fi theme very well. If they do work at all I would think you'd want a totally different set. Like biotechnic,  nanotechnic, psychic, not sure what else, but probably 1 or 2 more could be imagined.Is there not already a d20 Traveler? I know it isn't based on 4e, but I would imagine it would provide some basis to work from.Personally I was a real fan of the original version of Traveler. The later ones never really appealed so much. But to me the nice thing about it was the much closer to realistic game mechanics. If someone shot you, it HURT. Chances were you fell down and didn't get right back up again, yet characters were still pretty survivable overall. It was a nice balance. I don't see how a level based system can capture that.Of course it would probably avoid the converse flaws of Traveler, like the total lack of any character advancement, and the strange perverse incentives of the career system.It also seems to me that there would be a larger emphasis on a wider range of skills and less emphasis on powers in a system that had the feel of Traveler. Maybe a good bit of stuff that was handled via skills in the original could be powers, but then classes would have to be pretty narrowly defined by trades, so the classes would be something like pilot, programmer, crew, merc, scientist, etc. Those could be skills instead, but then what do you do about the sheer size of the skill list? I guess classes could give out a lot of starting skills. The whole 'roles' concept seems a bit less germaine to Traveler as well. It isn't entirely inapplicable by any means, but most combat is quite different and D&D defines its roles so completely in terms of hand to hand combat that I have trouble with at least some roles. The other aspect of that is in D&D there is REALLY only one basic environment you fight in. Sure terrain changes, but the essential premise of hand to hand melee ground combat is pretty steady. Traveler was a LOT more wide open. You had ground combat (usually at range with guns, melee was a minor element), starship combat, zero-g combat, and possibly aerospace combat or other alien environment combat. Roles in the D&D sense aren't super applicable to most of those. They might be handled basically as skill challenges in a 4e Traveler, but skill challenges themselves don't couple with roles in any real fashion. So roles overall would, I think, be a much weaker thing in 4e Traveler. That will make class design a lot tougher.I guess the final alternative WRT classes is just don't use them, make it a classless setting. 4e should work fine as a classless system. Class features basically go away, but most of them are pretty hard to define in terms of hard sci-fi anyway.And that of course is the real nut of it to me, Traveler was hard sci-fi. Any setting that is going to feel like Traveler to me has to be pretty hard. Not sure 4e is really up to hard... but it is fun to consider anyway.</blockquote>

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