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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7359475" data-attributes="member: 82106">LOL, yeah, I never ran any of them, they were really mostly poop. I mean, there were some reasonably interesting locations and potential in some of the plots, but they had the weakness of almost any D&D module (you have to basically follow the author's path through the thing, usually with fairly minimal available branches) AND they didn't have the virtue of being an enclosed environment where such a path is at least pretty natural and likely to result from whatever the PCs do. That is to say, dungeons pretty much get explored, so when the PCs show up at White Plume Mtn, or Castle D'Amber, they are pretty much going to explore it! Granted, there are some possible plots and whatnot in some of those, but the tight focus on a narrow location works.Traveler modules tend to be much less that way. Most of them involve a presupposition that the PCs will take the bait, do whatever social/political/economic maneuvering is needed, get to the primary location, and then stick there when they could most likely (and most logically) just bug out. Obviously SOME of them instead railroad the party into the action, but that's just WORSE. A game where characters can roam a large fraction of the galaxy should NOT be a game where they get railroaded into a 'dungeon', yet that is sadly the description of most modules.Yeah, I have had very little exposure to it. What I read didn't seem like an improvement over CT and I still own that, so... Mongoose Traveller OTOH seems like mostly just a more polished CT. It refined the skill check mechanic slightly, but the chargen system is pretty much lifted verbatim from the original game, with the appropriate refinements that were introduced in the supplements. I think there are a couple minor tweaks that help get rid of a few quirks like the totally useless guy that got booted from the marines at age 22 and has no useful skills (not a good trade off for lack of age reductions to physical stats if you ask me). The High Guard system is literally just "take the CT core system and break it down to infinite levels of granularity" plus the extrapolations to a whole range of giant ships. It is a bunch more work to build a ship using it, but I used to do it regularly and once you know the system its really not bad at all. The real issue with it is the way it completely recasts the whole concept of ships. By the standards of the original core books and the first few supplements a 50k ton Azhanti High Lightning class cruiser is a HUGE warship. By High Guard standards it is barely more than a ship's boat for REAL warships which range on up into the megaton range. Had they started out with this concept in mind, then it would have been a bit less incoherent, but it comes across as kind of weird. Of course HG has been around for 40 years now, so you always have the choice to just go with what it dictates from the start. I will admit, million ton merchant vessels kinda implies a whole different sort of economics though.... Well, isn't it basically a spawn of the GURPS Traveler expansion? I think essentially that is the thing's pedigree. GURPS Traveler came out, was met with something of a yawn, and then some people folded the new material back into the original rules structure, with updates. I'm NOT a GURPS fan (said by someone who really liked Steve and Co. and playtested a lot of their early stuff, but it just never floated my boat). Yeah, I think Mongoose has basically the same tweak. I always thought that Traveler should have made INT, EDU, and SS as 'mutable' kinds of things. INT in terms of cyberpunk/transhumanist stuff, and the other two simply in narrative terms. I guess physical stats would be up for grab as well in that case, but it would seem like there should be some sort of trade offs there which Traveler doesn't really deal with.</blockquote>

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