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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8340453" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree. This is why I agreed with Luke Crane when he contrasted (I'll use quote marks but they're actually paraphrase as I never downloaded his blog and the site has since evaporated) the &quot;poorly thought out ideas&quot; of Marsh/Cook Expert with the genius of Moldvay.As well as the opacity of the encounter tables, the whole idea of a mappable and &quot;solvable&quot; maze becomes lost. Play becomes far more subject to the &quot;run-time&quot; decisions of the GM about what is &quot;realistic&quot; in respect of the setting and its inhabitants.I generally praise Classic Traveller but its on-world exploration rules suffer from much the same problem - which I discovered, hard, in the second session of my current Traveller campaign: the PCs left the domed city in their ATV to make their way to the NPC outpost, and I looked at the rules to find out what I should do, and I had throws for encounters per day, and daily throws for determining if the vehicle breaks down, but no process for determining if/when the PCs arrive at the outpost other than the GM makes it up. It's no coincidence that in the ensuing 18 sessions there has been no more on-world exploration: when the PCs have needed to get from A to B on a planet they've just flown there in their starship, followed perhaps by some short distance travel in ATV or air/raft.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8340453, member: 42582"] I agree. This is why I agreed with Luke Crane when he contrasted (I'll use quote marks but they're actually paraphrase as I never downloaded his blog and the site has since evaporated) the "poorly thought out ideas" of Marsh/Cook Expert with the genius of Moldvay. As well as the opacity of the encounter tables, the whole idea of a mappable and "solvable" maze becomes lost. Play becomes far more subject to the "run-time" decisions of the GM about what is "realistic" in respect of the setting and its inhabitants. I generally praise Classic Traveller but its on-world exploration rules suffer from much the same problem - which I discovered, hard, in the second session of my current Traveller campaign: the PCs left the domed city in their ATV to make their way to the NPC outpost, and I looked at the rules to find out what I should do, and I had throws for encounters per day, and daily throws for determining if the vehicle breaks down, but no process for determining [I]if/when the PCs arrive at the outpost [/I]other than [I]the GM makes it up[/I]. It's no coincidence that in the ensuing 18 sessions there has been no more on-world exploration: when the PCs have needed to get from A to B on a planet they've just flown there in their starship, followed perhaps by some short distance travel in ATV or air/raft. [/QUOTE]

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