A T5 Readability Revelation

[BlindGuy]

Hey All,

So I've been struggling for the past while to get any version of Traveller to be completely accessible—they all have their weird quirks when my screen reader comes into play. This includes T5, which is more than a bit intimidating but also strangely compelling in its detail.

I recently decided to run my T5 core PDF through one of my favorite book reading apps, which also has a very robust PDF parser. I was pleased to discover that the resulting text dump is much more readable than I've ever seen before. I can follow the flowcharts in character creation now, which used to give me fits. The character card also seems pretty easy to follow, though I've yet to run through the process.

Say what you will about the errata issues, I'm enjoying the density of T5, even if I'm not sure I'll ever play it.

 

[Draconian]

There are some errata available as the first message of the Errata Thread, labelled version 0.71 (July 2013). It takes a while to annotate a .pdf with them, but it is very helpful to do so. The most errata were in the critical character generation tables for each career so it is vital to correct these tables. One key mistake can be summed up this way: a character can't get a skill-increase from both a Commission (to officer-status or equivalent) and a Promotion in the same 4-year term. The order of skill-check has to be corrected accordingly.

Unlike classic Traveller, tasks can extend into a greater range of difficulty (rolling LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO a given target number in a roll of multiple dice; up to 10D is possible but rare) so there are many more skill levels awarded per 4-year term, to help a character eventually reach higher levels of difficulty. You get 1 skill-level per year plus extras from Promotions and Commissions. As a rough guide, I say to get the equivalent skill proficiency in T5, take the skill-level for a character in classic Traveller, double it and add 1.

 

[BlindGuy]

THanks. I think I might try generating a character sometime in the next while to see how it works.

I hope there is still progress being made on fixing things despite the negativity I've observed around T5. It seems like it's a potentially great product, I just don't want to see it dead in the water due to bad press.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Try reading all the rules and running a session.

 

[Draconian]

Yeah, when I was new at GMing, way back in pre-history, I was too literalist and the game slowed as we figured out all the twists and turns of the rules.

The rumour around the schoolyard, though, is that this is something you should not do. Make a quick decision and carry on. Avoid slowing down the game with boring things like PCs travelling and buying more stuff.

The starship jump procedure of T5 should be carefully attended to, though, because "interesting" breakdowns might happen. A supplement of "classic" type starships was produced with deckplans and the stats were revealed for T5.

You will find rich areas of detail in the game rules that you should exploit and develop. Sector generation yields rich systems with an average of 10 planets each. Since interplanetary travel is so easy they have common economic and cultural levels. There is not much explicit statement of what the extended system statistics mean, though. If you have old "classic" sector stats for a system, you can use a utility to generate the proper "extended" statistics at

http://www.heldenhaufen.de/T5

along with many other useful utilities from users like Thalassogen and Eaglestone.

 

[rich4421972]

[

QUOTE=BlindGuy;497318]Hey All,

So I've been struggling for the past while to get any version of Traveller to be completely accessible—they all have their weird quirks when my screen reader comes into play. This includes T5, which is more than a bit intimidating but also strangely compelling in its detail.

The first thing I did with my T5 printed book was to go through all of the errata and write them in the margins or, in the case of "clarifications," tape a little piece of paper over the bit of text (or table) that was confusing or even in error.

"Doing the errata" helped me become familiar with the book and its layout. There is quite a bit good playability in the rules.

For a setting, I generally use the Milieu 0 (End of the Long Night and early Third Imperium) or the "New Era" with Dulinor as the Emperor. The new citizen class is my favorite because of the great number of careers and avocations.

I recently decided to run my T5 core PDF through one of my favorite book reading apps, which also has a very robust PDF parser. I was pleased to discover that the resulting text dump is much more readable than I've ever seen before. I can follow the flowcharts in character creation now, which used to give me fits. The character card also seems pretty easy to follow, though I've yet to run through the process.

Say what you will about the errata issues, I'm enjoying the density of T5, even if I'm not sure I'll ever play it.