Book 2 v5

[Scott Martin]

Dibs on a seat: It might be worth flying across the continent for that.

We're looking at doing some work in that area (King county) Hmmmm...

It's definitely a bit to far for Aramis to car pool though

Scott Martin

 

[aramis]

Originally posted by robject:
I guess that depends on whether T5 needs to be completely rewritten or not. Not being a game designer, I don't know much about these sorts of things.

Best way to find that out is to get what is current into a packet, and into the hands of players.

T20 MS3 (the first t20 draft I got to look at and run) looked a HUGE lot different from T20 MS22 (which is the highest numbered draft before going to print) and most of that is due to the playtest GM's telling Hunter what was working, what wasn't working, and what needed rewordings. Some rules issues are directly playtester work. Hunters ideas were artistic in MS3, and looked very promising... but not entirely playable.

 

[robject]

Sounds like Marc needs Hunter there, then, too...

 

[parmasson]

And good pizza. never game on an empty stomach.

Nobody can play Traveller without good pizza and one high quality beer or Virgil’s Root Beer.
That is the good stuff.
It is the best early TL-8 non-alcoholic beverage I have run across. And Safeway carries it.

 

[aramis]

Can't drink root beer... gives me Monteczuma's revenge...

Don't drink beer when running... gives players headaches...

Coffee, tea, or mead. (Checks 4.5gal fermenting nearby) Yeah, mead is good.

A good meal together before the game is a great tradition.

 

[whartung]

I'm coming in late here.

So late, I've read the first 2 pages and the last page, but not the intervening pages. So, pardon my redundancy if this point has been belabored.

However.

If you want to define a craft system, there is a single primary requirement, particularly for a game such as Traveller.

And that requirement is a combat system.

As much as we like to haul freight among the stars, the combat system defines the design system, and people design for combat.

They design for combat because that's where the numbers meet the dice.

Other than combat, the ship is essentially defined by very hand wavy numbers like cargo space, staterooms, J and M drive. And those can be blocked together quite easily. Very high level concepts.

But throw in weapons, armor, damage, etc. and you have an entire new set of complexity.

There are a slew of successful "19999 ton" battle riders in HG for a reason, and it has nothing to do with staterooms, J Drives or cargo.

Also, if you're going to have 200ton freighter taking on 50K ton dreadnoughts, the systems need to be consistent.

"Why the 50K dreadnought would snuff the freight out of existence!" "Ok, what if I had 1000 freighters?" So, yea, it matters.

That's one of the things I liked about TNE. I could fire a pistol at a ship and know what would happen. Just like I could fire an FGMP-15 or 8lb Gunpowder cannon at a brick wall, tricycle, battle tank, and civilian or military starship and "know" what would happen.

The nature of gaming systems is that we have these artificially imposed limits for the nature of playability. In real life we know an extra DTon on a large ship isn't going to make any difference, but in a game system, it's a DRM, or a column shift, or whatever. An extra DTon has real and measureable effects in a game combat system.

When it comes to combat, in a detailed system, there is no "Spirit of the rules". Role playing, sure. Character or NPC behavior, of course. But combat? No sir. I want my -1 DRM for targeting or whatever, and page 32 paragraph 6 says I get a -1 DRM.

So, I'm all for a simplified ship system. I want to be able to Lego(tm) my ships together in 10 minutes, slap a catchy name and paint a pin-up girl on the nose and call it a day. But I also want to abuse and squeeze the rule system to get my -1 targeting DRM outside of the Lego Starship Set rules.

A simple example, again from TNE, was their Turret system. You can make an entire design sequence out of FFS to make a turret, and even put that 8lb cannon in the damn thing. But the stock ships used a standard turret design with standard displacement and other interface requirements. I imagine others have similarly simplified FFS detailed development with fewers choices and more pre-made decisions to simplify overall design.

That's why I think the combat system needs to be done first so that you can iron out abusive design techniques before hand. You can always abstract away detail, but you can't easily detail abstractions.

 

[parmasson]

When it comes to combat, in a detailed system, there is no "Spirit of the rules". Role playing, sure. Character or NPC behavior, of course. But combat? No sir. I want my -1 DRM for targeting or whatever, and page 32 paragraph 6 says I get a -1 DRM.

Ah ha! but don’t’ underestimate the roll of fate! That fatal flaw in the structure, your cannon that has a hairline crack, the wall built with substandard materials.

Perhaps the influence of the gods?

So, I'm all for a simplified ship system. I want to be able to Lego(tm) my ships together in 10 minutes, slap a catchy name and paint a pin-up girl on the nose and call it a day…

I think that is what we may be moving towards. The drag n drop small craft system seems to do just that.

That's why I think the combat system needs to be done first so that you can iron out abusive design techniques before hand. You can always abstract away detail, but you can't easily detail abstractions.

What seems to be happening over t the T5 forum is that Mr. Miller is hammering out what he wants the system to feel like. Basic principles first before numbers. Both approaches will work, just different ways of looking at it.

 

[aramis]

Unless design and combat are tightly tied, you wind up with problems like T4... 4 different levels of design sequences, each with different detail levels, and 3 of them providing more detail than the combat system used, and the fourth not providing enough!

 

[robject]

from whartung.

As much as we like to haul freight among the stars, the combat system defines the design system, and people design for combat.

[...]

"Why the 50K dreadnought would snuff the [200t] freighter out of existence!" "Ok, what if I had 1000 freighters?" So, yea, it matters.

[...]

That's one of the things I liked about TNE. I could fire a pistol at a ship and know what would happen. Just like I could fire an FGMP-15 or 8lb Gunpowder cannon at a brick wall, tricycle, battle tank, and civilian or military starship and "know" what would happen.

[...]

When it comes to combat, in a detailed system, there is no "Spirit of the rules". Role playing, sure. Character or NPC behavior, of course. But combat? No sir. I want my -1 DRM for targeting or whatever, and page 32 paragraph 6 says I get a -1 DRM.

[...]

A simple example, again from TNE, was their Turret system. You can make an entire design sequence out of FFS to make a turret, and even put that 8lb cannon in the damn thing. But the stock ships used a standard turret design with standard displacement and other interface requirements. I imagine others have similarly simplified FFS detailed development with fewers choices and more pre-made decisions to simplify overall design.

[...]

I'll meet you halfway. Defenses are part of ship design; therefore all aspects of shipbuilding have to be taken into account when the system is built.

If our current Traveller ship design systems are all about cramming weapons into a hull, then perhaps Traveller hasn't thought hard enough about shipbuilding.

Next, I'll go more than halfway. I think Fire, Fusion, and Steel is planned for T5. More accurately, I bet a revised version of FFS2 is the plan, although I suspect that simply adding to FFS would get a better baseline product.

However, I think there's no reason for Traveller to model what an SMG will do to a starship hull. In game terms, we all know the result: nothing. Similarly with 50000 SMGs. Relatively speaking, nothing. You can create mathematical formulae based on real-world numbers, but you still have to boil it down to a dice roll in the end, which means you've lost all your granularity. That's a lot of wasted energy, spent on too much mechanics, instead of creatively building a sensible game.

In fact, we already have an idea of what Marc wants for combat. Weapons, like spacecraft, are purpose-driven. Turrets, bays, spine. Energy, missile, sand. Each has hard limitations, driven by purpose. I think this means that 1000 freighters cannot harm a cruiser.

Yes, it's a simplification. But those kinds of scenarios aren't even for wargames.

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by robject:
If our current Traveller ship design systems are all about cramming weapons into a hull, then perhaps Traveller hasn't thought hard enough about shipbuilding.

There's an understatement

Originally posted by robject:
...However, I think there's no reason for Traveller to model what an SMG will do to a starship hull. In game terms, we all know the result: nothing. Similarly with 50000 SMGs. Relatively speaking, nothing...

In fact, we already have an idea of what Marc wants for combat. Weapons, like spacecraft, are purpose-driven. Turrets, bays, spine. Energy, missile, sand. Each has hard limitations, driven by purpose. I think this means that 1000 freighters cannot harm a cruiser.

Yes, it's a simplification. But those kinds of scenarios aren't even for wargames.

Agreed, 1 or 1000, if the effect is negligible it is lost. I hope you're right about the purpose driven ideal and more thought about ship design overall. It's about time. I have my doubts though.

Like 1000 C-ton freighters shouldn't pose a threat to a K-ton cruiser, so should a cruiser be less effective against 1000 freighters. A freighter with agility 1 should be able to outturn a cruiser with agility 1. A freighter should always be able to bring it's turrets to bear (ineffective as they are) on a cruiser while the cruiser should never be able to bring it's bay weapons to bear on a freighter. Likewise the difference between 1000 K-ton cruisers and a M-ton battleship with it's spinal mount.

However there needs to be some threat potential from massed smaller ships against a single larger ship to force the issue of active defenses, either in the form of point defense turrets on cruisers and battleships, or fighter squadrons. Otherwise no one will build smaller warships, and part of the fun of a game is getting individuals involved. That's kind of hard if you're just one of the hundreds aborad a battleship. There will be no curisers even to allow the players to be one of simply dozens aboard.

Something like a scaled agility rating is desperately needed. This and allowing small ships a chance to attack larger ships while larger ships have no real counter attack against the much more (relatively) agile smaller ships will help.

The damage a single smaller ship can do should be insignificant, but with a small chance for a lucky hit. And of course the odds of that lucky hit will go up in a massed attack making the threat real and requiring a counter.

So I think combat should generally be small ship vs small ship (turrets vs turrets), medium ship vs medium ship (bays vs bays) and large ship vs large ship (spinals vs spinals), but with potential for small against medium and large (though not the other way around) and medium against large (and again not the other way around).

Get that right and you have a game I might like to play. Stick to the old ways and I don't think I'll be interested. That's part of the reason I lost interest in the whole T5 thing a long time ago. It looked to be a simple remake of our old game with no input for new ideas, and I've already got that. Even better, I've got all my little house rules if I want to make it work the way I like.

 

[whartung]

All combat design is the balance of putting enough functional lethality into a survivable delivery vehicle capable of getting where it needs to be, and for the mission required.

The one extreme end of that is the missile, which has effectively no structural survivability. The other is the modern Oil Supertanker with maybe a couple of AK-47's to push back Somali pirates.

A 50K ton dreadnought had better fear 1000 200 ton freighters armed with fanatical crews. If the dreadnoght is immune to a single beam laser, is it immune to a 100? Is it immune to a missile simply because it can shoot it down, jam it, or dodge it, or because it has to armor to withstand the impace? Can it shoot down, jam or dodge 1000 missiles simultaneously?

And what about a 200 ton freighter as a kinetic kill weapon?

And if the 1000 Freighters are completely out of the picture, where does that leave fighters? And how is a 20-50ton "fighter" different from a 200 ton freighter? And I have no problem with a 200 ton freighter not having the arms or advanced sensors, or whatever to make them LESS effective. But listen to stories about upgunned German merchant raider ships in WWII and tell me a freighter can't be dangerous.

It boils down to a hull is a hull is a hull, and the difference in space between a fighter and a freighter is the arms, sensors, and thrust to weight ratio.

I have no problem with ships and vehicle be "invulnerable" to damage. An M1 tank can shrug off small arms fire. If a 50K dreadnought is going to be able to shrug off a standard beam laser, no problem. But we should not mistake displacement for capability of dealing damage. Displacement is related to capacity of absorbing damage.

But that's my point. Without a combat system in place to make such definitions. To tell us how a ship is damaged, and what mechanations are invloved in causing damage, it's difficult to design a ship properly. If small meson guns are ubiquitous, I'm not going to armor my ship more than I have to. No, I don't expect them to be, but it just an example of how the combat system affects ship design.

And if I'm arming my freighter, then I have to make some consideration for combat.

 

[robject]

In that case, no worries, W. Marc is approaching starship design from all points at once. His approach is to discuss the various and sundry topics to get our brains around the scope of the task, then to use our various specialties to come up with a solution that fits.

Here's a distillation of Marc's inital thoughts about weapons. I'll post his whole idea on Traveller5.com

Spines take on other Big ships (Battleships, cruisers, destroyers). Secondaries take on smaller ships (destroyers, PT boats). Turrets take on fighters. Each has its own function; they rarely cross missions.

It seems a shame not to use those turrets against the Dreadnought too, but that’s not their mission. If one machinegun won’t hurt the Dreadnought, then 100 machineguns won’t either.

and

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;"> Small Large
Primary Secondary Turret Missiles Missiles
Armor Kills Kills Kills Kill Kill
Dreadnought Thick x x
Hvy Cruiser Med. x x x1 x
Lt Cruiser Thin x x x1 x x
Escort No x x x x x

x = yes ; x1 = iffy</pre>[/QUOTE]Assuming the above table doesn't change (and it may well change), that means the mission of fighters is to take out escorts, which could have been used to take out cruisers, which could have helped take out ships of the line.

 

[aramis]

That's one of the things I liked about TNE. I could fire a pistol at a ship and know what would happen. Just like I could fire an FGMP-15 or 8lb Gunpowder cannon at a brick wall, tricycle, battle tank, and civilian or military starship and "know" what would happen.

Which is same as why I like MT... in TNE, one has to covert small arms. In MT, the stat runs are the same for all scales. (Ships' weapons are listed in the MTPM.)

I can just do it easier under MT.

 

[whartung]

<i>Assuming the above table doesn't change (and it may well change), that means the mission of fighters is to take out escorts, which could have been used to take out cruisers, which could have helped take out ships of the line.</i>

That basically means there is going to be some displacement enforced limitation that will prevent smaller hulls from being "cruisers". Perhaps only ships > 5000 DTon can have armor > X, and turret weapons can only affect up to armor of X - 1, or some other mechanism, and then another displacement limitation for mounting a weapon that could sunder such an armor rating.

Small meson guns will mess with that equation handily. A small meson gunned ship(s) will be able to eat any ship without a meson screen (due to TL differences perhaps), assuming traditional meson mechanics.

But on the other side of the coin, why will a fleet need escorts to protect itself from fighters if the fighters aren't combat capable against the capital ships?

The smaller ships tend to be more nimble from a deployment scenario, as they're a way to spread firepower around a large area than what a single capital ship can control. They're also effective in commercre raiding against unarmored transports. We'll have to assume that armoring up a large commercial transport to make them invulnerable against the smaller ships will be commercially impractical, otherwise you'll need commerce raiding capital ships.

In WWII wet navys, main line BBs were certainly resistant to the guns of a DD, but not necessarily torpedoes delivered by a DD, Submarines, PT boats, or air launched torpedoes. Obiviously the detail of water integrity is a problem space ships don't have. But it goes back to the point about displacement == ability to absorb damage, not necessarily deal it. Granted, WWII BBs were built the way they were to mount the large guns, so displacement == damage vs the guns on a DD. But missiles, and mesons can screw that relationship up.

So, I just think they need to be careful about enforcing roles through the game mechanics unless they work the "physics" properly to support this new vision. The ships should be built to the physics (which is why today we have missile cruisers instead of gunships).

 

[aramis]

Space vessels do need vacuum and pressure integrity, as well as radiation integrity.

Now, if fighters can't deliver a threat to cap ships, there will be no need to screen versus fighters. I've played some games that were that way... not really any point in fighters, so I'd load up extra weapons and win.

I agree, however, that enforcing roles via game mechanics is a bad idea. It is unrealistic, and prevents adapting the system to other scalings without major reworks.

For example, when I played Trek using MT, all I did was redefine jump and jump fuel volume to be the volume and mass of a ward drive nacelle, and trebled the rating for cruise WF.

It made all the canonical designs quite useful.

Now, when I run my new and growing home-grown TU, it will NOT have terribly large craft. It will limit out at Tl*2000/G Td. It will use Bk5 style design sequences, and Bk2 or MT vehicular style damage systems. The Big Imperial Cruisers will be 4G TL15 7500 Td. The system controlcarriers will be 1G, 30000Td.
The fighters or riders will be much faster. And Much smaller.

 

[Anthony]

Originally posted by whartung:

But on the other side of the coin, why will a fleet need escorts to protect itself from fighters if the fighters aren't combat capable against the capital ships?

It doesn't. It may, however, need Escorts to take out Cruisers -- you could have a triangular setup where, at a given cost:
Escorts beat Cruisers
Cruisers beat Battleships
Battleships beat Escorts

 

[whartung]

Originally posted by Anthony:

Escorts beat Cruisers
Cruisers beat Battleships
Battleships beat Escorts

There's game out there like that. It's called "Rock, Scissors, Paper".

And many tactical games (notably computer games) rely on this base type of game play and unit composition.

It's a very difficult thing to balance.

If you don't balance the system properly, then you end up with hordes of a single type of unit. In early RTS computer game, you ended up with a concept called "rushing" where one player would make a large amount of, typically, tanks, and then "rush" them all en masse into the enemy.

We saw this in HG in the competitions and their "19999" ton Battle Riders. The basic goal being to get as many Meson Guns in your fleet as possible, as essentially nothing else mattered.

Traveller combat with capital ships tends to rely on the Critical Hit to disable ships, and Meson Guns were particularly apt at generating Crits.

Even GDWs "Battle Rider" game was centered on Critical Hits, where as "Brilliant Lances" was more RPG oriented as it tracked the destructive path of a laser punching a hole in your ship so you could know which stateroom or gun mount etc was actually hit. Gives much more detailed damage.

This is the key differentiator between small ship and large ship combat. At the high end, before Meson Guns, you basically cooked the heavily armored ships in a rotisserie of fire until you fried all of their gun mounts off. The ships tended to come out clean, but with no weapons. They could still maneuver or jump, they just couldn't fight. Mind, that's an effective resolution, but it could sure suck up the die rolls.

After Meson Guns, ships simply exploded or lost some other vital internal system making them dead in space. No need to kill off those 100 laser turrets when a nuclear blast in Engineering will solve the problem outright.

In contrast to other tactical ship games where the ships tended to degrade gracefully. You do "1/3rd" damage to a ship and you ended up with a ship with 1/2 it's original firepower and 2/3rds of it movement capacity.

Mind, the other games aren't hard SF games.

But overall that's potentially another complaint about Traveller space combat, particularly capital ship battles, specifically High Guard.

The battles were pretty much settled when the fleet is rolled out. All of the tactics and skill were in the design, not in the playing. Once a side gained any kind of advantage, it was almost instantly insurmountable.

Kind of like the kids card game "War". The game is decided when the deck is shuffled, you just don't know who the winner is yet.

That makes Traveller more a strategic system than tactical. With Spinal mounts, manuever is essentially out of the game. I'm going to park my ship in an effective range band and point my spinal mount at you and start blasting.

If I can't face you with my spinal gun it's because a) you're too close (really really close, visible "I can read the ships tail number" close), or b) I'm running away. If I'm running away, and you can't maintain range while you blast me with your spinal mounts, I'll either die or get away, and the only reason I'm running is because odds are I'm going to die faster than I can kill you (for whatever reason). If you CAN maintain range, then I'm basically dead depending on fuel.

WWII battles were decided by information and firepower. Finding the enemy fleet and directing firepower on to the fleet, but particularly in the air war in the Pacific, were not particularly tactical engagments on the large scale. It's all quiet and sneaking around until someone gets caught, then it's balls out pure volume of fire.

So, I guess, when fleets engage in Traveller, I mean, the game is already decided. The game is not to engage until you can win. But once you engage, it's either win or lose and you'll know that the first turn -- the rest is just determining how much the win costs.

 

[Anthony]

It's kind of the nature of space combat; in the absence of weather or meaningful terrain, battles tend to be rather deterministic.

 

[robject]

Originally posted by whartung:

So, I guess, when fleets engage in Traveller, I mean, the game is already decided. The game is not to engage until you can win. But once you engage, it's either win or lose and you'll know that the first turn -- the rest is just determining how much the win costs.

If we're on the fleet-combat side of Traveller, we're talking wargame anyhow. Since the system is still under discussion, any suggestions on how to make it a tactical would be good now.

Otherwise, this does tend to blur into a Fifth Frontier War strategy game. I guess.

 

[mike wightman]

My favourite Traveller ship of all...

the RCES Clipper.

I want T5 to be able to include it somehow

That means spinal mounts for 600t ships, even if they are only the same as bay weapons for resolution purposes