Are the rules considered balanced and playable as is without too much addendums or improvements and clarifications from various sources (eg. OTU's, specialized magazines) are a must? I may start a campaign with newbies in the 2300 AD settings, and I want to assess how much work I will need to put in to be at ease with combats, spaceships and other typical game mechanics
fre0n
(This is all going to be discussion about the "original" 2300AD - the version available from the FFE CD, no discussion about the D20 2320AD or the 2300AD from Mongoose games, at least until my closing comment)
Most players will end up wanting to tweak rules after playing with them for a bit. How long the rules remain playable for you I think depends on how "gritty" you and your players are for combat. The rest of the rules work okay, I think. Combat, on the other hand has a few things I have issues with.
2300AD is sort of mixture between original Traveller rules and what would later become the GDW "House System." 2300AD has a number of situations where I don't think the rules cover them well - I've always felt the 2300AD were incomplete and not thoroughly playtested. In our modern internet age, it feels like 2300AD's rules were a "paid beta" - the rules work but they still feel incomplete in some areas that will come up in play. How much of a show-stopper these situations will be for you is something I can't say.
I used the 2300AD system for years (well decades, really) and the big issues I found with the system. A lot of these issues are pretty easily fixed with some quick GM calls or rules modifications. In addition, for your first few playthroughs you're likely to not really notice these issues.
* The basic throw range is way long (Easily fixed by just reducing throw range to STR * 2)
* It's too easy to hit. (With very average skills, your players are going to hit 60% of the time.)
* 30 second combat turns lacked the granularity that I felt fast-moving fire combat should have.
* Missile combat is a deterministic (Your skills don't come into it; it's just the Missile's Homing Value minus the Evasion Value of the vehicle, then you roll under that with a d10.) - Obviously in a lot of games, you can simply avoid giving missiles out and this becomes a non-issue.
* Area Fire is a bit clumsy once you start using it a lot - certain weapons with high Area Fire Values allow a character without any skills to be pretty effective in combat at the cost of large expenditures of ammunition because player skill doesn't enter into it (like missile combat).
* Edge cases and exotic equipment are not well handled. Blunt trauma and that damned Autoinjector Gun are particulars here.
* Like almost all GDW games, melee combat (hand-to-hand combat or animal attacks) are not very well handled. (You can, in theory, avoid being attacked by ravening lions by trotting away from the lions while shooting at them with guns - the lions can only take one action, which they use to run up to you. But then they can't attack. So they have to wait until their next action to attack. In your turn you can conduct fire at a penalty while moving away from them. Since you've moved away, for the next action, lions have to move up to you again...)
* 2300AD (the original rules) are no longer really supported by anyone so you're not going to get any kind of new products or support.
However, 2300AD the universe is not dead. There is a new version of 2300AD using the Mongoose Traveller rules - you might want to look into that. There's a Google group and Facebook page available for it and it is active.
