How to "fix" your T4 game...

[Merxiless]

There is something to be said for the 24 year old paramedic, utilizing the latest equipment, every day, vs. the 50 year old doctor, who might not be up on the latest techniques of "All this new fangled Technology", who is a General Practitioner.

Plus other factors that are not quantifiable. I mean, they are selling in Real Life, At-Home defibrillators with paddles, so that you can get someone to check you out and zap you at HOME, even before the paramedics get there.

I'm 40, and my wife is a 36 year old librarian.

I go down clutching my chest, you'd better believe I'd want her (properly trained with Resucitate by Defibrillator -0), High school education oh, 7, going at it, and NOT waiting the 8-12 minutes that it would take for paramedics Lvl -1 or old doc baker Medical -3 or 4 to get there.

Is this a case of equipment bonus adding +4 to the die roll? Might be.

Or maybe, as in real life shocking someone's heart NO MATTER WHAT THE SKILL doesn't damn work.

EDU-15 Medical-4 notwithstanding, some days, The Heart patient is a goner. Then What?

How does one quantify the will to live? Or those rare cases of someone who by all rights should be dead, falls into a frozen lake, suspended life for a loong period of time, and is revived to live a normal life?

It's a game, somewhat trying to model something, some situation so that THE STORY CAN BE TOLD, not to exactly represent the physics or biology of the situation, to 10 digit accuracy.

The dice throw, and result should not always be the ultimate recourse for any game scenario. But if the Referee can't decide, then that's what it is there for.

Pardon me for stating it, but in a referee's campaign, whatever he says happens, happens...

...Except for the fact that some players cannot stand to be in the control of the Referee, and so "Leave it up to the die roll" but then argue as to how or when the die roll should be modified, based on their perception of the rules, ref be damned.

Arguments about what arc of fire a weapon has, or how damage should be applied (By players, arguing for their side against the ref's ruling) are game-wreckers. I have seen it, MANY times in my 29 years of gaming.

How many times has a player stated, "well, hell, if I knew the rule was gonna give me THAT result, I would have...Done Y, instead of X (usually after taking damage). Why not just accept it as the game reality, and move on?

Dead Character? Roll a new one.

Everyone has their own flavor of how they think skill rolls should go, and what stats should be used. The key is trusting the referee's call, game system BE DAMNED.

It's funny to me (funny strange, not funny ha ha) that no one true rules system will ever be invented, because no one can ever 100% agree on how the real world works, much less model it in a roleplaying system based on a single toss of a few dice accurately.

The best referees I know just don't even use the rules of any specific system, roll some % dice (no matter if it be Traveller, Star Wars d6, or TSR's Antiquated Boot Hill), behind a screen for noise, ignore it, and tell the story.

If that ability to tell a story could be written up and sold as a "system", I'd pay 150.00 for a hardcover copy of it, rather than trying to fumble with rules more complicated than a light intro to calc course (which FF&S pretty much is).

 

[Ursus Latex]

Well I agree on you on most parts, but rules were made to make it not all a story of the referee, but give some power to the players and chance. If I don't want my players free hand in a situation, I don't let them roll. But I balance both situations (roll and no roll) out, so they don't get the feeling I'm telling a good night story to my kids.
If you give the story the highest priority, you sometimes have to rule over the player's heads, sometimes however you have to follow chance or palyer's wills, even if it blows up in your face a bit. It shows players they can do something you didn't plan to happen and they feel good. You should have a backup-plan however.
In addition just rolling a new character doesn't fit in most situations. Let's say you frag a player character in minute one of your session, what do you do? If you roll a new one, this character needs a new background, some intro and the group needs to like him. Nothing worse than a character that doesn't fit into the group or jumps in from nowhere.

Correct, there is no "perfect system", every system is an abstraction and hence looses details, so it cannot be perfect. But some of us don't like the current T4 system and we're gathering ideas on how to make it fit our ideas. This isn't a missionary station.

Urs

 

[Merxiless]

Right on. T4 isn't perfect.

 

[aramis]

No system is perfect.

Even I, who am a MegaTraveller Grognard, have incorporated bits of T4 into my house traveller. 1 skill/year, The dodge and swing pools, the Psionics rules. I've only incorporated one bit of TNE... Contacts.

Even more, no system can appease everyone. (WJP and my own argument recently pointing out the very different assumptions we come at gaming from.)

 

[Ursus Latex]

By the way:

Can someone briefly summarize the content of the T4 sourcebook "Psionic Institute" it's nowhere to get in Germany and I'm thinking of buying it in America...

Cheers,
Urs

 

[Merxiless]

Urs, I sent you a PM with that information. Personally, I liked it as a useful reference.

 

[Ursus Latex]

Thx. Got it and replied.

Urs

 

[mtgeiger]

The best method of resolving the Task System in T4 is to use the Universal Task Profile which has been published and posted throughout the Traveller Game Series as well we within the EPIC Adventure format. Traveller Version 5 (to be published in June of 2007) has a complete definition and system of resolving tasks within the Traveller adventuring.

 

[aramis]

Mark: T5 is the same as T4, at this point, and positing it as the solution is, in essence, stating that "There is no problem, get over it."

MANY people found problems with T4 tasks. Using the default for a given ruleset is not always optimal. the UTP has conversions to native task resolution for all editions, yes.

It does not, however, include using those other systems in a given edition.

 

[robject]

T5 builds on T4.1. Its task system doesn't use the half die, and calls the IHTIT rule "TIH!" (This Is Hard!), nudging task difficulty up two levels if the skill level of the actor is not equal to the task.

The premise is that the T4 task system has a unifying strength and richness that previous task systems lack. Thus, older Traveller task systems trade off a simpler mechanic for a more disjoint set of task rules.

 

[aramis]

Still, it has the same fundamental flaw (1att level = 1 skill level in CG and Tasks both) as T4/4.1.

 

[robject]

The strength of the 1:1 aspect of the T4 task system is that one point change in characteristic makes a difference. There's a difference between a DEX 7 Pilot-2 fellow and a DEX 8 Pilot-2 fellow.

It can be a flaw. Characteristics dominate without compensating and limiting factors.

Hence, the 'fixes' proposed are the topic of this, erm, topic.

 

[daltoncalford]

This is a debating point among various players.

What value does 'skill' have in comparison to natural ability.

What value does skill level X have in comparison to skill level Y?

Are the rating systems linear or on a curve relative to one another?

All of the above questions need to be answered before you approach the game mechanics.

You also need to explain to the referee's why you made the decision in the first place.

T4 was a roll under mechanic - different from CT/MT, although most other aspects of the game where a return to the CT/MT roots.

T4's skill system was vastly underpowered in comparison to previous versions and did not sit well with those players who believe that 100's of hours of specialized training is far more important than having a knack for the task at hand.

T4's game mechanic dropped the 2d6 approach and came up with variable numbers of dice and half die rolls.

I am not going to attack roll/over vs roll/under as that is an area of personal preference.

I am not going to attack the handfulls of dice approach as the local T&T crowd will attest to it's fun (although they went with a risk style mechanic vs a difference of sums mechanic).

I am not going to attack the undermining of the value of skills as that is a decision of the developers.

What I am going to attack is the description of WHY they did this. Nowhere in the developers notes do I see any attempt at game design with T4. It appears to be a mish mash of systems without regard as to how they all work together. Anyone can grab the years of material produced for traveller, slap it together, make one or two changes and call it a game. The truth is that a game system needs to be consistant throughout. The T4 system did not feel consistant. As a ref reading the rules, I fealt no enjoyment at the prospect of playing the game. I own all the books, printed and pdf, and I have yet to consider playing a game of it.

A number of simple mechanics can be used to reconsile the attribute/skill system, I know of 6 off the top of my head.

All I can say is that the skill/attribute/task system is NOT the only problem with T4, it just happens to be the most glaring.

best regards

Dalton

 

[robject]

You're right. The T4 rules did not "feel" vital to me, and the various books were disjoint. There are four different ways to design spacecraft. There were specialized rules scattered about. It didn't give me a wash of confidence.

The situation got worse when our group realized -- via playtest -- how truly powerful characteristics now were, and how trivial skill levels had become. I didn't like that, as much for the surprise as for the rules change.

 

[Commander Drax]

It's a shame, there are some flashes of genius in T4, though they are few and far between, for me the rule set was far too inconsistent to be used, the background wasn't bad, but after years of CT and MT, I couldn't bring myself to use it. It felt lke I was going backwards in terms of quality and game mechanics not forward in terms of it being a new edition.

I fixed it by using the MT task system, and creating my own ship building system. In the end I had a lot of fun with T4 though for all of the wrong reasons.

 

[robject]

T4 had a lot of improvements in several areas: character generation worked well and (I think) captured the spirit of Traveller; I understand that it has an elegant way of handling a large variety of tasks under a single mechanic, or something like that. Starship design, while painful and boring, was based on FFS2; the background for Milieu Zero had lots of potential -- it was well-suited for home-grown campaigns and pocket empires. It shed new light on the old central sectors of the Imperium; we never knew many of them, but now we had to discover them and deal with them in a TNE-like way.

Some aspects weren't successful, but had good ideas. Starship design and combat had some innovations that I liked, and bits I didn't care for. The task system lacked a characteristic control, but intuitively (to me) rolled against one's char + skill.

And some bits stayed the same. World gen. Animal encounters.

And some of the supplements were very good, and filled in gaps in Traveller's overall corpus, including Central Supply Catalog, Pocket Empires, and Psionic Institutes. In this respect it most resembled Steve Jackson Games, although where SJG succeeded in its execution, T4 failed miserably.

 

[aramis]

I found that CG DIDN'T work well, mostly because it failed to take into account the (far more) badly broken task system. Intuitive, yes. Effective, hardly.

The task system so badly broke so much of the rest of T4 that my players would only take T4isms if I were running some other system.

Easy tasks were too easy, and hard were too hard, there was no middle ground.

The increased randomness made random CG far more likely to produce "A zillion and one skills, but no specialty" characters, while the "picked skills" option made for characters without outside hobbies and high stats.

I have fund the same thing across a great many different trials... random CG only works when numbers and levels of skills are both low, and skill effects are fairly steep.

In CT, level 1 is significant skill; many characters have no skills past level 1. In MT, most will have a couple of level 2 skills, and maybe a 3+ or two. It is not uncommon, however, to have 4+ term characters in MT with a skill or two (often not the one the player wanted) at levels 5+.

In T4, skills past level 1 were meaningless for picked skills, and disadvantageous for rolled ones. After gaining level 1 in the desired skills for the character, my players switched instead to Personal Development rolls almost exclusively.

T4.1 nudged this up to level 4, maybe 5 or 6...

The problem being that the higher numbers of skill across a similar number of skills resulted not in deeper skills, but in more shallowly but broadly skilled characters as a desired result of the CG process to meet the demands of the Task System. Of course, the fact that all but one of my group at the time were also experienced GM's didn't help matters.

AS to handling tasks better, well, truth is that DGP-CT/MT was both more flexible, and had better developed options for handling odd situations under a cohesive task system. It also used only two dicing combinations: 2d, and 5d (2d for success, and 3d for time). Players could always roll all five and count the two of the success color.

TNE was a better task system, even. Yes, it was missing some elements of MT's task handling, but it provided a single die resolution, validity for every level of stat and skill (at least on Difficult, Routine, and SImple tasks), and worked fast and very simply, and gave good results. WHen ported to T4, however, it worked somewhat less well, due to the lack of a cost differential between stat and skill.

T4, however, like MT and TNE, was tightly tied to the task system. ANY changes have potentially drastic effects. My own Stat/3 heresy has profound ramifications... it cleanly shoves MT into Space Opera mode. I happen to like that.

 

[Commander Drax]

I've created an alternate task system for T4 let me know what you think, the link is:-


http://www.the-children-of-earth.org/T4DL.html