Yes, Mongoose Traveller and Traveller 5 both have some DNA from Traveller 4. But they have different fathers.
In one sentence - what makes the 'real' difference?
- Thread starter LiamKerrington
- Start date
Yes, Mongoose Traveller and Traveller 5 both have some DNA from Traveller 4. But they have different fathers.
Attributes usually associated:
Lion: courage
Snake: treachery
Goat: madness (at least in Spain)
Now, draw your conclusions :devil:...
LiamKerrington
SOC-12
Mh ... A tough one ...
Courage: Spawning a SciFi rpg in the wake of fantasy-madness ... Therefore CT would be the Lion.
I remember people spitting their bile about MT often enough, therefore I'd associate treachery with MT, because in it's lght CT might be devaluated - according to some people - which is not my opinion, because I do not know MT at all; I just establish the link here.
The Goat then would be to be connected with T4, because T4 was created in a time of turmoil and decline within the whole rpg-community, and SciFi (here in Germany at least) is everything else but common in terms of roleplaying; therefore there is a certain madness in having a new Traveller edition against all odds of the rpg-market ...
Best wishes!
Liam
Otto Harkaman
SOC-12
Seems like an awful lot of tinkering to do very little adventuring.
I note that the revised Mongoose Traveller Vehicle book was inspired in part by T5's Makers...
To me, it was a fascinating new way to look at things.
(I offer the following observation to anyone interested in the difference between the T5 Makers and what has come before):
In CT (Striker), MegaTraveller and TNE (FF&S), you start by creating attributes (like cost, weight and volume) for each of the major pieces of something. So creating a gun (for example) in CT-MT-TNE, involved creating a bullet, creating a barrel, creating the grips/mount ... and adding all of the pieces together to come up with a total cost, weight and volume.
The T5 Makers and MgT Revised Vehicle Book, take a more 'start with an object and modify the heck out of it' approach. So creating a Gun would look more like 'these are the stats for a gun' and then adding or subtracting based on the final performance ... but THIS gun is bigger than normal or smaller or lighter or more accurate. So you just add/subtract the modifiers from the base value to get the final values. What is important (for better or worse) is the system doesn't really care about the details ... caliber, barrel length, flintlock vs percussion vs revolver vs semi-auto ... just don't matter.
... A Flintlock is just a Heavy, Slow, High Damage, Short Range gun.
[NOTE: This is not 100% accurate for how things work, but reflect the basic idea behind the T5 Makers and MgT Vehicles Book.]
Personally, I enjoy the crunchier FF&S style because I like knowing that Gun A is .44 Magnum Revolver with a 4" barrel and a red-dot laser and Gun B is 12 Bore Swivel-Breech Flintlock Rifle-Musket loaded with a Mini-ball and Birdshot ... it helps me to create artwork for the weapon. However, I can see where a fast easy system that just yields the final game statistics could have an appeal to many people.
So I wish nothing but the best for anyone using the T5 Makers and will continue to sing its praises as a very clever system (that could benefit from a good magazine article showing some step-by-step examples), even as I continue to play with FF&S (TNE) to design things like a TL 13 Marine Combat Knife with a built in Laser Cutter for use in Classic Traveller, MegaTraveller and Mongoose Traveller (my favorite systems).
[Sorry, that was way more than one sentence, but I felt that it was important to really explain the difference between the Makers and Striker/FF&S.]
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LiamKerrington
SOC-12
It's cool. Thank you very much. I think this is a very good example for how much the original task may be flawed.
I learned a lot from your comparison of the game-systems from the perspective of a maker.Best wishes!
Liam
I see MgT more as an evolution from CT than from T4. As if 2 evolutionary lines have appeared, T5 evolutioning (as I have read here, I have not read it) from T4 while MgT returning to CT and evolutioning from it.
I've seen rules from both CT and T4 copy/pasted into MgT verbatim as rules. It's about 50/50 from each edition.
Truth. MgT did NOT evolve from T4.
Very true. Any similarity between MgT and T4 is due to both using text from CT.
A single major difference... okay, it's meta, but here it is.
Traveller5 differs from other versions of Traveller in that it deliberately gathers, consolidates, and innovates rules and concepts scattered throughout four versions of Traveller, filtered through Marc's mind, into a consistent whole in a single book.
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Yep, and a tiny bit of MT was salted in too.
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