Surely! Book 3, page 206.
What was the concept behind T5
- Thread starter Blue Ghost
- Start date
Surely! Book 3, page 206.
The Psionics Chapter.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Psionics is magic?
Nope, this is magic:
Nope, this is magic:
Up until about seven years ago, there used to be a really huge hobby "superstore" called D&J Hobby down in the San Jose Cambell area in the south say. It was the first hobby store I went to when my adopted mother moved us out here. Male stuff like models, warsims, remote control anything, minis, and RPGs were on the left side as you entered the store, and female stuff like doll houses, crafts of various sorts, were on the right. Most of what I bought here were JTAS, FASA Far Traveller, and just an assortment of cool stuff. Sadly they closed their doors in … what, 2014? I can't remember. I have many fond memories of that place, including reading through "Legend of the Sky Raiders" and a few GURPS publications.
Anyway, I bring it up because even here D&D really seemed to be the golden boy as it too filled racks in this store. And I think it was here, and some place in Marin about a five minute drive of where I live now (it's now a female oriented knock knack shop, but was a comic and game store at one time) that I bought MT books.
Like I was telling MAgnus in an email, I kind of got MT, but the starship design rules were, again for me, just over the top with various sensors, commo gear, and the code generated for combat. I get that same kind of feeling with T5. To me starship combat ought to be like SFB; something that visually displays the ship and gives you a sense of its capabilities; turrets, armor and/or shields, armaments and damage track, ECM if any, and all the rest. In my gaming sessions when starship combat took place we always used the standard rules, rarely High Guard … if ever. And I think for MT we stuck with basic Traveller starship combat. An acquatinence bought me brilliant lances a few years back, but we never touched it. I seem to recall that the Star Wars' RPG had simplified space combat rules too, though I can't remember much of them. I like good complex games. It's why I got involved with SFB, Car Wars and all the rest. But for adventure gaming MT seemed way over the top. Again, that's my sense with T5. I don't know, I'll have to run a session and see.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
Three dimensional reality manipulation requires energy.
Perhaps psionics directly tap into the hyperspace dimension.
Perhaps psionics directly tap into the hyperspace dimension.
ShawnDriscoll
SOC-14 1K
I've only used "theater of the mind" when doing any combat at the table.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Borrow it from the quantum foam that makes reality.
The link between jump/higher dimensions and psionics was the motivation behind the Empress Wave in TNE.
Had the line continued the nature of jump/higher dimensions and psionics would have been explored more thoroughly.
Clarke's three laws...
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
Shalom,
M.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
Shalom,
M.
Yes, I get that feeling as well. I don't run ship combat at the T5 level of detail.
Star Fleet Battles, as it stands now, has 300+ some odd pages of rules, but most of them tend to be "special case" situations; i.e. ESG-web interaction, or effects of a pulsar on an Andro power absorber panel … ECM verse using "the Scrambler" verse using (my personal favorite device) ATG (active terminal guidance) for drones. All that stuff is explained in a well defined section.
And where I understood and got High Guard back in the CT days, it just seemed over engineered for the kind of game Traveller was. And MT just ratcheted that up by several degrees to the point where I didn't even bother with it. I just used basic CT starship combat, made little marks on the deck plans for damage. Essentially the deck plans became the Traveller's answer for SSDs; i.e. "breach in the hold gets a tick mark" "a breach in engineering gets a tick mark in addition to downgrading the powerplant or m-drive...whatever was hit" that kind of thing.
I'm hesitant to read T5's starship combat rules. I did go through them one time, but again it was very MT like. just my two imperial credits.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean.
ShawnDriscoll
SOC-14 1K
All combat is role-played out in real-time. No minis at the table.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
I'm busy simplifying T5 ship combat so I can port a lot of it to LBB:2.
Turrets - single, double, triple, quad
Barbettes - single, dual
Bays - small, large
Main
Compartmentalisation and Schrodinger damage resolution
Sounds familiar.
The year before last some guy at either Dundracon or Kublacon tried to sell me on "diceless roleplaying", which I saw as just not game related at all. To that end I wondered why he was at the convention, and had my suspicions.
Champions, although it's supposed to be an RPG, is more or less a superhero combat game a-la SFB and Carwars, using the same impulse mechanic. I bring it up because it has the reverse problem of not lending itself to RPing, but more or less gets bogged down in the "starship combat" aspect of the game, even though you're supposed to be a group of "supers" sleuthing out criminals or would-be conquerors of the world.
To me all combat ought to be either CT or Snapshot based. CT uses range bands, while Snapshot uses counters and a map with action points (I guess AHL does the same, but doesn't have the "granularity" of Snapshot, to borrow from a player's lexicon some years back).
I guess Traveller, as per the use of range bands and the two actions per turn mechanic, is abstract, and doesn't require minis, but I still think you need to role dice and keep track of damage.
ShawnDriscoll
SOC-14 1K
Well, ya. You still have to use dice and damage for Traveller. I'm not sure what the game would be otherwise.
Part of an unfinished SF Horror campaign is that progress of tech levels to reality manipulation has "shortcuts", so some culture might jump straight to TL25+ from a low TL and either "ascend" or self destruct. Occasionally such a culture will get "exiled" by previously ascended races to pocket dimensions in order to sort themselves out while avoiding irreparable harm to the universe.
And THAT is the campaign setting's partial answer to the Fermi Paradox. Sophonts discover "magic", then vanish.
There was align..:smirk:*cough* *cough* er.. morality and ethics
in the psionics section. :xh:So...Not yet... :coffeesip:
Heh, have I got stories
Personally, I prefer Snapshot over basic personal combat. It has all the mechanics for every possible action you can think of. Eons back one player in my group did not like action points. He'd always get sour faced and say something like "Oh come on, not action points again..." Oh well. You can't please everybody.
Love Snapshot and its worthy successor, AHL.
