I have been working my way through Traveller 5 (T5) to see if I can get this game to the table. It is said that only nuclear scientists, engineers and Biblical Studies and Philosophy graduates are able to do so.
The three big black books (BBBs) are notoriously dense, abbreviated, and complex to navigate. Including indexes they clock in at 888 pages, styled as procedural manuals to launch missile systems. And yet, there is an intriguing and playable game in amongst the tables and ‘condensed to the point of confusion’ summary sheets. Many people give up. I have wavered, but have doggedly pushed through.
The game system is a major divergence to the Classic -> Mongoose/Cepheus line of 2D6 games. The Task system is redolent of the previous errata strewn T4, now evolved and honed as the ultimate expression of the game, at least down this evolutionary path. As task difficulty ascends so does the dice pool you have to roll. The dice result must be equal or less than the ‘Task Number’ (TN) for a success. The TN is formulated in a variety of ways, but most frequently the addition of a characteristic, skill and knowledge. ‘Knowledges’ are akin to skill specialisations. So, characteristics, which are generated in the same way as the 2D SF Traveller editions, are much more directly influential to task checks.
If your combined skill and knowledge is lower than the base difficulty dice number, you have to apply the ‘This is Hard!’ rule and engorge your dice pool by one extra die. How I am ever going to get a group of players to see past the wording of this rule without faintly embarrassed guffaws of laughter I really don’t know.
I happen to like a lot of game in my RPG. When looking to embrace a heavyweight, I create my own quick reference sheets, less to replicate what the game obfuscates in its depths, but rather to pick out the core sense of the game for a playable summary. In reality, I think that the base text of the game needs a more sympathetic rendering to draw out the system in a more approachable way. A mammoth task and way beyond me, so a simple document will have to suffice.
Acknowledging the apparent complexity, I don’t think the game looks particularly difficult to run. Once you have your mind around the task checks you really are off and running. At times the game provides relieving simplification. Wounds are factored similarly to the 2D6 line but with a post battle severity and diagnosis check to provide more uncertainty and detail to the restoration. NPCs, on the other hand have a simple ’10+ points of damage and they are out of action’ rule with any damage less than this ignored. For all the mechanical changes, and some of the technological detail, the game feels very much like Traveller.
Having said that, I have found my first eye widening major divergence from other editions of the game. Such surprise came not from the task system, or many of the sub systems in T5. These are different, and apply lots of interesting changes to to the Mongoose version, but none of them change the logic of the Traveller universe as I understood it. I’m deep in Book 2 Starships and have discovered that most of the turret based weapons, such as the classic Beam Lasers and Fusion Guns have ranges only out to about 500KM. In all other versions I have encountered they have ranges of hundreds of thousands of kilometers. Starship combat works at very short range with these weapons or, as I was told on the Traveller Discord, they are mostly used as defensive systems to shoot down missiles, which now have greater prominence as primary offensive systems with long space ranges. Fire missiles or get in close to rip a ship apart. You can still stand off with the biggies, such as Particle Accelerators or Meson Cannon.
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| My simple Foundry VTT T5 character sheet in action |
To show willing, and perhaps to push me over the precipice into a sunk time fallacy of actual play, I have put together one of my basic Foundry VTT character sheets. Lacking automation, it works well enough to record character details and roll dice. This propels me to a final step. What am I actually going to do with the game?
A shout out to Rob Eaglestone, whose Xboat and Imperiallines low cost zines have illustrated many aspects of the T5 game. I have bought them all and have yet to digest. They look terrific. Amongst these zines is an introduction to the Galaxiad setting, further out in the future of the official timeline. Instinctively, I think running a game out there is too much of a Hop Drive away from my comfort zone, perhaps until it is detailed a little more. I like the look of where it is going.
Converting any 2D6 Traveller material looks possible on the fly. Characteristics and skill names are largely the same, and their numbers are not very different from Mongoose 2e. High level examples of starships and weapons need very little cross over, though I’d need to think about detailed hit location compartments should a starship ever have the misfortune to get into a battle.
Could I face my old favourite Hard Times? Right now, I think I need something a little less implosional. The Fifth Frontier War is a prior destructive sploosh in the fragile fallacy of the Imperial pond. Could it be a classic trading and adventuring sandbox, out in the Vanguard Reaches? Yeah, maybe that. A sort of frontier scifi, themed like a rustic fantasy. Picking a simple hook and cluster setting and then dropping a free trader crew in the midst usually does the trick.
Maybe.