Quote from: jeff37923Let me ask the question a different way. Which version of Star Wars provided a game play environment that best represented the genre feel of Star Wars, d6 or d20?

I know what youre doing here, and I agree. I think a more glaring example of incompatibility between rules and setting is d20 Conan - the action in the books is fast and furious, while d20 makes it a slow, complex and "tactical" affair; and the "classes & levels" concept dont fit the source material either.

But as someone said above, familiarity is always a huge factor to be considered. Sometimes its best to just ignore some rough edges than to learn a entirely new system.

Quote from: silva;643954I know what youre doing here, and I agree. I think a more glaring example of incompatibility between rules and setting is d20 Conan - the action in the books is fast and furious, while d20 makes it a slow, complex and "tactical" affair; and the "classes & levels" concept dont fit the source material either.

But as someone said above, familiarity is always a huge factor to be considered. Sometimes its best to just ignore some rough edges than to learn a entirely new system.

I'll concede that point, familiarity is a huge factor. However, the caveat that how the rules themselves are written does indeed come into play and making everything a different flavor of vintage D&D is often taking all the flavor out of the gameplay.

Quote from: jeff37923;643955I'll concede that point, familiarity is a huge factor. However, the caveat that how the rules themselves are written does indeed come into play and making everything a different flavor of vintage D&D is often taking all the flavor out of the gameplay.

I dunno, I look at stuff like Mazes and Monsters and I think, is this the best representation of Greek Myths? No. Is it the best genre game for playing a game based around Classical mythiology or society? No. But its a fun game in and of itself, and I wouldnt say its useless or shouldnt exist. Its just a different riff on things.

Quote from: Spinachcat;643917I have been working on a OSR-ish Spy game, but I only had one playtest and I was not sure if I was happy with the lethality. There are HP for wounds, but I wanted a game where guns kill people and weapons do D6+X and you die on a natural roll of a 6. So you could survive several non-killing blows, taking various hits from weapons, but regardless of your health sometimes your head gets popped. The players liked the danger level because it made the genre about sneaky Spies and not Rambo. I am tinkering to make nat 20 into a kill shot instead, lessening auto-kills from 17% to 5% which may be a better idea.

Color me interested. Would love to hear more

QuoteI see this as a failure of imagination on your part rather than the game's fault. Not many other Referee's seem to have had this problem in writing adventures in Classic Traveller. However, you should take a look at the Cultural Differences Table in the World Generation section of Mongoose Traveller Core Rulebook.

I salute those valiant GMs who wrote their adventures uphill both ways in the snow and the writers who put in a random culture quirks table into a different book 30 years later. The 15,000 people who've downloaded SWN maybe want a few more tools in the box.

QuoteWow. This is such bullshit and it tells me that you do not have a lot of experience with Classic Traveller. There are whole books about detailing worlds, adventures, and patrons. Again, I see an imagination fail on your part.

What, the S03 Spinward Marches supplement was actually useful to you? Their idea of a helpful supplement was 32 pages of hexadecimal code, line-noise world names, and a hearty handshake. A great many of the first Traveller supplements were published as if the people who wrote them had no idea whatsoever what their audience was going to need... almost as if they were writing the first such supplements ever, and had only minimal experience with the medium they were participating in creating.

QuoteAgain bullshit which shows that you do not know as much about Classic Traveller as you think. There is an entire section on Encounters in the Classic Traveller rules which includes Animal Encounters and a method of generating them based on the animals position in the ecology rather than how many hit dice it has. There is no random sapient generation system because the underlying assumption of Traveller is that intelligent races will not be some kind of "alien of the week" and instead treated with more care and respect for them than is common (which is why the Aslan cat-people and Vargr dog-people of Traveller are not considered jokes like many alien races of other games are).

The Aslan and Vargr are bog-standard space furries with traits lifted verbatim from their Terran animal counterparts and are perhaps the worst alien ideas Traveller ever had. The Encounters section in the CT hardback is borderline worthless to most GMs. How often does a GM need to fill a random ecological niche on their world as opposed to creating an animal that could somehow be a problem to PCs? Worldbuilding tools that aim at creating some kind of Harnesque ultraversimilitude are the GM equivalent of the forty-page long charop forum wanks of 3.x. It's an enormous amount of effort poured into self-gratification that, while perhaps enjoyable for the author, is profoundly unlikely to improve anyone else's experience at the table.

Quote from: SineNomine;643965I salute those valiant GMs who wrote their adventures uphill both ways in the snow and the writers who put in a random culture quirks table into a different book 30 years later. The 15,000 people who've downloaded SWN maybe want a few more tools in the box.

You know, just because Classic Traveller was too hard for you to use imaginatively does not mean that it was a problem for the millions of gamers in several different countries to understand and use.

Quote from: SineNomine;643965What, the S03 Spinward Marches supplement was actually useful to you? Their idea of a helpful supplement was 32 pages of hexadecimal code, line-noise world names, and a hearty handshake. A great many of the first Traveller supplements were published as if the people who wrote them had no idea whatsoever what their audience was going to need... almost as if they were writing the first such supplements ever, and had only minimal experience with the medium they were participating in creating.

Again, millions of gamers in several different countries proves you wrong. The problem lies with you and not Classic Traveller.

Case in point, the Universal World Profile was used as a shorthand to allow hundreds of worlds to be displayed with the minimum relevant information. The Referee was given great latitude in the interpretation of the numbers in that UWP so that interesting worlds and adventures could be created. You got the snaphot of the world and the Referee was allowed to dial in the detail to as great or as cless as desired. You think it is useless because you lack the imagination to use the data given.

Quote from: SineNomine;643965The Aslan and Vargr are bog-standard space furries with traits lifted verbatim from their Terran animal counterparts and are perhaps the worst alien ideas Traveller ever had. The Encounters section in the CT hardback is borderline worthless to most GMs. How often does a GM need to fill a random ecological niche on their world as opposed to creating an animal that could somehow be a problem to PCs? Worldbuilding tools that aim at creating some kind of Harnesque ultraversimilitude are the GM equivalent of the forty-page long charop forum wanks of 3.x. It's an enormous amount of effort poured into self-gratification that, while perhaps enjoyable for the author, is profoundly unlikely to improve anyone else's experience at the table.

Again, just because you have demonstrated incompetance in using Classic Traveller does not mean that it was just too tough a game system for millions of gamers in several countries and that those gamers were happily unsatisfied and just didn't know any better.

I think it is funny that you declare Aslan and Vargr to suck so badly and yet you have not created anything for SWN that outshines those races. If they are that bad, then you should be able to use your imagination and create something so fantastic that it puts them to shame in your sleep. Why haven't you?

As far as filling ecological niches for a world as oppossed to creating a monster for the PCs to kill really demonstrates how shoehorning a vintage D&D approach to a good system that never needed it can really fuck it all up. Taking a believeable approach to an ecosystem helps to keep the Players immersed in the environment. By pushing the science of the science fiction you get something that does not jerk at a Players disbelief suspenders so hard that they lose interest.

Oh, and Classic Traveller predates Harn by about six years.

Quote from: jeff37923;643972Case in point, the Universal World Profile was used as a shorthand to allow hundreds of worlds to be displayed with the minimum relevant information. The Referee was given great latitude in the interpretation of the numbers in that UWP so that interesting worlds and adventures could be created. You got the snaphot of the world and the Referee was allowed to dial in the detail to as great or as cless as desired. You think it is useless because you lack the imagination to use the data given.

The fact that you consider it acceptable to pay for the opportunity to make something usable out of your purchase is leading me to suspect that I am working way too hard on my tools.

QuoteI think it is funny that you declare Aslan and Vargr to suck so badly and yet you have not created anything for SWN that outshines those races. If they are that bad, then you should be able to use your imagination and create something so fantastic that it puts them to shame in your sleep. Why haven't you?

Because I don't sell brilliant ideas- I sell tools to help you create your own brilliant ideas. That is the value that focused OSR games bring to the the table- they're toolkits to help you assemble your own game in the idiom you desire, not gazeteers to give you a premade setting.

QuoteAs far as filling ecological niches for a world as oppossed to creating a monster for the PCs to kill really demonstrates how shoehorning a vintage D&D approach to a good system that never needed it can really fuck it all up. Taking a believeable approach to an ecosystem helps to keep the Players immersed in the environment. By pushing the science of the science fiction you get something that does not jerk at a Players disbelief suspenders so hard that they lose interest.

To quote from that chapter:

"Animal Descriptions: The referee may elect to describe animals in order to allow a better image in the adventurers' minds. The basic system may be used without this aspect, but descriptions such as lion-like, amoeboid, canine, or others may prove useful."

Look out! It's a charging 24,000 gram Intermittent with claws+1 and a Mesh-equivalent hide!

Quote from: jeff37923;643929So, you say that you like Classic Traveller, but you created Stars Without Number as an alternative? Why? What about Classic Traveller did you think you needed to fix? What minutiae in Classic Traveller do you think is game-killing?

I am a huge fan of CT and I enjoy SWN. CT has lots of problems that are solved in SWN and SWN is an awesome resource for every Traveller GM.

Like OD&D, CT was the trailblazer and did an amazing job that still rocks four decades later. But SWN gives you cool tools and a nice levelling system so unlike CT, you get that zero to hero character arc that many players want.

I disagree with Sine Nomine that the CT charts were useless. The tables were so awesome for the time and I still can crank out a fascinating planet just buy tossing the dice and spending some time imagining how all the pieces fit. The UPP codes were a great shorthand, but like "10x20 Room, 4 goblins, 30 cp" the creativity was not in the abbreviations, but in what an individual GM did with the bare bones info.

I am just grateful I can so easily combine goodies from SWN and CT and use one to influence and enhance the other.

Quote from: Spinachcat;643979I disagree with Sine Nomine that the CT charts were useless. The tables were so awesome for the time and I still can crank out a fascinating planet just buy tossing the dice and spending some time imagining how all the pieces fit. The UPP codes were a great shorthand, but like "10x20 Room, 4 goblins, 30 cp" the creativity was not in the abbreviations, but in what an individual GM did with the bare bones info.

I may have been excessively harsh in calling them "useless". It's certainly true that if you sit down and use the pieces as touchstones for inspiration, you can often put together a very interesting result, just as you can with 2,000 coppers and nine rats in a room.

But every GM has a certain budget of time and creative energy. We don't have an indefinite amount of leisure and enthusiasm to build our worlds out of bare rocks and superglue. The goal of a purchased product should be to give the reader enough preformed components and trimmed tropes to save him the trouble of constantly reinventing the wheel or regularly rationalizing new explanations for a repeated clash of elements. The lingua franca that is old-school D&D allows bits and pieces to be carved off of dozens of different games and hundreds of other supplements and creations, allowing us to save our creative energy for those parts that are most fun and rewarding for us. This makes it all the more likely that we'll actually get to make something playable and entertaining.

New OSR interpretations of a genre are valuable for that effect alone. Each one increases the network benefit to all the other offerings. Honestly, I think the old OGL dream of a perpetually churning D&D that was constantly folding in useful d20 elements is actually coming to fruition in the OSR, except that the D&D that is constantly being refined is happening individually at each GM's table rather than in a single official edition.

Quote from: SineNomine;643978The fact that you consider it acceptable to pay for the opportunity to make something usable out of your purchase is leading me to suspect that I am working way too hard on my tools.

No, you are merely unjustifiably proud of your "tools". See, a lot of people can come up with their own details without having to rely on someone else's "tools". Again, just because you can not does not mean they can not.

Quote from: SineNomine;643978Because I don't sell brilliant ideas- I sell tools to help you create your own brilliant ideas. That is the value that focused OSR games bring to the the table- they're toolkits to help you assemble your own game in the idiom you desire, not gazeteers to give you a premade setting.

Then why isn't there Third Party material to support your game?

While you are at it, tell me why making everything like vintage D&D makes it better.

Quote from: SineNomine;643978To quote from that chapter:

"Animal Descriptions: The referee may elect to describe animals in order to allow a better image in the adventurers' minds. The basic system may be used without this aspect, but descriptions such as lion-like, amoeboid, canine, or others may prove useful."

Look out! It's a charging 24,000 gram Intermittent with claws+1 and a Mesh-equivalent hide!

Since you lack imagination, I will give you the benefit of mine.

Also quoted from the chapter-
"Intermittent: Herbivores which do not devote full time to eating are termed intermittent. They tend to be solitary. Intermittents usually freeze when an encounter occurs, fleeing if attacked by a larger animal. There is some potential that an intermittent will attack to protect territory or young.
Typical Terran intermittents are the chipmunk and the elephant."

Now since you didn't bother with terrain it was found in or the numbers for Attack, Flee, or Speed, I will come up with something on my own. Now the Mesh armor hide caught my attention and I immediately thought of something like an armadillo or a pillbug, I'll go with pillbug because a 24 kilo pillbug just tickles my fancy. Now this thing will be found in forested regions and uses its claws+1 to dig through the tough bark of trees to get at the tender parts inside and/or the sap it may drip out. I will also declare it to be edible by humans and be 30% edible meat (another thing you forgot from CT). Now while they tend to be timid and roll up to protect themselves if attacked, they do unroll and attack if their young or their part of the forest territory is threatened.

Now the Uber Pillbug is adventure-worthy because the trees in the forest it inhabits are valuable because the sap can be used in medicines, the tree for furniture lumber because it is quite beautiful due to the presence of minerals that are brought up by its root system. The Uber Pillbug is however, part of the tree life cycle in a symbiotic relationship with the tree using the Uber Pillbug's nymph stage for pollination. You must get rid of the Uber Pillbugs to get at the tree for harvesting.  Aslan and Vargr like to play sports games with them before battling the Uber Pillbug once it attacks back. Humans think it tastes like lobster with a hint of chicken.

See, that wasn't that hard, was it?

Quote from: SineNomine;643982I may have been excessively harsh in calling them "useless". It's certainly true that if you sit down and use the pieces as touchstones for inspiration, you can often put together a very interesting result, just as you can with 2,000 coppers and nine rats in a room.

Nice to hear that you agree with me.

Quote from: SineNomine;643982But every GM has a certain budget of time and creative energy. We don't have an indefinite amount of leisure and enthusiasm to build our worlds out of bare rocks and superglue. The goal of a purchased product should be to give the reader enough preformed components and trimmed tropes to save him the trouble of constantly reinventing the wheel or regularly rationalizing new explanations for a repeated clash of elements. The lingua franca that is old-school D&D allows bits and pieces to be carved off of dozens of different games and hundreds of other supplements and creations, allowing us to save our creative energy for those parts that are most fun and rewarding for us. This makes it all the more likely that we'll actually get to make something playable and entertaining.

New OSR interpretations of a genre are valuable for that effect alone. Each one increases the network benefit to all the other offerings. Honestly, I think the old OGL dream of a perpetually churning D&D that was constantly folding in useful d20 elements is actually coming to fruition in the OSR, except that the D&D that is constantly being refined is happening individually at each GM's table rather than in a single official edition.

Except that making every past game genre over in terms of vintage D&D robs them of the individuality which makes them unique because it reduces much of the gameplay to the same and that can easily become bland and tasteless.

Quote from: Spinachcat;643917I have been working on a OSR-ish Spy game, but I only had one playtest and I was not sure if I was happy with the lethality. There are HP for wounds, but I wanted a game where guns kill people and weapons do D6+X and you die on a natural roll of a 6. So you could survive several non-killing blows, taking various hits from weapons, but regardless of your health sometimes your head gets popped. The players liked the danger level because it made the genre about sneaky Spies and not Rambo. I am tinkering to make nat 20 into a kill shot instead, lessening auto-kills from 17% to 5% which may be a better idea.

I am interested as well.

Quote from: jeff37923;643983Except that making every past game genre over in terms of vintage D&D robs them of the individuality which makes them unique because it reduces much of the gameplay to the same and that can easily become bland and tasteless.

This is a profoundly confused idea.

By this logic, once a game has been created for a genre, no future game should ever be created for it. If you can dilute the individuality of Traveller with old-school mechanics, then you can dilute it with FATE, or with X World, or with Rolemaster. GURPS is an even worse offender, as it has multiple offerings in multiple genres, relentlessly blandifying them all. People must stop making games, because people might like them better than the firstcomers!

How does this position not amount to a categorical rejection of any semi-hard sci-fi RPG published in the past 30 years?

Quote from: TristramEvans;643643
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Quote from: SineNomine;643994This is a profoundly confused idea.

By this logic, once a game has been created for a genre, no future game should ever be created for it. If you can dilute the individuality of Traveller with old-school mechanics, then you can dilute it with FATE, or with X World, or with Rolemaster. GURPS is an even worse offender, as it has multiple offerings in multiple genres, relentlessly blandifying them all. People must stop making games, because people might like them better than the firstcomers!

How does this position not amount to a categorical rejection of any semi-hard sci-fi RPG published in the past 30 years?

Confused? Because I like some variety in my gameplay and do not want everything to play like vintage D&D?

Those different versions of Traveller you mentioned used the same setting background, but were each different systems. You are advocating the use of the same system in all genres, not just some settings.

You are also arguing from a lack of information. GURPS was originally designed as a Generic Universal Role-Playing System, it is in its very nature to go and be used in different genres. Vintage D&D was designed for fantasy and trying to shoehorn it onto genres outside of fantasy just creates vintage D&D in that genre as it poorly emulates gameplay outside of fantasy.