To avoid the further derailing of the Trav5 thread, I thought I'd open up this one; I would also like to hear more concrete information about why people will feel one edition is better than the other.

RPGPundit

I'll tell you right now that they are two different versions of the same game designed for two different audiences of that same game.

Although I do appreciate the effort to try and stop the derailing of the Traveller5 thread.

Quote from: jeff37923;667850I'll tell you right now that they are two different versions of the same game designed for two different audiences of that same game.

Different versions such as 3.x/PF vs. 4e or more like BX/AD&D1 vs.AD&D2?

To be honest, it's kind of tragic that this thread has to exist in the first place because when MongTrav first emerged it was said that it and T5 would be mutually complementary versions of each other. Whilst I'm sure you could use the various tools in T5 to make stuff for MongTrav the character creation processes/skills/dice rolling mechanic diverges enough that it seems like you'd have to do a fair bit of conversion work in some areas, which feels like a missed opportunity.

I have to admit to not being a fan of Mongoose Traveller.  The use of D&D style stat bonuses and initiative offends me.  The art offends me.  The skill packages that entirely undermine the life path system offend me.  On the other hand Mongoose Traveller is stable and functional which is really more than any other edition of Traveller can say.

Traveller 5 is a mess.  I'm saying that as a rabid Traveller 5 fan.  It's poorly edited and frequently unclear in process and intent.  But the scope of the thing is magnificent.  The focus is clearly and solidly on the creation of the universe by the GM and the Players.  It's a clear statement that Marc Miller's ultimate Traveller is about making up your own stuff.  The book is almost entirely tools to do just that.

If you were to ask me what I think Traveller really needs going forward, it would look more like Mongoose Traveller well not "look" but be similar in content.  I think it would have to use a 2d6 roll over mechanism or there'd never be peace.  There's a faction that simply will not accept any other mechanism for Traveller.  That's not totally ridiculous.  Would D&D be D&D if they made it into a dice pool system?  Would Rolemaster be Rolemaster without tables and D%OE?

There was a AD&D 1.5 some guy did up that looked spot on perfect, this is what D&D is and should be to me.  He cut and pasted a lot of Gygax's words and reused the old art but as I looked through it I thought it was easily the best version of D&D I'd ever read.  Traveller needs something like that.  Something that fixes the original while staying true to it.  Despite some truly dreadful design and art choices Mongoose Traveller is closer to this and the allure of all the liscences they've done with it is undeniable.  Star Fleet Traveller!  How cool is that?

If I had to draw out the D&D parallel, Mongoose Traveller is Castles and Crusades and T5 is Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Quote from: David Johansen;667880I have to admit to not being a fan of Mongoose Traveller.  The use of D&D style stat bonuses and initiative offends me.

I honestly don't mind the stat bonuses. They ensure stats stay relevant after character generation, and the penalty for untrained skill use is pitched such that on balance a trained person with average stats will usually have a distinct advantage over an untrained person with great stats. (Plus, with all its many situational bonuses or penalties for extreme stat levels, CT arguably had stat modifiers anyway - all MongTrav does is take them out of the task difficulty writeups and generalises them.)

QuoteThe art offends me.

The core book art is terrible, I agree, though I can't think of any time when art has been a strong point of Traveller. And I like the fact that it reflects various types of SF universe from the hard to the ridiculous, which supports the really nice thing MongTrav does of keeping the system recognisably Traveller whilst opening it up just enough to support a range of universes beyond those with the Third Imperium's core assumptions.

QuoteThe skill packages that entirely undermine the life path system offend me.  On the other hand Mongoose Traveller is stable and functional which is really more than any other edition of Traveller can say.

Again, I honestly don't mind these because a) unless one player gets an exceptional number of skills from the package their skill loadout is still going to be mainly determined by their life paths, unless they only take 1 or 2 terms (which isn't actually advised), and on the whole I think it's a good way to guarantee you'll have a party suitable for the campaign premise you chose to run with in the first place.

QuoteTraveller 5 is a mess.  I'm saying that as a rabid Traveller 5 fan.  It's poorly edited and frequently unclear in process and intent.  But the scope of the thing is magnificent.  The focus is clearly and solidly on the creation of the universe by the GM and the Players.  It's a clear statement that Marc Miller's ultimate Traveller is about making up your own stuff.  The book is almost entirely tools to do just that.

I agree with this but am less positive about it than you. I think it's an edition of the game which caters a lot to those hardcore fans who spend most of their Traveller time sat at home crafting worlds or ships and so on, whereas MongTrav is geared far more towards people who want to sit down at a table and play without fuss.

Given that leisure time is at a premium for most adults with full-time jobs I'd go for MongTrav every single time, supplemented by bits and pieces from T5 if I can snag the time to play around with its various subsystems, rather than trying to roll with T5 from the ground up. On top of that, I would say that it's far healthier for the RPG hobby and community for people to be spending time gaming together than it is to cater to a subculture of solitary gearheads who rarely if ever get in much actual play (and don't you go telling me that the Traveller fanbase doesn't have a healthy contingent of those).

Back in the early days of the hobby, an Alarums & Excursions contributor who was arguing the corner of letting a thousand house rules bloom rather than expecting everyone to stick to the letter of the law as issued forth by TSR said that (paraphrasing here) "D&D is too important to be left to Gary Gygax". I kind of feel the same about Miller and Traveller at this point. As a custodian of the game's history, he's been great, but in terms of producing products to carry the game forward, grow and refresh the fanbase, and generally ensure that it has a future beyond a small, sterile cadre of loyalists, Mongoose clearly have the edge.

Alright, I'm confused. The "Skill Packages" in my version of Mongoose Traveller, unless I'm mistaken, are things you give one skill from your campaign style to each character to make sure each character has a useful skill.

Quote from: Silverlion;667903Alright, I'm confused. The "Skill Packages" in my version of Mongoose Traveller, unless I'm mistaken, are things you give one skill from your campaign style to each character to make sure each character has a useful skill.

Same here, though in my reading of the rules the players can distribute the skills as they see fit (so if someone had really shitty luck on the life paths they can have a few more skills, for instance).

This might be a better place for me to ask "why not Traveller 5?"

Apparently there might be a task resolution difference between systems. So it's not 2d6 roll under in MongTraveller? But I'm going to need examples to compare:

Can someone make me an equivalent Star Wars Stormtrooper, Star Trek red shirt with phaser on stun, and Phantasy Star talking cat that casts spells through psionics? For both systems. And break down a combat in both versus a horde of fleeing Gungan/Ewok/Kender victims? Casualties welcomed.

So far, outside of bloated layout and item creation equations without examples, it doesn't sound all that bad.

Quote from: David Johansen;667880There was a AD&D 1.5 some guy did up that looked spot on perfect, this is what D&D is and should be to me.  He cut and pasted a lot of Gygax's words and reused the old art but as I looked through it I thought it was easily the best version of D&D I'd ever read.  Traveller needs something like that.  Something that fixes the original while staying true to it.  Despite some truly dreadful design and art choices Mongoose Traveller is closer to this and the allure of all the liscences they've done with it is undeniable.  Star Fleet Traveller!  How cool is that?

If I had to draw out the D&D parallel, Mongoose Traveller is Castles and Crusades and T5 is Dungeon Crawl Classics.

I'm sorry to derail this thread but where did you find that Ad&D 1.5?

I wish I could contribute to this debate but I'm a heathen who connected with Stars Without Number in a way I never could with Traveller.

Quote from: Warthur;667898Back in the early days of the hobby, an Alarums & Excursions contributor who was arguing the corner of letting a thousand house rules bloom rather than expecting everyone to stick to the letter of the law as issued forth by TSR said that (paraphrasing here) "D&D is too important to be left to Gary Gygax". I kind of feel the same about Miller and Traveller at this point. As a custodian of the game's history, he's been great, but in terms of producing products to carry the game forward, grow and refresh the fanbase, and generally ensure that it has a future beyond a small, sterile cadre of loyalists, Mongoose clearly have the edge.

I just read that section about Gygax in Playing at the World a couple of weeks ago. It was pretty amazing how so many of our contemporary issues go all the way back to the beginning of the hobby.

The big difference between Gygax and Miller, though, is that I think Miller would whole-heartedly agree with the sentiment that Traveller is bigger than him.

His whole approach from the beginning is in marked contrast to how Gygax operated. By being open to third party licenses, having an extremely generous policy for fan use of his IP, and even allowing Mongoose to use the OGL, Miller has consistently opened up his game to wider expansion, experimentation, and exploration, even when that creates contradictions in canon, or results in shaggy, messy, toolkits.

To put it in more familiar terms: where Gygax went for the Cathedral approach, with Official (tm), top-down and regulated planning, Miller embraced the Bazaar. Neither is necessarily a perfect solution, but if Mongoose Traveller demonstrates the upside of the Bazaar, T5 is a good example of the downside.

Actually, I think T5 is a stark reminder of the benefits of the Bazaar. I don't think even the advocates would like a world where it was the only in-print version of the game by any means; even die-hard T5 fans have got to admit that as far as getting new people into the game in the first place goes, it's far too obtuse, especially as a first exposure to RPGs, whereas MongTrav is about as good a recruitment tool for Traveller as I've ever seen (and would be fairly high on my list of recommendations of RPGs for people new to the hobby to try out).

Quote from: RPGPundit;667824To avoid the further derailing of the Trav5 thread, I thought I'd open up this one; I would also like to hear more concrete information about why people will feel one edition is better than the other.

RPGPundit

I'm in a rush right now, but I need to put this thought out here. I reject your premise for this thread. There is no need to proclaim that one edition is better than the other because each is meant for a different segment of the Traveller gamer audience. They are different tools for Traveller gaming, depending on the job at hand will determine which version will be best for the Players and Referee.

Quote from: Silverlion;667903Alright, I'm confused. The "Skill Packages" in my version of Mongoose Traveller, unless I'm mistaken, are things you give one skill from your campaign style to each character to make sure each character has a useful skill.

IIRC, you keep picking one skill each in turn until all the skills are gone.  So the smaller your group, the more individual skills each member will get.

My issue with the MongTrav lifepath system is the same as with FGU's Daredevils - the aging penalties take so long to kick in that character creation tends to produce characters in their forties.  I prefer my Big Damn Heroes to be in their physical prime, and a kid who's crazy good at one specific thing is almost impossible.  It's not a big deal, to some extent that is the point of the lifepath system, to make exceptional characters exceptional.

Quote from: David Johansen;667880If you were to ask me what I think Traveller really needs going forward, it would look more like Mongoose Traveller well not "look" but be similar in content.  I think it would have to use a 2d6 roll over mechanism or there'd never be peace.  There's a faction that simply will not accept any other mechanism for Traveller.  That's not totally ridiculous.  Would D&D be D&D if they made it into a dice pool system?  Would Rolemaster be Rolemaster without tables and D%OE?

Then what is GT?  GURPS merely using the Third Imperium as a setting?