Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;1010255This is all waaaaay off topic but:
...

Thanks Christopher for all that information, I'll continue this with you via PM, lots to discuss. I don't want to interrupt the discussion about DFD.

Quote from: Séadna;1010288Thanks Christopher for all that information, I'll continue this with you via PM, lots to discuss. I don't want to interrupt the discussion about DFD.

Great. And note that I have added two more links at the end of the previous post I made, leading to more discussion about Referee-driven play in the first years of the hobby.

Quote from: estar;1010272So which subset of the OSR is next on your hit list? The gonzo crowd? The sandbox guys like myself and Autarch(ACKS)?

I thought Pundit was "the gonzo crowd"?? Murder-suicide.

Quote from: K Peterson;1010296I thought Pundit was "the gonzo crowd"?? Murder-suicide.

Things do get dark inside Pundit's bunker sometimes.

As usual there's nothing the matter with a 'fantasy fucking Vietnam' style or combat as war approach. Although I question how suited D&D really is to that style of play, which to me something like RQ seems better suited. The issue, such as it is, is when the clear implication or claim is that this is how D&D was played or 'meant'  to be played in an imaginary 'back in the day.' People acting tough over the way they play pretend will never not be silly.

Quote from: Voros;1010303The issue, such as it is, is when the clear implication or claim is that this is how D&D was played or 'meant' to be played in an imaginary 'back in the day.'

Has anyone on this thread made such claims?

No, but as we know Pundit is often reacting to something other than what the person he is speaking to actually said. That’s why I said ‘the issue, such as it is.’

Ummm... okay then.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1010204A Green Devil Face waiting for an arm, forever.

Pundit, that's amusing, but could you cut down on the exaggerations? Please?

Quote from: Séadna;1010230There was the box mockup of "Wanderer", outside of that I'm not sure. Personally I've never ran just a plain horror game in Traveller, SciFi with horror yes. For the others not at all. Would be interesting to try.

I should rephrase the original post. What would Lamentations have been like coming at its aesthetic from a hard SciFi angle rather than a picaresque Fantasy one and with the skill system of Traveller.

The assumption would change from dangerously greedy and maybe a bit mad adventurers going too far for treasure, to competent ex-military taking a contract to Death Station Doom. Possibly no different though!

There's also Mercator, which is free on the Zozer Games site, and Worlds Apart, and Flynn's guide to magic. You could, basically, run LotFP adventures with it:)!

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;1010255I don't think the skill system of Traveller limits the characters. Skills in Classic Traveller are not necessarily a definition of what one can do, but rather what one has expertise at. Specifically, per the text, they are what one can get paid to do. A former Marine in Classic Traveller can do many things -- but he's got a few skills he's so good at he can be paid to do them.

Have I told you that your view of Traveller skills reminds me of Careers in Barbarians of Lemuria?
Which is also a 2d6 system,now that I think of it...

QuoteFor example, if an engine stops working on a space ship you don't need to have a Mechanical skill to get it fixed. You could get it to a starport for repair. In the same way you don't need Time Stop to kill four opponents in the blink of an eye while they are helpless against your attacks. You could just kill them in normal combat at the risk of taking damage yourself. In both cases there are always ways of getting most things done in both games.... but relatively speaking, having a spell or skill allows a PCs to short-cut the process and invoke his desires faster.

Yes, in the sense that you use something on your sheet, roll dice, and get a result. But some spells don't require rolling, and therefore, have no chance of failure;).

Quote from: AsenRG;1010400Yes, in the sense that you use something on your sheet, roll dice, and get a result. But some spells don't require rolling, and therefore, have no chance of failure;).

I see your point about the rolling being different than an automatic success. But whether or not the use of the skill or spell is rolled isn't the issue at hand for me in this analogy, so the fact that there isn't a 1:1 comparison doesn't concern me. My point was to compare how we have come to think of skills today (a long list that can handle almost all things a human can do, with the skills on the character sheet being the go-to default for characters doing things), to the list of original Traveller (idiosyncratic and short, not at all a complete list of human talents and abilities, in a game where we simply talk between players as the default with the Referee making adjudications as needed, with rolling dice and maybe adding a skill DM not as the default for resolving issues but as the backup plan when the conversation element isn't enough for the Referee to make a call.) In such cases the use of a Situation Throw involving any number of the Traveller skills can make the journey of repairing a damaged engine (trek across this endless waste to reach civilization, and then kidnap a mechanic when no one at the starport is willing to help you) to a single roll that solves everything quickly.

Whether or not the party has someone with Mechanical skill, the ship can still be repaired. It simply might not be with a Situation Throw involving a Mechanical skill as a DM. It might be a whole adventure.

(In other words, the point is not to supply adventures the "ping" the skills the party has. It is to provide adventures. And if the skills are there to make the lives of the party easier, great. If not, their lives are more complicated. Pinging skills in RuneQuest, by contrast, is part of how the game works -- because skill advancement is done through rolling the skills. Classic Traveller does not work this way.)

I need to make it clear when I speak about mechanics I'm not talking solely about how one "rolls the dice" -- which is, I know, how most people defined RPG mechanics. I'm talking about how all the procedures fit together during play. That Classic Traveller is defined, on page 1 of Book 1, as a "conversation game" is a big statement about how play proceeds, and thus the mechanics of play.

The definition of "mechanics" as "how we roll the dice" is how we get lots of RPGs in which we look at our character sheet for what number to roll to solve problems, instead of focusing on the "conversation" part in which we simply talk, with the PCs coming up with out of the box ideas, often precluding the the need for die rolls.

To swing it all around, I think early D&D (and clones like LotFP) often work the same way. Which makes sense. Games like OD&D, original Traveller, and B/X D&D grew from a different soil than later RPGs.

As for BoL... I've played it and it's charming. But it does what later games do -- codifies all things down the character sheet for the roll to solve problems every time.

I'm really much more interested in these earlier RPGs that work more from the conversation between Referee and Players that does not depend on rolling as the default method of the PCs taking action. Things are much more freeform, with the conversation and evocative narration of how the PCs do things sometimes precluding the need for rolls, and providing ad hoc DMs if rolls are required.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;1010416Pinging skills in RuneQuest, by contrast, is part of how the game works -- because skill advancement is done through rolling the skills.

I've never felt the need to do that when running any variant of RQ. I must have missed where the rules told me to do that and have been doing it wrong all these years... I always saw it as being closer to Traveller (in how it's generally less concerned with character advancement as a primary goal) compared to D&D.
I must be playing it wrong too, because I use my character's concept to solve problems, how he'd see/approach the challenge, rather than look at the 'skill menu'. It's up to the GM to determine which skill, if any, applies to what action I declare my PC to be taking.

Quote from: Simlasa;1010420I've never felt the need to do that when running any variant of RQ. I must have missed where the rules told me to do that and have been doing it wrong all these years...

Never said you were doing it wrong.

Here is a passage from the RuneQuest 2 rules covering how to set up an adventure and run the game:

Quote"An adventure area, whether it be a section of forest, cave, old ruin, river etc. should provide the players with the following opportunities:
--experience in the use of his skills
--opportunity to obtain treasure and thereby purchase further training
--the chance to die in pursuit of the above
--enjoyment while doing all of the above"

[emphasis added]

No one is obliged to do as directed. You certainly aren't. I'm not. But it is there in the rulebook.

Whether or not one needs to follow those instructions, I mentioned RuneQuest in the reference of two points:

• First, that the mechanics of RuneQuest do demand application (as do many later RPGs) for improvement, in contrast to Traveller.
• Second, there are a LOT of people (not you!) who assume that the they need to build their Classic Traveller situation/scenarios around the skills the PCs possess. (Note this sentence from Séadna from a few posts back: "You'll tend to be narrower with a guy who is 'Str 16, Gun (Slug Pistol) 2 etc' than a guy who is just Str 16, especially as the former suggests particular scenarios to engage in." You can also find this notion posted regularly over at the Traveller-dedicated Citizens of the Imperium forum.) I mentioned RuneQuest because the Referee section says to tailor scenarios in this way, it was one of the first games to emphasize skills this way, and it influenced many later skill-driven RPGs. My point is that (whether or not you played RQ this way) it was one of the games that started a view of skill-use in RPGs that took hold that stands in contrast to the use of skills in original Traveller.

However, one can (and should) design scenarios and focus on skills (or not) exactly as one wants when running RuneQuest.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;1010426"An adventure area, whether it be a section of forest, cave, old ruin, river etc. should provide the players with the following opportunities:
--experience in the use of his skills
--opportunity to obtain treasure and thereby purchase further training
--the chance to die in pursuit of the above
--enjoyment while doing all of the above"

Interesting, that text is in RuneQuest 1, yet I never really made an attempt to provide challenges for most of the character's skills (and RQ 1 actually says "experience in the use of most of his skills"), I just set up scenarios or used modules or converted D&D modules. Interestingly, Traveller adventures, with their pregen PCs, may encourage more "build the adventure to suit the characters" than RuneQuest does with its adventures despite the two games suggesting the opposite...

Frank

For full info: The passage I quoted above is from page 102 of RuneQuest 2nd. (The fact that RQ1 said "most" is fascinating.)

As for the Traveller adventures... yeah. Adventure 1: The Kinunir had no pregens, and to this day remains for me the "most Classic Traveller" of the Classic Traveller adventures in its open ended nature and scope. As the Classic Traveller adventure line continued they became more linear, more dependent on having the correct skills, and, in general, more in line with the changing tastes of the RPG hobby.

There was things thing called Traveller... and then the expectations of the hobby changed, and the products released by GDW changed around the rules of Traveller even as the rules remained the same.

This, in my view, led to a lot of confusion as to why the game did not "work" -- when in fact it works fine if you use to do what it was supposed to do.

Quote from: Simlasa;1010420I must be playing it wrong too, because I use my character's concept to solve problems, how he'd see/approach the challenge, rather than look at the 'skill menu'. It's up to the GM to determine which skill, if any, applies to what action I declare my PC to be taking.

To be fair, while Runequest has skill and advancement through increasing skill, the way it written is very heavy on the roleplaying. I.e. pretending to be the character in the setting of the campaign (most of the time Glorantha). So your experience with Runequest doesn't surprise me.

And also the other main "point" of the mechanics was to better reflect Perrin and his group experienced renacting and fighting in the SCA than what D&D did. It wasn't to make a bunch of kewl powers and be fantasy superpowers.

Also another form of advancement in Runequest 2 is paying for training. If you want a broken Runequest character just get a lot of money, a GM who is lack on roleplaying the setting, and take advantage of every form of training.