You actually skipped a step when it comes to damage. Weapons don't do dice of damage but rather points of damage (a hit from the assault rifle doesn't do 3d6 damage, it does 3 damage). Damage is first applied to your life force totals (the Merchant Doctor would have 3/3 life force). The assault rifle dealing 3 damage would drop the Merchant Doctor to 0/3, which means he is unconscious but not dead. Once combat is over, a friendly character can perform triage to assess what those 3 damage points actually mean for injuries. Then and only then do you actually convert the damage points into dice to reduce characteristics. As a result, you never lose characteristics during combat… only after. It is assumed that pure adrenaline keeps you from realizing the wound to your leg actually reduced your dexterity to zero. Once characteristics are adjusted, the character's new life force is totaled for future combats (in your example, the doctor would be reduced to a life force of 2/1 after he was brought back to consciousness… a very dangerous place to be and close to death). Note, because damage points and the assessed damage to characteristics are separate, it is quite possible that a character is "killed" (i.e. presumed dead because they lose all their life force) and nevertheless discovered alive after the battle because the assessed damage dice did not actually drop all their physical characteristics to zero! That always makes the assessment rolls after combat very nail-biting and exciting in my experience.
I'll pin these comments to the top so people can see this correction, I've obviously been mixed up between the many versions of Traveller I've been covering. Many thanks for the detailed update.
@3:40 I believe you may have made a mistake here… beyond the crucial skills/characteristics, there are not really any modifiers in MegaTraveller (although I suppose you as a referee could do whatever you want). Instead, to make a task more easy or more difficult, you just change the difficulty level (i.e. bump a routine task up to difficult, or knock it down to simple). As a result, MegaTraveller is basically a modifier-free system. I think you were looking at the "minus" symbol in the diagram, but what that means is that you subtract the crucial DMs from the time roll (whereas you add them to the task roll). The lack of tables and tables of modifiers is part of what makes MegaTraveller different than other editions.
@@RPGGamerThe default character name in Elite was Commander Jameson - the character gen example in 1977 Traveller was Alexander Lascelles Jameson, a free trader character.
And one of the joys of the system, although a bit silly to spend ages building a character only for them to die before you can play them. But I adore it never-the-less.
@@RPGGamer I think Basic used hexadecimals as well, and alot of RPG designers in the 80s probably did their own text-adventure games in Basic as well as pen-and-paper.
You actually skipped a step when it comes to damage. Weapons don't do dice of damage but rather points of damage (a hit from the assault rifle doesn't do 3d6 damage, it does 3 damage). Damage is first applied to your life force totals (the Merchant Doctor would have 3/3 life force). The assault rifle dealing 3 damage would drop the Merchant Doctor to 0/3, which means he is unconscious but not dead. Once combat is over, a friendly character can perform triage to assess what those 3 damage points actually mean for injuries. Then and only then do you actually convert the damage points into dice to reduce characteristics. As a result, you never lose characteristics during combat… only after. It is assumed that pure adrenaline keeps you from realizing the wound to your leg actually reduced your dexterity to zero. Once characteristics are adjusted, the character's new life force is totaled for future combats (in your example, the doctor would be reduced to a life force of 2/1 after he was brought back to consciousness… a very dangerous place to be and close to death). Note, because damage points and the assessed damage to characteristics are separate, it is quite possible that a character is "killed" (i.e. presumed dead because they lose all their life force) and nevertheless discovered alive after the battle because the assessed damage dice did not actually drop all their physical characteristics to zero! That always makes the assessment rolls after combat very nail-biting and exciting in my experience.
I'll pin these comments to the top so people can see this correction, I've obviously been mixed up between the many versions of Traveller I've been covering.
Many thanks for the detailed update.
@3:40 I believe you may have made a mistake here… beyond the crucial skills/characteristics, there are not really any modifiers in MegaTraveller (although I suppose you as a referee could do whatever you want). Instead, to make a task more easy or more difficult, you just change the difficulty level (i.e. bump a routine task up to difficult, or knock it down to simple). As a result, MegaTraveller is basically a modifier-free system. I think you were looking at the "minus" symbol in the diagram, but what that means is that you subtract the crucial DMs from the time roll (whereas you add them to the task roll). The lack of tables and tables of modifiers is part of what makes MegaTraveller different than other editions.
The template for the computer game Elite from 1984.
Yep, they lifted the government types for Elite from Traveller, and some of the other planet generation stuff.
@@RPGGamerThe default character name in Elite was Commander Jameson - the character gen example in 1977 Traveller was Alexander Lascelles Jameson, a free trader character.
Dying in character generation is a possibility
And one of the joys of the system, although a bit silly to spend ages building a character only for them to die before you can play them. But I adore it never-the-less.
I suspect this game was made by someone dabbling in assembly code by the hexadecimal usage 😄
I think they probably drew from that, as they thought that computer code and hexadecimal was "futuristic".
@@RPGGamer I think Basic used hexadecimals as well, and alot of RPG designers in the 80s probably did their own text-adventure games in Basic as well as pen-and-paper.