The rest of the careers portion looks pretty standard; I didn't scrutinize every table. I did however note with extreme pleasure that Flyer is now a MUCH more common skill; it's part of the basic training for Agent and Citizen careers, and is included in the specialty skills for Army, Marine, Noble, and Scout, and no fewer than three times for Navy.
Um, excuse me? This is a skill-based game, and it's always been pretty damn inconvenient for Traveller PCs to increase their skills. I don't see why this is an issue, especially since the resident Genius PC in my group (Int and Edu 15) only has 43 skill levels after nearly 3 years of gaming. I don't ever see this becoming an issue, and if it does, I think it's going to be ignored.
Ship shares have been hamstrung; instead of giving you 1% ownership of a ship, it now grants 1MCr. for purposes of buying a ship. This is mitigated by the new rule that the various Ship mustering-out benefits now give you 25% off your mortgage; roll this 4 times (or pool your shares, but there are no rules for what happens if one PC rolls a lab ship, another a yacht and a third a free trader) and your ship is free.
Finally, the only
available PC races are Imperial Human (There isn't even an
entry on the Zhodani), Aslan, and Vargr. Let me just say how nice it is finally to see, in print, a tacit admission by Mongoose that they don't want people playing Droyne or Hivers or K'kree. This is something I've suspected for many years (kindly note that we haven't had an alien book since 2012) and it's good to see this attitude essentially codified.
The rest of the chapter looks essentially unchanged.
Chapter 2: Skills and Tasks
The biggest change here is that
tasks no longer have dice modifiers for ease or difficulty; instead, they now have target numbers, so a Difficult task now has a target of 10+ rather than a -2 DM to a roll.
This is literally
the first thing I did when I started playing this game, and frankly I'm surprised it took this long.
Boon and Bane dice are new. Put simply, they're an easy way for the referee to give bonuses or penalties without having to figure out how much of a DM to give. They're both an additional die to be rolled in skill checks; for a Boon, the player takes the higher of the three dice, and lower for a Bane.
On the one hand, I like this as it's fast and easy and doesn't interrupt game play. On the other, I present to you
part of a review on DriveThruRPG:
Boon and Bane dice work similarly to advantage/ disadvantage dice in D&D 5E. What works well in a light setting like 5E is the harbinger of doom in Traveller. Billed as a system to simplify the referee's job, Bane and Boon dice actually limit player options without being much better than the traditional DM based system. For example, where before you could take multiple negative DMs to cut the time required for a task by several steps, you are now limited by the B&B system to one step only, since a player can only be affected by one bane dice at a time. I used that particular system just last week in my own game. Had I been playing this edition, I would've been incinerated by a jumpcusser's laser beam. The life of a famous drive engineer and his crew ended because he was magically prevented from speeding up his rolls by more than one step.
So there's that. I think there's an easy fix to this problem: either allow multiple Bane dice to be rolled and force the PC to take the lowest two, or use the old method of "each increment increases the difficulty", or a combination of the two -- first increment gets a die, the rest crank the difficulty. But I admit I'm not a math person, so there may be something lurking within the penumbra of probability that I haven't noticed.
Speaking of penumbra: the
Electronics skill now has Comms, Computers, Remote Ops and Sensors as specialties instead of disparate skills. While I would object to this in a modern game, for a far-future setting this makes sense. Subsequently, the Engineer specialty of Electronics is now gone -- likely subsumed into Mechanic.
From a purely semantic aspect, I would have re-named Electronics as Technology and turned Mechanic into Repair, but that's just me. I also find it a bit strange that they didn't do this with other skills; Navigation seems like a natural fit for Survival or Seafarer.
Then there's a goat-rope that is
Gun Combat. Hey, do you remember how Mercenary 2e changed
Gun Combat to be just Slug and Energy specialties? That's exactly how it is here, with the addition of Archaic for things like blowgun.
Other changes:
- Trade skills have been renamed Profession. Big whoop.
- Science skills no longer are broken into Physical, Life, Social and Space; there's all just one big messy Science skill, so now your Doctor of Philosphy effectively has Physics-0. I don't like this.
- Zero-G skill is gone, and Vacc suits allows battledress operation.
Chapter 3: Combat
Initiative is somewhat different. oMong used to be roll 2d6+ Dex; NuMong has you make either a Dex or Int check, and then the
effect is your Initiative score. This means you can have negative initiatives, as a Dex/Int check is Diff 8+ unless otherwise specified. TL;DR it's a needless complication.
Acting from surprise now gives a Boon die to Initiative, rather than an automatic 12+ Dex mod.
Delay is no longer an approved action.
Dodging is different; instead of giving a -1 penalty to
everything trying to hit the character in exchange for a -1 to all actions for that round, it now gives the PC's Dex or Athletics (Dexterity) DM as a penalty for a
single attack. Does this mean that a PC with a negative Dex mod gives enemies bonuses to hit? I have no idea!
Diving for Cover is essentially "I dodge all the things and hide behind cover" in exchange for burning an action.
Cover has been greatly simplified, and in some cases (such as when hiding) gives armor instead of a to-hit penalty.
Weapons and ammo have traits now. Armor piercing rules have changed, and apparently all explosives now do full damage up to their max range, instead of falling off. Burst and Full Auto have also changed, and I leave it folks better with math than me to decide if they are improved or not.
Weapon ranges and vehicle combat have been moved to different chapters. The rest of the section seems unchanged.
Chapter 4: Encounters and Dangers
Radiation damage has been moved out of the starship combat section and over here. This seems sensible.
Animal creation is simplified. Is it better? Not especially. Whereas the old system was time consuming, it actually gave you a feel for how the creature evolved and would therefore act. This version is "give it some hit points based on its size, and assign traits and behavior as desired." In other words, the way most referees do when pressed for time.
Sample Patrons have been removed. Goodbye Abber Koja, Desperate Peasant; you were a nice example but ought to be in a GM screen, and the space is needed elsewhere.
Also gone are the two pages of sample NPCs, replaced with a table that goes from "green non-combatant" to "elite combatant" with average skill levels and characteristics. As you might guess, the table is not very useful, even though 2 pages of NPCs wasn't all that great either.
Chapter 5: Equipment
There's a hard-coded rule about
selling equipment back for half its value, which is nice.
Encumbrance has been simplified. "Heavily encumbered" is now gone -- you can only carry 2*(Str+End), and when you do, you suffer a Bane.
Now, up until this point, NuMong has hovered in the "quite all right" range; the sensible organization and addition of welcome rules has balanced some of the more questionable changes.
This chapter is where all of that changes. Right after encumbrance, there's a full page illustration advertising "The Core Collection" -- whatever
that may be, as it isn't clarified -- and then a section on armor with a big space-eating font on top.
Many
armors have been given degrees of radiation protection. This is most welcome. But weirdly, the armor values for most have been increased -- sometimes significantly so (oMong TL12 Vacc Suit has protection 6, NuMong TL12 Vacc suit has protection 10; TL14 Battledress was protection 18, now 25), and now a TL7 flak jacket provides less protection than TL7 cloth armor.
After this are two pages of art (well, art placeholders) for various items mentioned, which at the moment doesn't do anyone any good.
Battledress is now back to being armor instead of a vehicle, THANK THE GAMING GODS.
Then there's another space-eating font for Augments, and more pages of assigned space for illustrations. Then one for Communications, and you get the idea; there's so much space wasted here trying to make things look pretty that the book will suffer for it later.
By the way, whose idea was it not to put
commas in prices? I want that person drawn and quartered, because my eyes have trouble telling the difference between 20000 and 200000 unless I stop and count the zeroes.
Radio transceiver prices are screwy. Everything is given in units of Imperial purchasing power, so why is it that a TL5 continental-rage radio costs 15,000 Cr but a TL12 radio of identical range only costs 1,000 Cr?
Oh, look, the
Computer section has lovely difficult hard-to-read orange text in a strange font on a black background. While I'm certain that's an homage to old-school amber computer monitors.
it does not belong here and hurts my eyes. The print-friendly version is much easier to read.
The prices for computers is again weirdly variant based on TL with them starting off at 500 Cr at TL7, declining to a low of 100 Cr at TL10, and then climbing steadily to 5,000 Cr at TL14.
The rest of the chapter is more of the same, really. Lots of wasted space, lots of questionable changes, and an ironic bit where the guns are given a range but without being told in what. I'd sure like to assume it's in meters, but given how erratic everything else has been, I have to wonder.
Oh, and many
Heavy Weapons now do destructive damage, just like in Mercenary 2e. I'd complain about having to wait for re-stats of all the weapons from
Central Supply Catalog, but fortunately Merc2e already did that for me, so thank heaven for small favors.
Finally, there are no entries --
none -- for robots and drones. Did they run out of space?
This entire chapter needs to be ripped out.
Chapter 6: Vehicles
This section has good points and bad points:
- Combat with vehicles has been clarified, simplified, and cleaned up. I especially like the section on dogfighting.
- Vehicles take damage in a different way: they basically have hit points, and once they're chewed up, the craft is destroyed. There's no Structure anymore; it's all Hull.
- There's a system for critical hits, which deals damage to components in a manner similar to the old system.
- Vehicle armor and weapons are now on a separate, intermediate scale between personal and starship.
- The "spaces" system of construction from the Vehicle Handbook is gone (at least for the moment) and is replaced with.. nothing. There is literally no way to build a vehicle with this book. Of course, oMong didn't have that ability either.
All of this boils down to "You have to buy the new vehicle book, because this system is not backwards-compatible with the books you have now."
Chapter 7: Spacecraft Operations
What's that, you say? I've skipped some chapters? Isn't there supposed to be a section about designing starships, like in every single
Traveller game ever?
Unfortunately, the answer is "Hahaha no screw you." If you want to build a ship in Traveller, you'll have to wait until
High Guard comes out, which is sometime after March 2016. Until then, you'll use the sample ships listed in the book and you'll like it, plebe.
You're using a non-standard ship for your PCs? Sucks to be you, then.
Back to the chapter at hand, most of the rules are to be expected, with some minor changes involving Boon and Bane. There's a
new chart for resolving poor maintenance (you'll find out why in a moment), and there's a new ship stat called
Power which tells you what you can run on your ship at any one time. Sadly, Power is just a theoretical concept at this point, as
nowhere in the book can you find the power requirement for a shipboard weapon. Again: buy
High Guard, plebe.
Transit Times are still in clunky, unusable units, which is something that I'd hoped would change from 1e. Example: it takes 2,000 seconds for a 1-G ship to reach a typical orbit. That's nice, now how about putting that in terms I can use, like 33.3 minutes?
I do note that "2,000 seconds" and other times actually have commas, unlike the equipment section. I do believe the writers are being sarcastic.
Chapter 8: Space Combat
More
Range Bands instead of distances in kilometers.
Initiative is now 2d + pilot skill mod + ship's thrust score.
The addition of the
Power stat is pretty obvious: the game designers want engineers to have something to do in combat, and shutting down systems so that the captain can have "More power, Mr. Scott!" fills this role.
There are rules now where if you have
different weapons in a turret, you can only use one of them in a turn -- so now you can choose between shooting down an incoming missile or launching sand to prevent lasers from chewing you up. In other words,
don't fly a Scout/Courier, as you're now screwed.
On the other hand, it seems as if the designers liked my idea for fire-linking weapons, because if you have 2 or 2 of the same weapon type, you fire them at once with a single roll and each additional weapon adds +1 to all damage dice rolled.
Speaking of damage, spacecraft now take damage just like vehicles. Once again, I will defer to the
reviewer over at DriveThruRPG:
Space combat is totally, 100% wrecked. Structure has been removed as a stat. As an example of the changes, the normal Free Trader now has a hull rating of 40. Weapon damage is, on the whole, the same as 1E. System hits are now restricted to critical hits exclusively. Where in 1E, you'd get through the hull and the armor, then start hitting systems and structure before actually destroying the ship, when you remove the hull in 2E, the ship is destroyed and beyond, and I quote, "any repair". That's right-- hull points are now health points. 1E's harrowing, highly-lethal, and most of all satisfying damage model has given way to what is essentially ground combat in space with more hit-points. Not only that, but good luck taking it as a prize. At least after a combat in 1E, you could take hull-less ships as heavily-damaged rewards, or for salvage, or something. Now you're just... out of luck? The fact that system hits are now essentially random means that power is more of an annoyance than anything in the combats I've run. While it could have been a welcome addition to the simulation of 1E, it seems like a pointless extra stat in a system that wants to be this light. Several ships cannot actually run their maneuver drives, jump drives, and basic ship systems in combat at the same time, as well. This is before weapons, you understand. I'd fix this, if there were any actually any ship construction mechanics in the core rulebook. Those are stripped out in favor of a multi-book "core collection" philosophy. The ghost of D&D whispers at our airlock again, friends.
Other fun changes:
- Bonus reactions from high Initiative are gone.
- Pulse lasers are now medium range, meaning there are no short range weapons available.
- Particle Beams are very long range.
- Missiles now do 4d damage! There's no differentiation between basic, smart, or nuke; they all do 4d damage. I'm not sure if I ought to be impressed or appalled.
- I'd like to point out that in oMong, nukes only did 2d. Now, I'm on record as saying that missiles were anemic and needed improvement, but they've now been scaled up to torpedo damage!
- But I think what bugs me most about missiles is this:
- In oMong, we had the missile chart where it took 10 turns to hit a distant target and all missiles moved at thrust 5.
- Then High Guard said "Whoops, our bad, missiles move at Thrust 10, all turns to impact are halved."
- But now NuMong is back to the old chart with the old thrust times. WTF?
Chapter 9: Common Spacecraft
Also known as "These are the ships we'll permit you to have until we finish with
High Guard."
All
deck plans in the color version are isometric; the printer-friendly version has flat 2d plans, as God and Marc Miller intended.
I'm sure that fans of the setting will be happy to note that the iconic
Empress Marava class of
Far Trader has been replaced by a J-2 Beowulf variant.
I realize it's poor form to bag on layout errors in a Beta, but I find it humorous that there are tables and chairs stuck in the forward bulkhead of the
Free Trader. And there's no air/raft garage in this model, either.
There is also NO common room in the
Scout/Courier -- it's been replaced with a workshop. Why do I foresee an increase in cabin fever among Scout crews?
The
Lab Ship looks awkward in isometric, but looks pretty good in 2d. Funny, that.
The
Mercenary Cruiser continues to look ungainly and its decks are a mess. So, SOP, really.
The
Patrol Cruiser replaces the Gazelle and has a deck plan that I don't hate, but don't really love, either.
Apparently private toilets are a thing of the past, which makes the
Safari Ship, Subsidized Liner and
Yacht that much less luxurious.
The
Subsidized Merchant finally has a logical deck plan.
Ships missing: Gazelle, Heavy Freighter, Corsair, Police Cutter.
Ships added: Slow Boat and Slow Pinnace, with stats and deckplans for all small craft.
This brings us to page 204. I wish to inform you that 1e Mongoose Traveller ended on page 192 (including a character sheet and hex paper) and was a complete game that included ship creation.
Chapter 10: Psionics
I'm not sure how I feel about NuMong psionics. They are, overall, far more effective now; some may love this, and others will hate it.
The the
psi point prices have been reduced and the ranges increased, sometimes tremendously so (Example: 1e Telepathy had a free range of close, +1 psi point for Medium, +2 for Very Long, +3 for Distant and +4 for Planetary. 2e, most Telepathy powers have an inherent range of Distant, but you can increase that by doubling or quadrupling psi price).
The
Mind link talent is back, and
Suggestion has been added to TP. In what I can only hope is a typographical error,
Teleportation costs
nothing -- so long as you don't mind going places naked. (In which case, cyborg the heck out of yourself and become the Terminator.)
The rest of the chapter looks fairly standard, although I admit that I have likely missed things.
Chapter 11: Trade
There's a new form of passage, called
Basic, which is essentially steerage or troop berthing: 4 people to a room, with half a dton for them to sleep in and 10kg baggage. It's like low passage, only with no privacy but less risk of death. I like this.
Hauling
freight is much more profitable now, although there is this weird thing going on for J-6 where the prices suddenly increase by an entire decimal point. I mean that literally: J-5 middle passage is 34,000 Cr (commas are gone again, BTW) but J-6 is 350,000 Cr. WTF? I'm puzzled by this.
Rolling for passengers is now less complicated as it doesn't involve planetary characteristics (like Rich, High Population, etc). I admit that this is faster and easier, but it's also less commercially "realistic"from a system that previously sought to simulate a lot. I do not like this.
Available tons, and therefore base prices, of
basic trade goods have been doubled. I'm indifferent about this, because although it makes sense, I've yet to see a PC group engage in spec trade with basic goods.
Chapter 12: World and Universe Creation
There are new entries in the
Government table: Religious Autocracy and Totalitarian Oligarchy have been added.
Here's another great example of page wastage: the Cultural Differences table, that took just one page (p.117) of oMong, now take up two in NuMong (p.230-231). So they have room to waste like this, and the book is already over 1e's pagecount, but a starship creation system is too much to add...
In a welcome change,
Starport Classes now get a bonus or penalty to their 2d6 rolls based on the population of their planets.
Chapter 13: Sindal Sub-Sector
The book concludes with 10 pages on a subsector within the Trojan Reach. This by itself is not a bad thing; the
Pirates of Drinax campaign is within the Reach, and the sector hasn't gotten as much love as the Spinward Marches.
Why, then, did the writers include as their introductory adventure
High and Dry, which is set in the Spinward Marches and which has plot hooks designed to keep PCs within the Marches? I think this is a missed opportunity; the adventure should have been re-written to better place it within Sindal subsector.
That said, I like the writeup; it's always nice to see new segments of the Travellerverse opened up, and Dolberg, especially, is an amusing planet.
Is This Worth Buying?
Short answer:
No.
Long answer: The new material is worth maybe 10 bucks, and the rules fixes aren't that remarkable. I'm not impressed with most of the changes, and making ship generation part of a separate book is an unpardonable sin for a game called
Traveller. This could have been mitigated in a few ways, though:
- We could have been given a graph showing how power plants generate Power, and the Power costs of weapons, so that players could make changes to their own ships.
- All ship elements could have been cut from this book altogether, with the disclaimer that "Ships will be addressed when High Guard comes out. Until then, continue using the old system."
I have a sneaking suspicion that one of the reasons ship design was cut from the book was because the rules for it have changed such that it renders all previous ship books (
Merchants and Gunboats, Fighting Ships, Merchants and Cruisers, Trillion Credit Squadron) incompatible with the current system. Buy them all again, plebe!
So unless you enjoy nitpicking, arguing on the internet, or fighting what is likely a hopeless battle to change things you don't like, then stay away from this. Your old
Traveller books will work just fine, and given how character creation has changed very little, further adventures ought to be easily compatible.
I'm STILL annoyed there isn't a Droyne book, though, and won't be for some time, if ever. After all, the "core" books have to be printed in time for GenCon 2016.
PDF
