Customer Reviews

Traveller's Handbook (Traveller T20 D20)

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The Travellers Handbook for the d20 game system is easily the best d20 release since the original D&D 3E Player's Handbook. To put it simply -- this book rocks!

T20 uses the popular d20 rules system, yet retains the distinctive flavor and classic style of Traveller, the first science fiction role-playing game. It is not just D&D in outer space. This is a harder, grittier, more realistic sci-fi RPG than Star Wars or Dragonstar.

This hefty book is packed with goodness. All of the classic Traveller elements are here: the jump drives, the character prior history, the cool alien races, the archetypal starships and armed traders. The prior history system alone makes this product a must-buy for RPGers. You can create a 10th-level Traveller character in about the same amount of time it takes to create a first-level D&D character. And multiclassing, which is encouraged, is a breeze. Many of the skills and feats will be familiar to D&D 3E players. The new skills and feats make sense for a sci-fi setting, and many can be imported to other d20 games.

Another strong point are the creation rules. With these, you can create new items -- such as computers, ground vehicles and starships -- from a wide range of technology levels. There also are rules for creating whole star systems. These rules are generic enough that they can be used with any d20 game setting, and can easily be adapted for use in any game system.

The combat system also is very flexible. It can be used for person-to-person combat, vehicle-to-vehicle combat or starship-to-starship combat, or any mixture between the three. Stuck in a planetside firefight and need your friends in orbit to help you out with a meson gun or particule beam bombardment? Or want to try to shoot down that pirate corsair in orbit from your grav tank? No problem, the rules can handle that.

If combat is not your bag, there are economic rules for trading cargoes. Want to buy a starship and make your fortune in the stars? The rules are all there. You can even engage in speculative trading -- buying low on one planet and selling high on another. If your merchant instincts are right, you can make a big score. If you're wrong, well, you might have to try you hand at a little smuggling to make your next mortgage payment. The rules also cover prospecting on planet or in an asteroid field.

Traveller has always been one of the most richly detailed, highly flexible and best sci-fi RPGs ever created. T20 continues that grand tradition while at the same time carving out its own unique pocket universe among the plethora of d20 products.

This is easily the best d20 old-game-to-new-game adaption I've seen in the last couple years. It is fully developed - tons of skills, classes, feats, and equipment. The combat rules are logical and lethal. Starship combat, psionics, and planetary generation are well-designed and incorporated, drawing on twenty years of game development. The "Imperium" background is vague enough to allow plenty of flexibility when designing the setting while still providing enough of an inspiration framework to avoid doing it from scratch.

The game is a hard-science sci-fi roleplaying game - more Star Trek or Foundation than Star Wars. Belongs on every gamer's shelf.

This is a comprehensive and well executed adaption of D20 to Traveller. Traveller is a game I've held in high esteem since I was a young teen in 1983. The other reviewers do a great job of describing what's appealing about Traveller, so for the sake of brevity: ditto.

But not only that. It's a better D20. Here are the areas where I think T20 does better than D20:
1. Armour exists not only to deflect weapons, but to reduce damage.
2. Being more experienced doesn't make weapons less damaging. A sword or pistol is always a dangerous thing to have pointed at you.
3. People who work together have different backgrounds, different levels of experience, and different ages.
4. Magic Powers (in this case, psionics) are built on the existing skill system and bought with skill points.
5. In many cases, you can compensate for poor education by having high IQ, poor charisma by higher social standing, etc.
6. Experience points for completing objectives, rather than winning fights.

If you like lots of combats where your character takes a half-dozen 10-point sword wounds in a row and comes out fighting, and you get masses of XP for this, then this game isn't for you.

If you like a lot of variety with exploration, role-playing, a few *very* dangerous fights, space ships, high-tech, low-tech, utopias, hell-worlds, commerce, aliens, etc, then try this game.

Thank goodness someone has taken the time to re-write Traveller for D20! There are many, many things that excite me about this rulebook. One of the most inventive has to be the Lifeblood System introduced here in the pages. For all gamers, this is a "MUST" have book. For all of you older Traveller fans, the wait is finally over! Go get this book! That's just my .02 Cr.

The long wait to a modern vision. The best game produced with out being backed by a movie. Mark Miller wrote the forward and you can tell he is happy about the product that was his baby, and now all grown up, setting another standered in RPG's. Thank God for this book, saved me from giving up gaming.

I'm a big Traveller fan. It was one of the first RPGs I ever played and the first I GMed. I've owned products from every incarnation of it, even the dreaded Gurps Traveller, and own almost all original (or Classic as it's now called these days) Traveller products.

Physically, this is an impressive book. It's heavy, and it's huge. That's the first thing you notice. The next thing you notice is the price tag (...). Though after a quick mental "D'oh!", you realize it's priced reasonably, given it's size. (...)

Traveller 20, or T20, takes the tack that Fading Suns d20 took - ditching all the regular d20 classes and introducing several new ones. Herein lies much of the problems I have with T20. Although realistic, several of the classes are simply terrible at combat. They have a Base Attack Bonus progression which ends up at +5 when they are 20th level. Again, this is somewhat realistic, especially for classes like the "Academic". But I think it's bad game design. You're going to end up with many characters simply worthless in combat. No one likes playing the far future version of Richard Simmons. By using the weakest normal Base Attack Bonus progression (where it ends up at +10 at 20th level), you're giving the character a much better chance of being useful, yet aren't stretching reality too much.

I also found it odd that the Army class has a fairly weak base attack bonus progression - the average one in d20 terms, that ends up at +15 at 20th level. The Navy is even worse. Not quite as bad as the Academic, but weak (the weakest normal progression, like that of a wizard). Should military classes be worse at combat than a Mercenary? Maybe the Navy, but not the Army. And should Mercenaries be on par with Marines? Marines are considered to be the toughest regular fighting forces around (and this is especially true in the Traveller universe). So I'd definitely say no.

While presumably not everyone will run a combat heavy game, Traveller always had a strong criminal and mercenary slant since the begining (early on, it was more or less "Thugs in Space", where the PCs were criminals or toughs.) So this great imbalance between the classes is perhaps a bigger problem in a game like Traveller than other SF games.

I also have problems with the concepts of some of the core classes. The "Traveller" class for instance. Does that really need a class? No. And why is "Mercenary" a core class? I don't really get how you can become a mercenary from the get go, once you're 18. It seems like it's something that you can't start out in, but can become on after a tour in the military or somesuch. I.e., essentially a prestige class. In fact, this is likely why in the original Traveller, which didn't have classes but had careers, there was no mercenary or "Traveller" career. Though they did follow the classic Traveller careers fairly closely (which is good, as early reports about the game had them doing something complete different and very wacky), I think they should have followed them much closer.

In a way, all core classes are somewhat similar in that all their special abilities are bonus feats. Some of the feats are exclusive to that class, but they all get the same number of bonus feats (about one every other level).

There are 3 prestige classes - the Big Game Hunter, the TAS reporter, and the "Ace Pilot". By contrast, these do have some special class abilities which aren't feats. But the Ace Pilot is a really dorky name. I can't help but think of Red Dwarf - Ace Rimmer. I think the first two should have been regular, core classes (well, maybe a generic reporter or media class). I also think some more prestige classes were needed. Special Forces, for army characters. Assassin. Lots more.

I also think Psionics should have been handled as a prestige class. Not only does it makes sense (that's one thing prestige classes are for - secret societies and such), there are balance reasons for it. As it is, Psionics are largely handled by feats and by random luck. If you have psionics, you might have powers in one of 5 different areas, or spheres. Each different power requires a feat to be taken, and each sphere is also a skill which needs to be built up. Okay, except that all spheres are not equal. Telepathy has 7 different powers or feats. Telekinesis has one. Teleportation has one. The latter two are potentially very powerful, depending on the character's PSI ability.

So, while I think most new classes are okay, some are flawed pretty badly, either in execution or concept. Even as NPCs classes, they wouldn't work. And as there are no NPC classes, the workload on the DM or Referee is going to be increased a lot. For some reason, many don't realize that part of the reason for the NPC class was to make things easy on the DM - the original ones are all very simple, with no special abilities or powers (other than the adept and it's spells). This is somewhat mitigated by the large appendix of stats for NPCs. But still annoying, IMHO.

Another interesting idea, but flawed (or so I think) is how characters gain past experience, called Prior History. This is similar to past versions of Traveller, and is almost a game of it's own. But in essence, the problem is it ends up producing characters that have a wide variety of character levels (each year of prior history, they get 1000 xp, plus possible bonuses). One PC might have a 3rd level character. Another might have a 10th. While this is perhaps realistic (though honestly, older is not always better), it largely defeats the whole purpose of having character levels (which is to make combat ability easier to gauge, as well as general competence).

While Prior History has balance problems, it also is quite confusing. I can't quite figure out how college works. Characters in it get XP, but what class are they? Academic? Any class they want? It doesn't say. And multiclassing is confusing. On the one hand, it says anyone can apply to a service class until they are 33, but in the multiclass rules, it says those classes can't be multiclassed into unless you have prior experience in that class. So how do you multiclass into it? And the Mercenary career - the text mentions an Academic might want to multiclass into that, but Mercenary is restricted to those who were in the Army, Navy or Marines. And why can't Scouts be a Mercenary? They were in a military service, and are as good in combat (in T20 terms) as the Army and better than the Navy. Or Rogues? While not in the military, they are good at combat as well.

It doesn't help that the only example of prior history is as simple as you can get: a character that starts off a rogue and stays a rogue his entire career (he's also immensely fat, perhaps this was meant to be a Marlon Brando/Godfather reference). Gee, thanks for the help. So in making up characters, we just ignored the multiclass restrictions in the prior career, and no one took university.

Speaking of combat, T20 introduces several new combat rules, most pretty major. For one, there are no more hit points. Instead, there are stamina points, which are more or less identical to hit points (and go up every level). There is also "Lifeblood" points, which are based on a characters constitution and are fixed. The explanation of this is actually hard to find in the book. It's in the combat chapter, but rather being the first thing explained, it's buried after a long section on starship sensors. WTF?

Anyway, since there are two types of hit points,armor is handled a bit differently. Armor increases armor class, but also has a damage reduction value. This reduces the number of dice a weapon does, to a mininum of one. The remaining value is then subtracted from that remaining die (which was the high roll). It's confusing to explain, but is actually fairly clever.

Example:

Alec is wearing cloth armor, which has a rating of 6. Homer comes along and shoots him with a Laser Rifle, which does 3d10 damage. Homer rolls for damage and gets a 7, 10, and 4. Alec thus takes 21 stamina poinst of damage, which is easy enough to figure, but the lifeblood damage would be 6. The cloth armor has a rating of 6, so that means 6 dice would be removed from the total. But there's only 3. So 2 of the 3 are removed, leaving the roll of 10 (the highest). From that roll of 10, 4 is subracted, leaving 6. (4 because the armor rating of cloth armor is 6, but 2 of that was used to remove dice).

I find this pretty clever, and it seems to work well enough, though it has some quirks. They've also managed to keep weapon damages and armor value consistent with other d20 stuff. Another change is that strength no longer helps in melee combat, it's dexterity, like in missile.

About 110 pages of the book is on design sequences for vehicles and examples of vehicles. While many Traveller fans are in fact people who love to design stuff, I think this really would have been better suited for another book. It's also really only suited for Traveller games, as Traveller tends to make certain assumptions about it's starships that don't really apply to other universes. (For one, their expense. Ships in Traveller are insanely expensive. Contrast that to say, Star Wars, where starships are priced like cars. Or most SF games where they are more like ocean ships. This is one of those things I never liked about Traveller. There's no real reason for starships to be that expensive, given the technology levels - robot construction, contra grav, computer design, all would drastically reduce the cost of starships. But they still cost 200 million credits+, even for a small ship. I also don't understand how it can take years to build relatively small ships either. But I digress).

Basically, by comparison, in 35 pages or so, the Imperial Encyclopedia fro

T20 is a really great game. It may look a little pricey, but you get a lot of bang for the buck (unlke many expensive White Wolf books, this one is packed with info).

I highly recommend this if you like the d20 system. I doubt that Wizard's d20 Future will even hold a candle to it.