Played both; wants to play both.
I have played both 2300AD and Tw2k. The 2300AD is supposed to be more hard sci-fi than the original Traveller. So there are no personal laser weapons, teleporters, limited ship movements in space (no ST warp drives) or other Star Trek or Star Wars like stuff. Rather most weapons are still bullets, some early gauss rifles. Most spacesuits are like we know from the 1980s. The only major change is that oil isn't a power source and instead its all hydrogen power with some small fusions reactors for cities. Realistically, in space there was only a few large ships and most of them are controlled by either governments or mega-corps. As a player you either play as Mercs or with the right module, you are a colonist who gets thrust into a militia defending the region from other mega-corps or an alien invasion. There are some Earth based modules, one set in the Texas trying to keep a guy alive or protect his body from an enemy merc unit. Another is set in Libreville, Gabon where the Earth space elevator is located. The whole module is about how the place is full of crooks, villains, corruption. Sort of like how Mos Eisley is described in Star Wars. You can help try and clean up the town, operate with the crooks, or try and become a element of corruption. Most folks hate this module that are fans of the engine, but when I played it almost 25 years ago with my friends; it was fun for us because the whole opportunity to become rich and famous was good.
I enjoy it because it feels very much like Heinlein style juveniles. The hard science stuff, the chances of being part of some space patrol, the use of intelligence to avoid combat was the primary; but good dice rolls could lead to fun combat. To me with Version 1 and Version 2 of the game, the rules and skills seemed to translate between it and the two versions of Tw2k. So it make it sense and character translation between the two games is fairly easy, at least in my opinion.
That all said, the initial offerings by GDW are considered weak compared to both the original Traveller and Tw2k, since the rules seemed a little more complex and the version 1 rule book had a metric butt ton of errata as well as the setup in the rules wasn't very good. A bunch of page flipping to find out things that should have been in logically order weren't. If I remember (my books are in storage with my cousin), things like combat and healing were like 4 or 5 chapters apart.
The backstory is interesting since it does fill in everything that happens to the world between the end of the Twilight War and the 2299-2300 time frame. The rise and fall of France, the reunited Germany, the various Chinese states, the US, Texas, Mexico, Canada, etc. With the original GDW version of the rules they just mentioned that the Twilight War happened, but it wasn't much more than a paragraph and the 2000s to 2100 is talked about as the recovery period. With the Mongoose version, seemed to make allusions to the T2013 backstory.
I have the Mongoose version of 2300, however it also depends on the Mongoose Traveller V1 rules to play. Since the Mongoose 2300 is grafted on to those rules. I just haven't found anyone in my area that wants to do 2300AD or Traveller; so I can't talk about how it plays in real life.
__________________
Hey, Law and Order's a team, man. He finds the bombs, I drive the car. We tried the other way, but it didn't work.
|
07-23-2020, 07:11 PM
Hybrid Mode
