The Fourth Creep

 Omer Golan-Joel of Stellagama Publishing wrote of the 'Three Creeps" in Traveller: Modifier creep, Complexity creep, and Scale creep. Modifier creep is typified chargen in LBBs 1-7. Skills are piled and piled on characters, weapons get more and more addies to hit. Complexity creep is typified by the starship design in Book 5. Scale creep can be described by Trillion Credit Squadron. Instead of a small ship Universe we get to build giant ships and fleets and have them obliterate each other! Phew. Quite a step up from a 100 ton Scout on loan. 

Not my picture. Not a challenge to anyone. Not my weapon, but ooh shiny!

I may have found a fourth creep. Gear creep. This is not common to traveller alone. Second Ed. Thief Rouges splat book had a lot of neat gadgets for example. At one point our 90 lb. female elven rogue had about 40 lbs of devices on her. 

Gear creep might not result in huge modifiers. Of course if you keep adding new gadgets, their +1 will add up, witch makes it hard to squash. It certainly isn't reflected by Scale creep. Your new body pistol firing EMP bullets fits in your pocket.  As for Complexity, while each gadget might have a very simple mechanic, they do add up. You have to roll 1d6 to see the results of your EMP bullets on the robot, on the camera, on the console. The mechanics aren't complex but there are more and more of them. A similar phenomenon occurred with Car Wars and Starfleet Battles. You get more and more stuff piling up and the ref can't track how it all interacts. 

How do your EMP bullets affect the control console? Can the ship still jump? Is the jump drive itself damaged? What about that battledress? If AP/EMP bullets penetrate, do they negate the BD's shielding?

Actually EMP bullets sound pretty cool. 

The solution to tis and any other creep is simple, be careful what you allow int your game. I had a sweet jacket at one point: the players would buy the splat books for their character classes. I'd buy ref splat books and I'd review them all and decide what I'd let in. In fairness, I never had to do that with CT ... except for that advanced chargen. 


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