Traveller: Things I'd Change

Mongoose Traveller is a fine game, but it's still rooted in the assumptions of the 70s.  Things that could do with some updating:

• The whole computer technology progression is charmingly quaint.  You never have enough RAM to run all the things you want to run.  VR goggles are like TL12 or something ridiculous.  You get the idea.
• Cybernetics. As has been noted elsewhere, transdermal cybernetics are practically impossible to keep clean and free of sepsis.  Nope, cybernetics ought to be internal-only, wirelessly-charged (or glucose-driven at higher TLs), and communicating either via nerves or over a bluetooth-style wireless personal area network (careful around the Comms jammers...).
• This model also has the convenient side effect of eliminating the ridiculous implanted weapons and wolverine claws and crap...  I guess you could still get claws as wetware, tailor-grown for your immune system and grafted at substantial expense, but less common is better.
• Drones.  At the very least they ought to replace space fighters, since comms are a lot less massy than pilots and life support.  Gives the guy with Remote Ops something to do during starship combat, puts small, cheap, extra craft in the hands of PCs (don't need tens of MCr for a drone), and again some advantages to the Comms guys for jamming.  Miniaturized drones for planetside use are already in civilian hands IRL, too.  For all that Eclipse Phase does, this is one thing I don't recall seeing.  Shadowrun is moderately infamous for this; I suppose I ought to study its mistakes.  The first rule, I would guess, is that if the rigger thinks he's invincible hiding back in the ship or the getaway car, it's time for the customs inspectors or other unwelcome visitors to come a'knocking, or for signals to get traced by the local spectrum-allocation goons.  There may (almost certainly) be legal consequences for having killbots, which might limit the combat utility of a drone operator and push him back towards a utility / reconnaisance role.
• Economics.  The Golden Pair is a persistent problem in travonomics.  Also, the trade system as it exists is fairly boring a lot of the time.  Needs work both from realism and gameplay experience sides.  Suns of Gold may be helpful in this respect.
• Training.  Perpetual sticky in many craws.  L0 skills ought to be easy to pick up; they're basic familiarity.  L4 skills ought to be nearly-impossible to pick up; they're world-champion grade.  The training system does not do a good job of this.  It also seems that a possible balance point might be to alter the difficulty of learning new skills, so that rather than scaling with skills known, it scales with age.  This provides an incentive to stop character generation before the end of the 4th term (the traditional stopping point, when stat-aging kicks in), and would also prevent any one-term-Navy-PDev-only hacks that could otherwise learn an ungodly number of L0 skills very very rapidly (while still providing a reason to play younger PCs).  There is also the inconsistency of one point of a skill being about four years of experience; for character generation to be consistent with play as well as something that actually happens in the course of a regular game, we either need to drastically expand timescales (perhaps Pendragon-style, with large gaps between adventures, or ooh we could make jump take a really long time?  But you don't earn a whole lot of experience in cryostasis, or under relativistic time dilation), or change the assumptions about skill acquisition rate present in chargen.  One might argue that operating freelance brings more opportunities for learning and improvement, and I think that's sort of true but 1) shouldn't Drifters or other freelance backgrounds have a higher rate of skill acquisition during chargen then?, and 2) the opportunities to learn presented by freelancing seem typically circumstantial / of immediate necessity rather than directed, specialized training like one might encounter in a military or corporate setting.  I do not know the proper solution to this problem.
• Lest anyone suggest it, I am fairly certain the proper solution is not reversion to SWN / D&D-style XP mechanics and levels.  Although a "skill point"-based XP system with varying time and point cost to boost a skill based on age and its rating might not be the worst of all evils, honestly.
• Armor penetration continues to bug me.  Something like Classic Traveller's weapon vs armor tables would work, but they're clunky.
• SOC continues to bug me.  I think Eclipse Phase got group standing right in this regard.  It's not quite a skill, and not quite an ability score.
• Wafer Jacks / The Exocortex Problem.  How many people do you know who are basically incapable of navigating without a GPS?  (Certainly many people my age seem this way)  How many programmers rely heavily on stackoverflow to do their jobs?  (...  I don't know anyone like that.  No sir.  Actually though, but only because the stuff I'm doing is so bizarre that it isn't on SO yet, rather than for lack of googling)  Who remembers all of their appointments, deadlines, and scheduled phone calls anymore, or even their friends' birthdays?  I can barely spell without a computer anymore; it's embarrassing, really.  Traveller did not consider this outsourcing of brainpower to personal electronics and The ButtCloud.  There's some thought to be put into making this gameable.  The wafer jack is not a perfect solution (it's transdermal, for one thing!), but it's a start in the right direction maybe.  Also notable is that I don't need a wafer jack to look stuff up on WebMD and have it be way better than guessing blindly.  This is sort of true in Traveller as well, except expert programs live only on local machines, rather than being available on distant servers for public use.  On the flip side, variations in local custom regarding data is potentially a really interesting area to add to the law / government tables (along with drones).  Presumeably you're not running IP Over X-Boat, so you're going to have a lot of fragmented one-planet networks with their own rules (common protocol stacks if you're lucky...).
• Speaking of which, Governments.  What is up with all these Feudal Technocracies, and what does that even mean?  This table needs reworked.
• Psionics. Mind over matter and placebo are one thing, but these are another.
• AI.  AI is hard for many reasons.  SWN did an OK job of it; perhaps I could borrow from there.

Bundle of Holding: Paranoia!

Damnit, BoH, now I'm halfway through both the Pendragon and Eclipse Phase core books and you're tempting me with more cheap, delicious games in support of good causes (EFF and Human Rights Watch this time). 

And my coworkers have requested that I run Paranoia.  This has been problematic in the past due to lack of Paranoia (well, in written / manual form, at least).  But now it is remedied.

So much for having a monthly gaming budget...  and next week is Steam Summer Sale, and this last week Civ5 came out for linux...

And good times were had by all.

Related: Eclipse Phase is a beautiful setting, and one which I think Jared and Matt at least would be moderate fans of.  I'm a little concerned that with the body-switching and virtual reality and mind-bendy nanobots, things could get into Bodak Territory pretty easily, but it also feels like it would suit my style quite well.

• Immortalish demons with magic beyond mortal kenning - TITANs, exsurgent virus, exsurgent nanoswarms.  Hell, they even have skull-taker bots that behead you for forced uploading to unknown purpose...
• Cults within cults, wheels within wheels - Shadow war between Firewall and TITAN cults (or other things that I just haven't read up to yet).  Conspiracy abounds.
• PC death - A regular occurrence, but softened by re-downloading into a fresh "sleeve".  Sanity loss is what permakills you (much like in ACKS, it's the resurrection side-effects that get you).
• The Dungeoncrawl / Hulkcrawl - Plenty of rightly-abandoned derelict habitats in orbit over Earth.  Mind the killbots.
• Non-aversion to divination - Useful here, since there's pervasive surveillance (sousveillance via nanite) and any half-sensible PC will probably just check the meshnet as their first source.  Not a good setting for murder mysteries (though resleeving makes me really want to run a murder mystery game, where the PCs are both the victims and the investigators.  But if you really want to assassinate someone in EP, you take out the backups first...).

Reddit would have me believe that one significant problem with the game is that you can stack too much armor, and then nothing is a threat.  This is something that I would probably have to address, since backup/restore operations are sort of supposed to be a thing.  I have also read that chargen is rather complex - am now curious if there's a good way to merge Trav-simplicity onto EP-setting.  But that is a project for after I have properly read and evaluated EP's mechanics as-is.