What happened to Traveller’s reaction table?

I’m preparing to run Traveller for my regular group – I’m running FASA’s old Sky Raiders trilogy, starting with Legend of the Sky Raiders.

I will run it using Mongoose’s latest rules, because I’m more familiar with them than the original little black books.

So I’m working my way through the scenario (which is harder going than I expected, but more on that in another post, I expect), and there’s a point where the PCs are slogging through a jungle and encountering the local natives. And on page 24, it says, “In all cases, the Reaction Table should be used as a guide for negotiations.”

And I thought, oh yes, I remember that.

(It’s not even Legend’s first mention of the reaction table – it’s also referred to on page 20.)

But could I find it in the current rules? I could not. I found a lot of other interesting tables, but not the reaction table.

Traveller’s reaction table

So the reaction table (from page 27 of Book 3: Worlds and Adventures) looks like this:

So basically, roll 2d6. Add modifiers if necessary. The higher the result, the better for the players. (I soon learned not to take the extreme results literally – a roll of 2 didn’t have to mean a physical attack.)

I think I embedded that philosophy into much of my gaming. Even now, if I need to make a decision as the GM, I roll 2d6 and then interpret the results with high being positive for the players, and low being negative.

I remember running one very loosey-goosey game (although that is not a term I would have used back then) in the 90s when that’s pretty much the only rule I used!

I know Traveller was my first roleplaying game, but I don’t think I appreciated quite how much it influenced my GMing style.

So while I will use the modern Traveller rules, I will also use the old rules where I find gaps.

Reaction table: gone but not forgotten

Somewhere between 1981 and 2022, the reaction table disappeared. (I didn’t keep up with Traveller’s numerous iterations between then and now, so I couldn’t tell you when.)

I wonder what happened that made a later designer think it wasn’t needed.

And do I think the reaction table should be reinstated? Right now, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll have a different view after I’ve run Legend of the Sky Raiders.