Being Alright with Getting IT Wrong

Plenty of folks feel a lot of pressure to try and run games as awfully close to the way it's written down in the book. The pressure to play RAW or do it right by the designer is something that smothers a lot of good play. That said there is a lot to be learned from doing something "by the book" to try and understand why it was presented that way to begin with. Last March I started running Classic Traveller and it's been a blast. Lots of great sessions across many different tables. But until a few weeks ago I was doing Damage and the Dealing of Wounds wrong! Even though I was doing it wrong we still had frantic shootouts and tense stand offs. I did want to understand the rules better and try it how it's meant to be rather than how I originally interpreted it. The big issue with how I was handling combat before was that I was allowing PCs to divide the damage on a given die and ignored the 1977 damage rolls in favor of the 81 values. So an SMG deals 3d6-3 damage. If the result comes up…