Well, I'm a great believer in the possibility of what Ron Edwards calls "vanilla narrativism" - that is, "story now" RPGing without player-side mechanics to support it beyond the sorts of action declarations one gets in classic D&D, Rolemaster, etc.
So I think that you can have player-driven, story-focused RPGing without the sort of metagame mechanics you describe. But you need to use procedures that are different from the Gygaxian GM-as-dictator. Taking suggestions is probably the most important. These can be suggestions from the players about world elements (places, NPCs, etc) that need to be settled for the game to go ahead, and that are relevant to their PCs backstories, goals etc; and also suggestions about where the game is going to go next.
Oh, sure, and we did it, at times anyway, though it was considered in those days a sort of 'variant' kind of RPing in the circles I traveled in. There were many lists of backgrounds and personality quirks and whatnot you could dig up from various magazines, as well as the 1e DMG, Arduin Grimoire, etc. 'Shared Narrative' where everyone was allowed to add things to the world was a fairly well-known technique, though it usually was relegated to 'experimental' games.
With your example of xenobiology, the player can ask "Can we stop it by toying with its reproductive strategy?" And if the GM takes the suggestion, then that means "say 'yes' or roll the dice" - assuming it's an important issue in play (those dame tribbles!) then the GM will call for a roll. If the roll succeeds, the strategy works.
In the context of Traveller, this depends (I think) on taking the lead of the books in setting appropriate difficulties for throws, and allowing appropriate DMs. (Eg the Electronics skill, I think maybe in the revised (ie 1980 rather than 1977) version, includes suggestd DMs for INT and EDU.) In my game, I've defaulted to 8+ for non-straightforward stuff, and 10+ for hard stuff.
As far as rolls against characteristics, I'm mostly following Andy Slack's advice in White Dwarf and using 3D-2 (gives a range of 1 to 16, so even a 1 can succeed and even a 15 can fail). But I think stat checks are relevant only for fairly basic stuff - Xenobiology is going to be more like 10+, +1 if EDU 8+, +2 if EDU A+. The rulebook does encourage the referee to keep track of these rolls and DMs to gradually build up a consistent world. This is very similar to Luke Crane's advice to Burning Wheel referees, that setting difficulties is the most direct way in which the GM establishes the world for the players.
I agree the rules don't make it clear what EDU is for; and MegaTraveller muddies the waters with a whole lot of knowledge skills. Our game follows Classic with no knowledge skills, and we're using EDU as flavoured by PC backstory - so the INT 8/EDU 13 ex-navy guy who never got a commission but is a member of the TAS spent all his salary on TAS membership so he could travel the universe looking for signs of alien life, and his EDU is a doctorate in xeno-archaeology; whereas the two ex-military guys with INT 2/EDU 10 and INT 3/EDU 9 clearly read the manuals very closely, but there EDU isn't going to help them much when xeno-biology is at stake. This is, in effect, similar to a background-flavoured skill system like 13th Age, but done in an informal and consensual basis - which goes back to the importance of taking suggestions from the players. This sort of system won't work well in a competitive/hostile environment where the players see their job as outwitting/out-"rules"ing the GM - but luckily that's not something I have to worry about in my RPGing.
Yeah, Traveller is muddy in general about EDU vs knowledge. Presumably every skill has an associated knowledge, a ship's engineer with Engineering 4 is presumably pretty up on the technology of fusion reactors. Maybe he's not a physicist and INT/EDU would better answer a question about that, except of course there's no indication of what EDU actually MEANS, a 15 might indicate a guy with 3 PhDs, but in what? Chargen doesn't answer that at all! Its a system that is ALMOST there, but it just falls short. Knowing what I know now, I can easily enough mold it into what I want, and I like that and favor using Traveller for that purpose, but when we played in the 70's and 80's it failed us in the end, or we failed it...
I personally think it is harder than that.
AD&D, incuding in its 2nd Ed incarnation, just doesn't generate characters with the right sort of richness and nuance to make vanilla narrativism easy. An exception is thieves - I've had success running an all-thieves AD&D game, with the focus on petty larceny and hijinks in Critwall and then the City of Greyhawk. Maybe druids or paladins would work too, but it's too hard to get a party of them without tweaking the PC gen rules.
I think fighters are the issue here more than anything. Clerics are a bit bland, but 4e does rather encourage you to push the players into specialized priest classes (in my 2e campaign the cleric was banned). Wizards are pretty rich too, though richness through vastly better options isn't a genius game design, it still kinda works.
I also think that Oriental Adventures is an exception, because it's PCs do come with comparatively rich backstories and implied capabilitiese. And the non-weapon proficiencies can play a similar role to the one that I described for EDU above. Even here, though, I think it's harder than Traveller: the default check difficulties in OA are absurdly high, which makes it harder to use "say 'yes' and roll the dice"; and if you go with WSG/DSG/2nd ed stat-based proficiencies then there is a different problem - stats come to dominate play, and players have a strong incentive to push the proficiency system into an unnuanced resolution mechanic to end-run around harder checks that would be dictated by thief skills or whatever.
We kinda moved on and didn't mess much with WSG/DSG, so I don't even know what the issues are there. OA is a great game, but it is actually a good bit different from classic D&D. It uses the RULES, but there's a completely different emphasis on 'social adventure' rather than dungeon crawls, troupe play where you run your clan, event-based play, and other such things. That being said it can also play a lot like 1e/2e of course, being mechanically almost the same game. And yeah, the checks in OA are too hard, you have to lower them, except maybe for a few combat-usable ones that might break the game (sort of like what you are referring to I think with WSG/DSG).
I think clearly Traveller is closer, I don't think we are arguing that, really. D&D is still reasonably flexible, both games real limits are in terms of their basic core genre, you can't really make Traveller into a more fantastical game very easily, and you can't make D&D feel at all realistic, or do fantasy genre very far from what it is built for, but this is pretty much true of all RPGs. I mean people tried to make the 'Ultimate RPG' and we got GURPS, which is an OK game, but vastly too complicated for most uses IMHO.
Traveller, if you extrapolate from the example checks given in the books, is just cleaner for this stuff, plus doesn't have the distraction of having to build it onto a wargaming chassis (where combat always gets better but only thieves automatically get better at their other stuff).
I haven't tried vanilla narrativist RQ - I think it would sit between Traveller and D&D, as I don't think it has quite the right skill load-out to get away from the wargaming, but the wargaming is ultra-brutal. (I've GMed a lot of vanilla narrativist Rolemaster - it has the right skill list, and its development system allows players to shape their PC skill load outs, which is a type of "flag-flying" to the GM.)
Yeah, RQ is stupid brutal, silly really. I think we once calculated that in a battle between 1000 trained warriors on each side an average of 200 of them would accidentally kill themselves with a bad roll, and another 100 would be killed by friendly fire. RQ combat also takes a LONG TIME to play out, unfortunately. I think this, more than anything, doomed the game to niche status. The play experience just doesn't stand up to D&D.
RM is nice, but too fiddly for most. It seems more like 3e before 3e than anything else. I think I bought just about the time I finally figured out that more rules wasn't better, lol.
I agree about the default Traveller party, although once you add in Citizens of the Imperium it gets a bit more varied. For me, what is more significant compared to D&D is the implied setting and hence implied challenges. If the default challenge is orcs in a 10' room, pulp movie cultists and chess puzzles, it's hard to build serious story. How does any of that relate to character motivation?
I understand, that was why my example was D&D that was NOT doing that
. It can be done, but you gotta have players that are willing to try.
Whereas trying to make a living, getting recruited by terrorists in the restaurant at the Travellers' Aid Soceity, dealing with officials who have actual worlds to govern: that's more promising raw material for buidling something out of, I think.
You can try and add it into D&D, of course, but then you get the problem that PCs have no connection to it by default (due to lack of background/lifepath for most PCs - again, thieves, paladins, druids and monks excepted to various degrees), and they also don't have the mechanical capacity to engage with it via "say 'yes' or roll the dice".
Sure, there's a sense in which there's more subtlety to a realistic sort of game.
I'm using opposed checks in Traveller. The odds of one 2d6 roll beating another is very slightly better than the odds of rolling 8+, so it seems to work OKI.
I think they were made official, or semi-official somewhere along the way.
