How Quickly Do You Bounce Off a System?

[Wofano Wotanto]

I figure if the character sheet makes the game look like something I won't like, then I probably won't like it.

That's a reasonable assumption.

On a related note, I very nearly bounced off Evil Hat's Scum & Villainy when I first got it. Had bought it with an eye toward reading and maybe running it during a vacation where I knew I'd be offline for a couple of weeks. It was what I'd expected from Blades In the Dark and I liked the setting, but when I went to try a simple run I realized (after twenty minutes of flipping back and forth and index hunting thinking I was missing something) there were no character sheets anywhere in the rulebook. You have to go online to download them. And those character (and starship) sheets include vital details about game mechanics that you cannot reverse engineer from just reading the rules, so you can't simply work around them being inaccessible with a paper and pencil.

Don't do that, publishers. If you print a book, it needs to be usable without internet access. No excuses.

Ordinarily would have just been an annoyance, but under the circumstances I've never had a book come closer to winding up in a campfire.

 

[MintRabbit]

The more it looks like a traditional fantasy game, the less I'm interested. Not a big fan of elf-and-dwarf-sword-and-sorcery-dungeon-crawl settings. I don't mind bits and pieces, like maybe there's still dwarves but they're in space or maybe it's an all-elf setting but the dark elves are planning a revolution, or maybe you're delving into dungeons but the dungeons are actually the haunted basement of a mansion. But all together it just doesn't work for me.

 

[dragoner]

I think there's a degree of "which first, chicken or egg" going on with how early Traveller evolved. Did the book release schedule cause it, or were they chosen in response to it, or some mix of both. I recall Mercs as being a huge big deal when it hit originally, and suddenly Army and Marine careers were the new hotness.

Spoiler: Lengthy OT chatter

They certainly didn't once Mercs dropped in 1978 and made that the career of choice for power gamers, but there were still something that I ran into a fair bit even in the early-to-mid 80s when my Traveller gaming peaked. "Diplomacy" often resembled a Retief plot (who, I'll point out, was quite popular in those days) and espionage was something freelancers got sucked into as deniable assets quite regularly (even today, and usually in conjunction with other story beats like mercantile affairs as a cover). Exploration morphed considerably over even a short period of time IME, starting out as going "where no one has gone before" stories and gradually shifting toward more picaresque "what weird local quirks does the next system over have?" travel stories akin to Jack Vance's Ports of Call as the canon setting was fleshed out and mystery evaporated. A fair number of campaigns became exploration focused by accident too - mis-jumps happen.

You were also more likely to see homebrew campaigns in the very early days when Traveller was more of a toolkit and less of a defined setting. Real frontier exploration is harder to fit in a 3rd Imperium game, while playing merchant is much harder when the GM's setting is loosely defined and lightly populated, and relatively peaceful settings don't support military campaigns as well as canon does. Quote a few GMs also skipped the "freelance sandbox" thing in favor of having the PCs all share an actual employer/patron, or be reservists called back to duty for one thing or another.

It was a different and less uniform environment in terms of campaign styles back then, at least IME - but you're right in saying it became dominated by merc/military and merchant campaign styles over time, and pretty quickly too. Still think that's largely the result of what order the books were released in, along with the obvious need to make every credit you can to pay for your ship (if any). It's actually nice to see how Cepheus and indie publishers have shifted things back toward more diverse settings and gameplay styles IMO. Takes me back to the days of my relative youth.

We played a merchant campaign first in '79, and then mercs later; though one time someone mentioned there not being classes, and another player said "we're all thieves" we laughed, except is kind of true. Whatever we played it sort of became ne'er do wells on the grift.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

We played a merchant campaign first in '79, and then mercs later; though one time someone mentioned there not being classes, and another player said "we're all thieves" we laughed, except is kind of true. Whatever we played it sort of became ne'er do wells on the grift.

The game tends more toward Dumarest of Terra or Nicholas van Rijn than Kimball Kinnison or Adam Reith for sure. Mercs pushed the needle toward Alois Hammer or John Falkenberg, but the constant need for credits to keep up with ship mortgages or passage tickets meant there was always a pull toward doing whatever you could to make a credit.

 

[dragoner]

The game tends more toward Dumarest of Terra or Nicholas van Rijn than Kimball Kinnison or Adam Reith for sure. Mercs pushed the needle toward Alois Hammer or John Falkenberg, but the constant need for credits to keep up with ship mortgages or passage tickets meant there was always a pull toward doing whatever you could to make a credit.

One time we wanted to raise a merc company and the ref made us roll up each one by hand. We were character rolling little fools by the end. Though really it more transformed into a board game at that point, cool, but not an rpg. RPG wise, I find military stuff works poorly because characters acting in concert, following chain of command, and general tactics; all fall apart relatively quickly. Trav's military careers make 100% sense at the time it was written, as the draft only ended five years before, so it was likely that everyone Marc was playing with, had been in the military, it was just a normal thing.

 

[demoss]

What I think, as a person who would be GMing the game as a Forever GM and explaining the system to players who probably aren't going to buy their own copies of the rules...

"Am I actually going to run this?" is almost never a consideration for me: I have more than enough games to run already.

"Is this interesting for me to read" is almost always a consideration.

Sure, sometimes I'm looking for a specific thing for a specific game I want to run, but then I would not describe it as "bouncing", but rather the game not meeting my criteria and me just going to the next option.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

"Is this interesting for me to read" is almost always a consideration.

Agreed. Which is probably why my "bounce" criteria is mostly based on typos, bad editing, wonky layout - oh, and nearly unreadable text, either through terrible color/contrast choices or supposedly artsy font choices. Forgot to mention that one before.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Very true. The "Traveller as toolbox" argument always stumbles over the number of setting assumptions the rules use - although usually it's the (frankly bizarre) fuel-intensive FTL system, lack of FTL, casual STL drives and absence of FTL comms that does that more so than the lack of a good system generator.

I'm conflicted there. To some extent unless you do a "Here's a bunch of potential FTL related technologies, pick one" approach, FTL is a big enough counterfactual that almost any decision is going to look weirdly specific, and that was really common with those early RPGs (look at the, when viewed from views of fantasy fiction as a whole, pretty ruddy odd magic system in D&D). So I'm willing to cut a little slack there.

But it is one of the things that make early Trav less generic than some people claim it is.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Don't do that, publishers. If you print a book, it needs to be usable without internet access. No excuses.

I mean, you feel how you feel, but I suspect the number of people who care that you have to download a character sheet online these days is trivial.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

To some extent unless you do a "Here's a bunch of potential FTL related technologies, pick one" approach

Which a toolbox really has to do, and a really exhaustive toolbox adds in interstellar STL like sleepers or generation ships - and maybe even interstellar teleports or transmission of digital consciousness. But Traveller was only ever sort of a toolbox, although many folks tried to use it as such early on. Modern Cepheus does offer FTL options, of course.

FTL is a big enough counterfactual that almost any decision is going to look weirdly specific

For clarity, my "frankly bizarre" descriptor stems from the fact that they chose to have an otherwise pretty generic FTL jump drive require an enormous amount of hull volume for fuel, while also using STL maneuver drives that don't require reaction mass and are arguably just as magical as FTL is. That's a weird inversion of the some of the more common scifi tropes of the era, and does strange things to ship construction when comparing starships and systemships. Lots of FTL systems call for rare fuel resources, but I can't think of any others that need fuel that eats up a potential 60% of the ship's payload. There are huge FTL drives (Niven's second-tier advanced hyperdrive was enormous, barely leaving room for a lone pilot in a hull built for establishing a new colony on a world) but the huge gas tanks are really different.

But it is one of the things that make early Trav less generic than some people claim it is.

This is true. It is a pretty unique approach, and not derived from any scifi lit source AFAIK. Credit to Miller for that.