Classic Traveller - a dice-driven game

[pemerton]

[MENTION=6919838]5ekyu[/MENTION], your random scenario element system reminds me a bit of icon rolls in 13th Age.

"Hey guys look what i found. What do you think this is?"... low trembling in the ground... ...ground erupts with big red angry eyes gleaming from the dust cloud...Player responds "i think you found the ace of clubs") possibly with me revealing the card in question at that very moment and if i am in a particularly inspired evil moment, the king of diamonds too. "Wait, no, we cant run. That's the freakin' king of diamonds there... aw come on... guys its not that big... look at those teeth... its a veggiesaurus... crap... this is why i can never have nice things"

I think this sort of taunting/prompting/poking is a really important GM tool that doesn't get discussed much on these boards.

Rather than make the players guess about what the fictional content is that their PCs have access to, let them know, and then watch them struggle to get it!

In my Traveller game I'm very relaxed about given the players stats for planets, NPCs, etc. (The original rule books leave it unclear how much the GM was expected to share with the players.) Keeping that stuff secret just doesn't seem to add very much - whereas letting the players know makes it easier for them to engage with the situation and try and do something with or about it.

 

[pemerton]

It is a very old-school design from when RPGs were new, so high randomness and reliance on tables shouldn't be surprising.

One of my favourite systems is Burning Wheel, and it has a lot of dice rolls determine content mechanics - Wises checks to establish backstory, Circles checks to meet contacts and NPCs, adverse content introduced as part of "fail forward" outcomes narration, etc.

What struck me about Traveller is that the random systems aren't connected to player/PC drives/purposes in the same way. So they're more random.

I guess that's what makes it old school? (When I think old school, the first thing I think is semi-arbitrary content used to set up puzzles for the players to unravel. Traveller doesn't seem to have much of that.)

I do regard the random character generation system as a feature, not a bug, since it does a great job of developing a character's backstory -- assuming you survive!

It does generate backstory, but there are other options for that. (Eg BW's non-random lifepath system.)

I don't see Traveller's system as a bug, or as a feature in general - but it is a feature of Traveller, with the survival check probaby the most remembered thing about the system!

Much of the random universe elements can be ignored if you like, though they can be helpful if the campaign is about galactic scouts exploring or rogue traders rogue-trading.

We're not doing an exploration or rogue trader campaign, but the random world generation and random patron generation have both been central to setting/backstory creation. To me, these are nearly as distinctive as the PC-gen system. They're part of what makes the game what it is!

 

[chaochou]

I can't remember who actually rolled the die - me or one of the players - but I would say this is another example of the players having a sense that there are procedures that they can hook onto, and then I take the lead in channelling their action declarations and expressions of intent into mechanical terms.

We've always been a table that is very comfortable framing action in mechanical terms, and moving very flexibly back-and-forth between fiction and mechanics (that would be an old Rolemaster habit!), so this is a very natural way for us to operate.

That's cool. I find it interesting how close this is - both in spirit and in mechanics - to the Apocalypse World Engine.

For example, a player may say "I want to dash across the courtyard to get to the dune buggy" and the MC says "With all the gun-fire that's a defy danger... you sure? It's gonna hurt if that goes wrong." And the player can look at the defy danger move and see the roll (+cool) and the specific outcomes, and you can freely discuss the stakes. So you go from fiction into transparent conflict resolution and back into fiction.

And Traveller is often doing the same thing; eg. Administration - a throw of 7+ will successfully resolve normal interactions without further problems; Leader - Leader 3 or better will allow soldiers to obey orders without hesitation; Vacc Suit - A 10+ to avoid dangerous situations applies whenever a non-ordinary maneouvre is attempted. All conflict resolution, all completely transparent!

What this doesn't do is give guidance on failure:
i) Does a failed vacc suit roll lead to drama? How do we create dramatic fiction from these rolls?
ii) Or does it lead to death - with the threat of death supposed to make the roll dramatic for the participants, even if the resulting fiction is mundane?
iii) Or do we try and convince the player there is the threat of death, even though we as GM know there isn't, to give the illusion of danger, an ersatz tension?

I think a lot (most / all) of early rpgs were supposed to work on (ii). But in practice it isn't very effective: neither success nor a dead PC are interesting drama, and a plausible threat of death results in very high casualty rates, which contradicts another stated goal of creating long-running campaigns.

As a result, many games were drifted very quickly towards (iii) - although sim rpgs with lethal combat and little healing (RQ, Traveller, later WHFRP) were much more resistant to drift.

Later designs said that the way to create a dramatic experience for the players was to create dramatic fiction, and then started creating processes for doing (i). I think Traveller's higher level mechanics ('more operational' as you put it) lend themselves to that very well, but you're required to put together the final piece of the puzzle yourself...

Sorry - your post was long and there are other bits I could pick up on, but Traveller's resolution system - and the very clear attempts at transparency with the players - always appealed to me. I'm picking my way around why.

 

[5ekyu]

That's cool. I find it interesting how close this is - both in spirit and in mechanics - to the Apocalypse World Engine.

For example, a player may say "I want to dash across the courtyard to get to the dune buggy" and the MC says "With all the gun-fire that's a defy danger... you sure? It's gonna hurt if that goes wrong." And the player can look at the defy danger move and see the roll (+cool) and the specific outcomes, and you can freely discuss the stakes. So you go from fiction into transparent conflict resolution and back into fiction.

And Traveller is often doing the same thing; eg. Administration - a throw of 7+ will successfully resolve normal interactions without further problems; Leader - Leader 3 or better will allow soldiers to obey orders without hesitation; Vacc Suit - A 10+ to avoid dangerous situations applies whenever a non-ordinary maneouvre is attempted. All conflict resolution, all completely transparent!

What this doesn't do is give guidance on failure:
i) Does a failed vacc suit roll lead to drama? How do we create dramatic fiction from these rolls?
ii) Or does it lead to death - with the threat of death supposed to make the roll dramatic for the participants, even if the resulting fiction is mundane?
iii) Or do we try and convince the player there is the threat of death, even though we as GM know there isn't, to give the illusion of danger, an ersatz tension?

I think a lot (most / all) of early rpgs were supposed to work on (ii). But in practice it isn't very effective: neither success nor a dead PC are interesting drama, and a plausible threat of death results in very high casualty rates, which contradicts another stated goal of creating long-running campaigns.

As a result, many games were drifted very quickly towards (iii) - although sim rpgs with lethal combat and little healing (RQ, Traveller, later WHFRP) were much more resistant to drift.

Later designs said that the way to create a dramatic experience for the players was to create dramatic fiction, and then started creating processes for doing (i). I think Traveller's higher level mechanics ('more operational' as you put it) lend themselves to that very well, but you're required to put together the final piece of the puzzle yourself...

Sorry - your post was long and there are other bits I could pick up on, but Traveller's resolution system - and the very clear attempts at transparency with the players - always appealed to me. I'm picking my way around why.

To me its 1 with a dash os w and 3.

Failure vacc leads to leak, tear, blown reserve followed by need to fix which i usally do by three win chechs... Get three success fixed, get three failure lose - race to see which happens.

So dead would be many 3 fail first outcomes. There, rare and after drama not just after dice.

Sent from my [device_name] using EN World mobile app

 

[pemerton]

That's cool. I find it interesting how close this is - both in spirit and in mechanics - to the Apocalypse World Engine.

For example, a player may say "I want to dash across the courtyard to get to the dune buggy" and the MC says "With all the gun-fire that's a defy danger... you sure? It's gonna hurt if that goes wrong." And the player can look at the defy danger move and see the roll (+cool) and the specific outcomes, and you can freely discuss the stakes. So you go from fiction into transparent conflict resolution and back into fiction.

And Traveller is often doing the same thing; eg. Administration - a throw of 7+ will successfully resolve normal interactions without further problems; Leader - Leader 3 or better will allow soldiers to obey orders without hesitation; Vacc Suit - A 10+ to avoid dangerous situations applies whenever a non-ordinary maneouvre is attempted. All conflict resolution, all completely transparent!

What this doesn't do is give guidance on failure:
i) Does a failed vacc suit roll lead to drama? How do we create dramatic fiction from these rolls?
ii) Or does it lead to death - with the threat of death supposed to make the roll dramatic for the participants, even if the resulting fiction is mundane?
iii) Or do we try and convince the player there is the threat of death, even though we as GM know there isn't, to give the illusion of danger, an ersatz tension?

Good post.

Your (i)/(ii)/(iii) schema has come into play in our game on two occasions that I can think of. (Other checks, like Admin checks to deal with Byron's impersonal bureaucracy, Electronics checks to modify communicators, etc, have been easily adjudicated with non-fatal consequences implicit in the framing.)

The first is the escape-in-ATVs episode described in the first post upthread. As I said, I never had to decide between (i) and (ii) (hopefully not (iii)!) because the players ended up not failing on both checks.

The other involved protective suits, which we resolved using the vacc suit rules - as per the second post here, Vincenzo failed his 10+ check crawling into the pillbox and so got stuck in his suit, and then failed the follow-up check (specified by the rules, with only +1 per level of skill rather than +4) to resolve the difficulty, and so his suit tore as he crawled through, exposing him to the corrosive atmosphere of Byron. That was a version of (i), but it relies on sim resolution plus the fictional circumstances, rather than BW or PbtA-style fortune-in-the-middle with looser narration of consequences. I think this system is vulnerable to collapse if the atmosphere is (say) hydrogen cyanide rather than a more "benign" corrosive atmosphere - I'm not sure how I will handle that if it happens.