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Classic Traveller - a dice-driven game
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7302537" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>And good ones! Thanks for asking them.</p><p></p><p>Fiirst, a little bit of personal backstory - I have a half-hour train commute to and from work every day, and when I'm too bored/tired/frustrated to mark student work or read/edit curriculum documentation, I write up RPG stuff instead. So when something earlier this year prompted me to have a look at my old Traveller stuff (I can't remember now what that prompt was!), I started writing up notes in an attempt to be more systematic than the original rulebooks are (eg combining everything I could find about vacc suit use into one "Using Vacc Suits" entry).</p><p></p><p>With further development since we started playing, that document is now about 50 pages - broken into sectins on character generation, world generation, animal generation, encounter generatin, action resolution, and a psionics appendix. (Which Alissa's player is very interested in, because she is young and has few skills, ie exactly the sort of Traveller character meant to have a chance at getting a boost from psionics.) The players have all seen it, and one or two might even have read it, and so they have a general sense of how the system works. At least two of them also played a bit of Traveller back in the day, and so have some retained sense of some of the mechanics (eg everyone remembers survival rolls as part of PC generation!).</p><p></p><p>So I would say that, as far as actual mechanics go, I am doing the heavy lifting. But the players are aware that there are systems at work, which in principle are knowable by them, and that I'm using for those mechanical resolutions. I'll give a couple of examples to try and give a sense</p><p></p><p>When the PC Alissa was introduced, we needed some backstory to make sense of the sudden appearance in Byron City of a young, penniless Marine who had been injured and forcibly mustered out (ie failed survival roll by 1) in her first term of service. Because she was a draftee, the player had already decided that she had faked the injury to get out of the Marines. But why was she on Byron, which is a low-ish tech level world with no Naval base and no obvious significance to the Imperium? That was when I suggested that her last memories, before waking in a cold sleep berth in the warehouse on Byron, were of being in a hospital in a Naval base on another world. So I rolled up a world using the world gen rules (I can't remember now if I fudged the Starport/Naval base rolls to make sure those came up positive, or if I started again until they came out right: maybe the first try yielded a Naval base and so I didn't need to think about it). Thus Shelley was created. I then made a single die roll to determine its jump distance from Byron, which came up 2.</p><p></p><p>So on that occasion, collective decision-making about the fiction, but with referee oversight (I would think of this as something like the BW model, although for my group it's a model that goes back in our play before we encountered BW), estabishes some more detailed context about the Imperium, about the backstory of this PC, and about the existence of some other world. And then the players can see that the actual world itself is generated using a defined procedure - and while I as GM have the ultimate role in making sense of the outcomes, the raw materials of the setting have this significant procedural, dice-driven aspect to them.</p><p></p><p>Secone example: in the most recent session, when the PCs had returned to the domed city and Alissa had been hospitalised for recovery, and we were doing the standard "downtime" stuff like taking stock of upkeep costs, checking out gear lists, etc, Vincenzo's player said that he wanted to find an employer. I can't remember if it was him or me who linked this into the patron rules, but he clearly had a sense that there is a mechanic whereby you can spend time/effort trying to get a job. I told him that it would take a week, and suggested that - as a couple of PCs are TAS members - it would make sense to hang out at that TAS lounge in the starport to try and meet someone. He was happy with that. When I said that the roll it 5+, with a +1 for Carousing, he decided (or maybe Methwit's player suggested) that Methwit come along, as Methwit is the only PC with Carousing.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>When I have to set checks that aren't specified in the rules, I also try to make it clear how I'm doing that. For stuff that seems like it should be fairly hard (in the fiction, based on causal rather than narrative logic) I tend to default to a required throw of 10+ (I can't remember where I got this from, but maybe one of the discussions of the tech-type skills, or a repair/maintenance subsystem?), with DMs for skill, INT, EDU, etc. Generally, I tell the players what the base throw is, and then what DMs apply based on their relevant abilitities (which sometimes I remember, and sometimes check with them), to establish a final throw required. The idea here is to help them navigate their PCs and the system, but to also help establish a sense that required throws aren't arbitrary. It's a different approach from BW - where I generally place a bigger onus on the player to nominate FoRKs, fish for advantage dice, etc, because that's a big part of playing BW and also feeds directly into the advancement rules; and a different approach from 4e, where players are meant to know the mechanics of their PC, and forgetting to use some crucial resource and suffering for it is part of the vicissitude of play.</p><p></p><p>To elaborate on that last couple of sentences: in 4e a character might be a really skilled fighter on paper, but in play turn out to be rather ineffectual because the player doesn't know how to leverage the intricate mechanics, makes bad calls about when to use a limited-use abiity, etc. And I would see that as the game working as intended - there's a strong tactical boardgame-type aspect to 4e play, at least in combat. (NB: I'm not saying that 4e is a boardgame - that boardgame aspect to play also, at least in my experience, invovles leveraging the fiction also. But there's no disputing that there's a lot of mechanically complex moving parts.)</p><p></p><p>Whereas in Traveller I think the choices are meant to be at a slightly more strategic or at least operational level. So if a player forgets that his/her PC has Electronics skill, and so doesn't think of trying to turn a communicator into a satellite uplink, that's on the player. (I use this example because it's one that came up in our game - Max's player didn't forget his Electronics, and so they did create the uplink that they needed.) But once the player has decided to try and tinker with the communicator, I don't think there is meant to be tactical element in remembering which PC abilities to bring to bear. It's the referee's job, as I see it, to make sure that the resolution of that attempt properly reflects the PC's skill training, INT, EDU etc. In (re-)reading late 70s/early 80s discussions of the difference between D&D and Traveller, I think this is one that doesn't quite get spelled out but is lurking behind a lot of what <em>is</em> said. I would say that, in this respect, Traveller resembles RQ or CoC.</p><p></p><p>There is no example of play other than creating that Merchant PC (who, by the way, gets a long sequence of absurdly lucky rolls!). Some of the individual mechanical subsystems get an illustrative example, but that's it.</p><p></p><p>I found the game really hard to run back in the day. When I first was given Traveller (maybe 1978? or 79?), I hadn't even heard of D&D and so had no play assumtions to import, and just didn't get how the game was meant to work: even before one gets to the player side of things, there just wasn't enough discussion of how the referee was expected to establish and manage ingame situations. Reading it now, I can see how the patron encounter system, the random encounter rules, etc are meant to support this, but as written they're too thin to communicate effectively to someone with no prior experience of RPGing.</p><p></p><p>Once I got Moldvay Basic, I was able to go back to Traveller and make more sense of it. But I still didn't have a good handle on what sort of action it might involve, how the players were meant to engage via their PCs, etc. And this wasn't helped by the White Dwarf scenarios of the time (which I'd also got hold of in the early-to-mid-80s) being pretty combat heavy (like D&D) yet the combat rules being obviously super-brutal. To be fair, The Sable Rose Affair does contemplate the PCs infiltrating the establishment disguised as a band whose members they have kidnapped beforehand (shades of the Blues Brothers); but the rule books give no advice on how to resolve such an attempt, and nor does the module. (I can now say that I would use the encounter reaction rolls modified by Carousing, Liaison and (perhaps) Streetwise; but I don't think a new referee could be expected to work that out from the material provided.)</p><p></p><p>Some of what I've already posted above will have helped answer this, I think.</p><p></p><p>I would say - despite your excalamation mark - that RM is actually a big source for filling in the blanks. Becuase - outside of spellcasting, which is more like D&D's emphasis on clever use of player resources - RM is also a system where the resolution, once the player has chosen a way to tackle a situation, is meant to reflect the ingame "reality" of the player rather than the player's clever tactical choices. (In Forge terms, I would say this is where both Traveller and RM show their purist-for-system colours.)</p><p></p><p>In 4e, if I know a player has an ability that s/he should be using but isn't (say, a free action self-buff that would help with a crucial roll, which the player has forgotten about), I won't remind the player. Rather, when they make the roll, if they fail I will taunt; and if they succeed I'll comment on their luck. Only if I'm feeling really generous will I remind them of the ability, and that probably triggers some taunting too, that they needed the GM to help them out. This is the tactical/gamist aspect of 4e play. In AD&D, and in RM, a similar dynamic applies in relation to spellcasting. (Or using limited-use magic items.)</p><p></p><p>But in RM when it comes to skill checks, and in Traveller, I feel that I have a duty to work with the players to make sure that all the relevant stuff that would affect a check (eg similar skills, appropriate stats, etc) are factored into resolution. That's not the GM throwing a player a bone, but just being a referee whose job includes making sure the fiction is fully expressed and realised in play.</p><p></p><p>Another angle on what I think is the same point:</p><p></p><p>In AD&D, when a player debates with the GM whether a particular spell can achieve a particular outcome in the fiction ("creative casting"), the GM has to keep in mind the threat of the game breaking. Adverserial play is always lurking in the wings.</p><p></p><p>In 4e, when a player wants to do something funky with a power, the GM and player are meant to work together to make sense of it in the fiction, and then the GM applies p 42 to resolve it - which means, most of the time, the game <em>can't</em> break.</p><p></p><p>In RM or Traveller, I see the players and GM working together to make sense of the fiction, and work out what the <em>true</em> modifier is for this particular resolution, given this particular character's suite of stats and skills - and the non-breaking of the game is dependent upon the designers having discharged their "purist-for-sysmte" duties of making sure theren't aren't so many DMs available that the dice system fails. So far, it's working.</p><p></p><p>As far as the players and their PCs are concerned, they have established character motivations based on a mixture of what the dice served up, plus personal inclination (eg Roland, the ex-Navy PC, has high EDU and is a member of the TAS - the player has decided that he wants to travel the stars learning about alien life and artefacts); and I think expect me as GM to provide them with appropriate opportunities to explore/play out those motivations in the manner that is fairly standard for our table.</p><p></p><p>Those turned out to be long answers!</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7302537, member: 42582"] And good ones! Thanks for asking them. Fiirst, a little bit of personal backstory - I have a half-hour train commute to and from work every day, and when I'm too bored/tired/frustrated to mark student work or read/edit curriculum documentation, I write up RPG stuff instead. So when something earlier this year prompted me to have a look at my old Traveller stuff (I can't remember now what that prompt was!), I started writing up notes in an attempt to be more systematic than the original rulebooks are (eg combining everything I could find about vacc suit use into one "Using Vacc Suits" entry). With further development since we started playing, that document is now about 50 pages - broken into sectins on character generation, world generation, animal generation, encounter generatin, action resolution, and a psionics appendix. (Which Alissa's player is very interested in, because she is young and has few skills, ie exactly the sort of Traveller character meant to have a chance at getting a boost from psionics.) The players have all seen it, and one or two might even have read it, and so they have a general sense of how the system works. At least two of them also played a bit of Traveller back in the day, and so have some retained sense of some of the mechanics (eg everyone remembers survival rolls as part of PC generation!). So I would say that, as far as actual mechanics go, I am doing the heavy lifting. But the players are aware that there are systems at work, which in principle are knowable by them, and that I'm using for those mechanical resolutions. I'll give a couple of examples to try and give a sense When the PC Alissa was introduced, we needed some backstory to make sense of the sudden appearance in Byron City of a young, penniless Marine who had been injured and forcibly mustered out (ie failed survival roll by 1) in her first term of service. Because she was a draftee, the player had already decided that she had faked the injury to get out of the Marines. But why was she on Byron, which is a low-ish tech level world with no Naval base and no obvious significance to the Imperium? That was when I suggested that her last memories, before waking in a cold sleep berth in the warehouse on Byron, were of being in a hospital in a Naval base on another world. So I rolled up a world using the world gen rules (I can't remember now if I fudged the Starport/Naval base rolls to make sure those came up positive, or if I started again until they came out right: maybe the first try yielded a Naval base and so I didn't need to think about it). Thus Shelley was created. I then made a single die roll to determine its jump distance from Byron, which came up 2. So on that occasion, collective decision-making about the fiction, but with referee oversight (I would think of this as something like the BW model, although for my group it's a model that goes back in our play before we encountered BW), estabishes some more detailed context about the Imperium, about the backstory of this PC, and about the existence of some other world. And then the players can see that the actual world itself is generated using a defined procedure - and while I as GM have the ultimate role in making sense of the outcomes, the raw materials of the setting have this significant procedural, dice-driven aspect to them. Secone example: in the most recent session, when the PCs had returned to the domed city and Alissa had been hospitalised for recovery, and we were doing the standard "downtime" stuff like taking stock of upkeep costs, checking out gear lists, etc, Vincenzo's player said that he wanted to find an employer. I can't remember if it was him or me who linked this into the patron rules, but he clearly had a sense that there is a mechanic whereby you can spend time/effort trying to get a job. I told him that it would take a week, and suggested that - as a couple of PCs are TAS members - it would make sense to hang out at that TAS lounge in the starport to try and meet someone. He was happy with that. When I said that the roll it 5+, with a +1 for Carousing, he decided (or maybe Methwit's player suggested) that Methwit come along, as Methwit is the only PC with Carousing. 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. When I have to set checks that aren't specified in the rules, I also try to make it clear how I'm doing that. For stuff that seems like it should be fairly hard (in the fiction, based on causal rather than narrative logic) I tend to default to a required throw of 10+ (I can't remember where I got this from, but maybe one of the discussions of the tech-type skills, or a repair/maintenance subsystem?), with DMs for skill, INT, EDU, etc. Generally, I tell the players what the base throw is, and then what DMs apply based on their relevant abilitities (which sometimes I remember, and sometimes check with them), to establish a final throw required. The idea here is to help them navigate their PCs and the system, but to also help establish a sense that required throws aren't arbitrary. It's a different approach from BW - where I generally place a bigger onus on the player to nominate FoRKs, fish for advantage dice, etc, because that's a big part of playing BW and also feeds directly into the advancement rules; and a different approach from 4e, where players are meant to know the mechanics of their PC, and forgetting to use some crucial resource and suffering for it is part of the vicissitude of play. To elaborate on that last couple of sentences: in 4e a character might be a really skilled fighter on paper, but in play turn out to be rather ineffectual because the player doesn't know how to leverage the intricate mechanics, makes bad calls about when to use a limited-use abiity, etc. And I would see that as the game working as intended - there's a strong tactical boardgame-type aspect to 4e play, at least in combat. (NB: I'm not saying that 4e is a boardgame - that boardgame aspect to play also, at least in my experience, invovles leveraging the fiction also. But there's no disputing that there's a lot of mechanically complex moving parts.) Whereas in Traveller I think the choices are meant to be at a slightly more strategic or at least operational level. So if a player forgets that his/her PC has Electronics skill, and so doesn't think of trying to turn a communicator into a satellite uplink, that's on the player. (I use this example because it's one that came up in our game - Max's player didn't forget his Electronics, and so they did create the uplink that they needed.) But once the player has decided to try and tinker with the communicator, I don't think there is meant to be tactical element in remembering which PC abilities to bring to bear. It's the referee's job, as I see it, to make sure that the resolution of that attempt properly reflects the PC's skill training, INT, EDU etc. In (re-)reading late 70s/early 80s discussions of the difference between D&D and Traveller, I think this is one that doesn't quite get spelled out but is lurking behind a lot of what [I]is[/I] said. I would say that, in this respect, Traveller resembles RQ or CoC. There is no example of play other than creating that Merchant PC (who, by the way, gets a long sequence of absurdly lucky rolls!). Some of the individual mechanical subsystems get an illustrative example, but that's it. I found the game really hard to run back in the day. When I first was given Traveller (maybe 1978? or 79?), I hadn't even heard of D&D and so had no play assumtions to import, and just didn't get how the game was meant to work: even before one gets to the player side of things, there just wasn't enough discussion of how the referee was expected to establish and manage ingame situations. Reading it now, I can see how the patron encounter system, the random encounter rules, etc are meant to support this, but as written they're too thin to communicate effectively to someone with no prior experience of RPGing. Once I got Moldvay Basic, I was able to go back to Traveller and make more sense of it. But I still didn't have a good handle on what sort of action it might involve, how the players were meant to engage via their PCs, etc. And this wasn't helped by the White Dwarf scenarios of the time (which I'd also got hold of in the early-to-mid-80s) being pretty combat heavy (like D&D) yet the combat rules being obviously super-brutal. To be fair, The Sable Rose Affair does contemplate the PCs infiltrating the establishment disguised as a band whose members they have kidnapped beforehand (shades of the Blues Brothers); but the rule books give no advice on how to resolve such an attempt, and nor does the module. (I can now say that I would use the encounter reaction rolls modified by Carousing, Liaison and (perhaps) Streetwise; but I don't think a new referee could be expected to work that out from the material provided.) Some of what I've already posted above will have helped answer this, I think. I would say - despite your excalamation mark - that RM is actually a big source for filling in the blanks. Becuase - outside of spellcasting, which is more like D&D's emphasis on clever use of player resources - RM is also a system where the resolution, once the player has chosen a way to tackle a situation, is meant to reflect the ingame "reality" of the player rather than the player's clever tactical choices. (In Forge terms, I would say this is where both Traveller and RM show their purist-for-system colours.) In 4e, if I know a player has an ability that s/he should be using but isn't (say, a free action self-buff that would help with a crucial roll, which the player has forgotten about), I won't remind the player. Rather, when they make the roll, if they fail I will taunt; and if they succeed I'll comment on their luck. Only if I'm feeling really generous will I remind them of the ability, and that probably triggers some taunting too, that they needed the GM to help them out. This is the tactical/gamist aspect of 4e play. In AD&D, and in RM, a similar dynamic applies in relation to spellcasting. (Or using limited-use magic items.) But in RM when it comes to skill checks, and in Traveller, I feel that I have a duty to work with the players to make sure that all the relevant stuff that would affect a check (eg similar skills, appropriate stats, etc) are factored into resolution. That's not the GM throwing a player a bone, but just being a referee whose job includes making sure the fiction is fully expressed and realised in play. Another angle on what I think is the same point: In AD&D, when a player debates with the GM whether a particular spell can achieve a particular outcome in the fiction ("creative casting"), the GM has to keep in mind the threat of the game breaking. Adverserial play is always lurking in the wings. In 4e, when a player wants to do something funky with a power, the GM and player are meant to work together to make sense of it in the fiction, and then the GM applies p 42 to resolve it - which means, most of the time, the game [I]can't[/I] break. In RM or Traveller, I see the players and GM working together to make sense of the fiction, and work out what the [I]true[/I] modifier is for this particular resolution, given this particular character's suite of stats and skills - and the non-breaking of the game is dependent upon the designers having discharged their "purist-for-sysmte" duties of making sure theren't aren't so many DMs available that the dice system fails. So far, it's working. As far as the players and their PCs are concerned, they have established character motivations based on a mixture of what the dice served up, plus personal inclination (eg Roland, the ex-Navy PC, has high EDU and is a member of the TAS - the player has decided that he wants to travel the stars learning about alien life and artefacts); and I think expect me as GM to provide them with appropriate opportunities to explore/play out those motivations in the manner that is fairly standard for our table. Those turned out to be long answers! [/QUOTE]
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