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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7315274" data-attributes="member: 82106">Heh, well, perhaps they were exposed to a different style of play in their formative gaming. I moved from a bit of a 'free form' concept to playing 'like everyone else', but I guess at that time I thought I must have been 'doing it wrong'. Then I beat my head against the wall of Gygaxian play until I figured out that what I did at age 12 was actually a good idea! Other people maybe didn't care for that early free form kind of experience and instead learned to play more like Gygax, but thought it was their own different way! (and in fairness they might stylistically differ from 'Gygaxian' DMs in a whole host of other ways that were simply more significant in their evaluation of what was different and what was mainstream).Right, there really isn't a very clearly articulated early example of a mechanical plot device in a major RPG, not before the mid-80's anyway (Toon comes to mind, and I think Gangster! maybe had some such elements, both games were published sometime in the mid-80's to my recollection). I think you can certainly argue that Traveller, by eliminating the whole 'character progression' element of play from the mechanics, was TRYING to turn the focus towards RP (You can only advance your character in terms of the fictional narrative, though some of those improvements will translate back to mechanical advantages in terms of better ships, guns, armor, etc). Yeah, I agree, there were also, a bit later, games like 'Skyrealms of Jorune' which were very emphatic about stories and settings being the central focus. These could be seen as incipient story games (even EPT falls into this category, as its setting is really its big thing, the rules are basically just variant OD&D with a few customizations). NONE of them, AFAIK (not a Jorune guru) has actual mechanics or play procedure that give players any sort of dramatic input outside of their characters actual choices in-game. Well, unlike D&D, Traveller is a very 'gritty' game. It absolutely supposes that the world is entirely realistic. Its combat system for example is actually QUITE realistic, given the limitations of RPGs and their gamist needs. Being shot with a pistol is damned hazardous! Maybe SLIGHTLY less likely to be instantly lethal than in real life, but not by much (IIRC a basic pistol or rifle does about 11 points of average damage, and a PC has about 20 points before instant death, there are no 'critical hits', but a good damage roll on a physically weaker PC could kill them). The point is, it is expected that locations and the elements of society and government will correspond to some imaginable and realistic (at least plausible) pattern. So there will be laws, rules, administrators, economics, and other such things. In a sense these simply ARE the 'challenge' of Traveller.If you think about it, the typical situation that the rules generate is a motley assortment of ex-military types all huddled aboard some 200 ton Free Trader that can just about make its mortgage payments if the crew is willing to take no pay and not be choosy about what sort of cargo/passengers they haul (passengers who have a finite chance of deciding to make themselves the owners in mid-jump). Their greatest threats are law enforcement, bureaucrats, and the machinations of various nobles and megacorps with whom they might have the misfortune to cross paths. Most of this means negotiating, bribing, duping, concealing, and other such nefarious activities, interspersed with hair-raising instances of death-defying battles, ship malfunctions, and maybe some weird alien encounters or more classic location-based adventures. So, the challenges are different, but the essential mechanics are still D&D-esque in the sense that they fall to the rules to resolve conflict and the player's input is through character choices and actions modulated by the mechanics of skills etc. IN THEORY you might move to the level of a PC using EDU to basically say "Yeah, I know about this type of animal, as a xenobiologist I should know about its reproductive strategy", but that would be followed by a dice roll against 'xenobiology' (and note that even EDU doesn't play a defined role here, though you might get a modifier to the skill check). There's no mechanic for "I invoke my EDU to make up lore about the creature's reproductive strategy that we can use to help us find a way to eradicate it" or something like that. Not even Social Standing has that, although it could be argued to be fairly strongly implied within the stock Imperium setting that the game basically assumes. Still, there isn't a way to even make a check against an ability score directly, the GM would have to just decide for himself if it would work, or else break it down into a detailed process that would involve existing skills.I think you can argue that 2e DOES point GMs in the right direction in its non-mechanical presentation. I could imagine a game that leveraged the rules framework of 2e AD&D pretty well and yet was not focused on setpiece location adventure (ala modules). So, for example you could put the PCs in a milieu like 'You are all nomads roaming the Great Sea of Grass on your trusty lizard mounts' and then allow things to sandbox into tribal conflict, invasion, civilization vs barbarians, etc. It is just not the typical formulation for a D&D game, and you'd have to be willing to accommodate maybe bending some 'rules' of D&D to make it work well. Like changing the way characters are initially equipped, maybe creating more specialized caster spell lists and priest classes, perhaps a couple of specific kits would be handy, etc. 2e actually HELPS this exact scenario in one way, it lacks 'barbarian as a class' and so you're free to create 'culturally focused' kits that embody that sort of distinction instead. I'm not sure if this is part of why Zeb Cook excised the barbarian from core 2e or not, but I thought it was a great improvement. Kara-Tur particularly suffered from the existence of that class.Is it easier to do that sort of game in Traveller? Yes, because Traveller simply lacks a really hard and fast concept of what you ARE supposed to do. I described the 'typical party' above, but the game doesn't honestly seem to put that forward as an INTENDED setup, it is just 'what happens when you unwrap the box and start rolling on the charts'. So, in a sense it is a 'looser' game. Frankly, given its focus on a modestly gritty realism, you can quite easily invent variant milieu in Traveller, like a pre-starflight game of planetary exploration (just build TL8 ships, not ENTIRELY realistic, but if you add a few details to the ship rules you can come close enough). You could do a variant game where the PCs are part of an isolated colony with no contact to galactic civilization, perhaps even one with a 'fallen civilization' or something (though now you would have to really hack the chargen rules a bunch, non-trivial but pretty easy to envisage working with say some pre-gens). I gues the point is, Traveller is a BIT more flexible than D&D, but perhaps more in terms of convention and some characteristics of the milieu than due to any significant rules innovation. I think it is instructive to note that Traveller has actually never strayed far from its original campaign structure, or really innovated much, whereas D&D has evolved and encompassed several (albeit fairly closely related) styles of play. They are both fairly flexible games, but Traveller invested a lot more of its page count and conceptual effort into the specific setting, so it has tended to remain there to a higher degree (I guess it also never reached a high level of financial success, so it didn't get nearly the number of spin-off products).</blockquote>

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