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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7315510" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.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.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 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.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.)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?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".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.</blockquote>

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