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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8992547" data-attributes="member: 42582">There is a tension between these two things, isn't there? A player who only cares about their character doesn't seem to be working in an infinitely vast imaginative play space.I'm not [USER=7027139]@loverdrive[/USER], but can give an example that I've posted about before: onworld exploration in Classic Traveller.A few years ago, when I broke out my old black books and decided to try this game for the first time in about three decades, the first session was awesome. And we had these colourful PCs, one of whom could drive wheeled vehicles and one of them who was a vacc-suit trained jack-of-all-trades. And the session ended with the PCs in a domed city on a world with a corrosive atmosphere.My idea was that I wanted a scene in which the PCs were out of the sphere, relying on their ATVs and their vacc suits to keep them alive.A couple of sessions later I got to run that scene - the PCs left the dome to find an enemy base in an old, abandoned military installation beyond the dome. And at that point I discovered that Classic Traveller has no rules for resolving on-world exploration. I mean, it has stats for vehicles (mph, refuelling rates etc). And it has a rule for rolling per day for vehicle malfunction. But those are only meaningful if I as referee make a decision about how far away the base is, at which point the players aren't actually playing any game: we're just doing the (fairly simple) arithmetic of calculating the number of travel days, and then making the (fairly unexciting) malfunction rolls.(This is the Traveller equivalent of [USER=7027139]@loverdrive[/USER]'s example of being told sword damage.)It was not good play.Anyway, here's a point of contrast: after finding and taking over the enemy base, the PCs came under assault from an enemy starship blasting the installation from orbit with its triple laser turret. So they decided to jump into their ATVs and escape the fire. Traveller has rules for a small craft evading and escaping starship fire, and I was easily able to adapt these for an ATV escaping orbital fire (substituting ATV/vehicle skill for small craft skill on the evader's side, while applying Forward Observer on the attacking side as a penalty). This was exciting, made more so because as the rolls to escape were being made, the players also made opposed rolls (using Communications skill, I think enhanced by Electronics and/or J-o-T) to intercept and block communications between the spotter and the orbiting starship, and to call in friendly reinforcements.It was great play.I was the same GM in both episodes (they happened within the span of a couple of months, from memory). The difference was that in one, the game did not deliver. And in the other it did.A RPG does not need a resolution mechanic for everything: 4e D&D has one; Dungeon World doesn't. But a good RPG needs a satisfactory rule for everything. DW has one: if the player's declared action doesn't trigger a player-side move, the GM has to say something (as [USER=7027139]@loverdrive[/USER] I think it was noted upthread) - and the design of the things the GM is encouraged to say and the player side moves means that, sooner or later, enough of the former will prompt some of the latter, and these will in turn feed back nicely into the former.On-world exploration for Traveller, though, has no resolution mechanic and doesn't have a framework like DW. It just sucks. Since that episode our Traveller campaign has continued for many sessions, but I've made sure never to have onworld exploration be an element of play, because I know the game simply can't handle it. Which in my view is a weakness in a sci-fi RPG (and is in my view the only really big weakness I've found in Classic Traveller).</blockquote>

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