Played some Classic Traveller today

[MGibster]

In Book 1, 1977 - which is the starting point for the tables we're using - J-o-T is the "6" result on the Merchant's Service Skills table. Rolling three 6 results on that table is not all that unlikely.

For some reason I missed the whole part about you running a Classic Traveller game. I only know a little about the setting and nothing about those rules.

 

[aramis erak]

CT Book 1-3 is almost all rules, very little setting, and even that limited setting is hidden as rules text and/or results of tables shaping the setting.

The skills are one of the crunchiest skill systems, in that each skill is a special case rule... so when I see people claiming it's light, and I've run all the other Traveller editions, and found CT the one requiring me to go to the rules far more often for "what's that special case?", I find it beggars belief.

That may be because I'm a rules-as-social-contract type player and GM, and ignoring the 6 pages of skill rules alone is not something I can casually do without explaining to players that it's being ignored... Last time I ran CT, my player briefing ran 1 page of listing which rules were and were not being used (swapping the DGP-CT task system's 2 pages in for those 6 pages and the additional chunk of skills as special case rules in Supp 4.)...

For me, Traveller NEVER feels light, and the lightest version in terms of needing to reference rules was T:TNE, and yet, was my least favorite until I'd run Mongoose.

Then again, Marc claims he's always used xd6 vs attribute+skill... and has hinted that the 2d6 baseline was Loren's thing... And one of the adventures has a 3d6 for Strength or less check left in... and a page of Bk 0 shows the 1d to 5d odds...

 

[Todd Roybark]

I've only played the original Traveller and Mongoose's and the systems feel the same to me.
I appreciate the small cleanups to the rules in MGT2.

We used to use Traveller rules instead of Fasa's Mechwarrior RPG rules. The system can model quite a bit, takes mods like a champ.

 

[pemerton]

The skills are one of the crunchiest skill systems, in that each skill is a special case rule... so when I see people claiming it's light, and I've run all the other Traveller editions, and found CT the one requiring me to go to the rules far more often for "what's that special case?", I find it beggars belief.

That may be because I'm a rules-as-social-contract type player and GM, and ignoring the 6 pages of skill rules alone is not something I can casually do

I'm not working from the books unmediated: I've written up my own version of the rules, which is - for my purposes - better edited. Eg I have a section on "Officials and Bureaucracy" which presents the rules on Law Level (chance of being pulled over), avoiding close inspection of documents (from the Admin skill entry), getting away with forged papers (from the Forgery skill entry), chances of successfully bribing them (from the Bribery skill entry), etc.

I find this makes it much easier to play in an AW-style: the activity being attempted feeds into the relevant subsystem, and then that tells us how to resolve it, including what the DMs are.

I don't have a view on whether this is "light" or not - clearly it's not as light as Cthulhu Dark or even Prince Valiant, but it's much lighter than most versions of D&D, or Rolemaster, or even (I would say) RuneQuest.

A big help is that the players don't really need to know the subsystems, so these can be managed by me as referee. The player just looks at the PC sheet and can see what his/her character is good at. That's a big difference from D&D in particular.

 

[dragoner]

The skills are one of the crunchiest skill systems, in that each skill is a special case rule... so when I see people claiming it's light, and I've run all the other Traveller editions, and found CT the one requiring me to go to the rules far more often for "what's that special case?", I find it beggars belief.

I find it is more difficult for traditional gamers to go back to CT after using the later versions. CT is easy in that PC's only have around 5 skills, and each one makes a sort of free-form playbook like in PbtA, and the skills as "moves" from that system. The later unified task systems make the use of skills more vanilla, the results flattened as CT often has +2 per skill level so that Engineer 2 is a huge advantage, for example; and you have a far larger skill list in later versions. The downside is that the unified systems promote rolling for everything, so that games get 2-3x the amount of rolling than CT. We used to crib our skills on our character sheets, because the actual stats take two lines, and our Ref (GM) would be critical if we didn't know what our PC's were capable of.

CT is really the first of the "indie games" with the narrative play-style, and skills played more as "moves"; Marc W Miller is a really brilliant, but underrated game designer for figuring this out 20 years before everyone else. However he is under-appreciated in the Traveller community, as most fans are die hard grognard-ish traditional gamers, that are hide bound enough to have an apoplectic fit at CT being described as a "story game".

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I find it is more difficult for traditional gamers to go back to CT after using the later versions. CT is easy in that PC's only have around 5 skills, and each one makes a sort of free-form playbook like in PbtA, and the skills as "moves" from that system. The later unified task systems make the use of skills more vanilla, the results flattened as CT often has +2 per skill level so that Engineer 2 is a huge advantage, for example; and you have a far larger skill list in later versions. The downside is that the unified systems promote rolling for everything, so that games get 2-3x the amount of rolling than CT. We used to crib our skills on our character sheets, because the actual stats take two lines, and our Ref (GM) would be critical if we didn't know what our PC's were capable of.

CT is really the first of the "indie games" with the narrative play-style, and skills played more as "moves"; Marc W Miller is a really brilliant, but underrated game designer for figuring this out 20 years before everyone else. However he is under-appreciated in the Traveller community, as most fans are die hard grognard-ish traditional gamers, that are hide bound enough to have an apoplectic fit at CT being described as a "story game".

All very true, and why I really have always hankered for MORE help from the game in terms of generating that story, like some sort of traits for PCs (skills count, but I think "cool under fire" or something like that could be a nice addition). The EDU and SOC ability scores are also very much in this category as well.
Anyway, I have played around with doing some of my own setting work. The observation that CT core books don't have a LOT of setting is SORT OF true, but the rules are VERY tuned to the Imperium. You can map out random sectors, but most of what you find is not sensible without considering Marc's model of interstellar society. 2300 kind of seemed potentially interesting, but I never could understand why they used that horrible Aftermath-based system for it, bleh!
Anyway, you don't have to hack it much to add some interesting stuff. I'd just make the computers into NPCs and call them 'AI', but you don't REALLY have to change much in the rules for them. Add some more plausible equipment, maybe change the TL system a bit to fold in things like nanotech and cybernetics in lieu of anti-grav. While the ships are a bit unrealistic, probably nobody cares, and they work well enough from a play standpoint.
The various subsystems are OK, but I think society should be a bit more complicated. Maybe I will revisit my d6 Space campaign and run it with CT instead. It would pretty much work... I didn't really find the d6 system was that thematic for what I wanted to do anyway.

 

[dragoner]

All very true, and why I really have always hankered for MORE help from the game in terms of generating that story, like some sort of traits for PCs (skills count, but I think "cool under fire" or something like that could be a nice addition).

Stellagama has Traits for Cepheus Light:

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

I just got the printed version of Cepheus Light through Lulu, it is good, very much like CT.

Somewhere between Wintermute and the Machine is where I make AI, good for using the ship as an AI NPC also.

Soc is sometimes better just flipped to Charisma, and use it that way. Unless one wants to dig into the whole space feudalism thing, with Barons and Dukes and all that.

Traveller is really great for all its generators for making your own setting. I do a more hard-ish SF setting myself, the sort of ubiquitous anti-gravity is not to my liking, personally. Nano- and Cyber- stuff is cool as long as it doesn't become "that one trick" which gets used all the time.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Stellagama has Traits for Cepheus Light:

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

I just got the printed version of Cepheus Light through Lulu, it is good, very much like CT.

Somewhere between Wintermute and the Machine is where I make AI, good for using the ship as an AI NPC also.

Soc is sometimes better just flipped to Charisma, and use it that way. Unless one wants to dig into the whole space feudalism thing, with Barons and Dukes and all that.

Traveller is really great for all its generators for making your own setting. I do a more hard-ish SF setting myself, the sort of ubiquitous anti-gravity is not to my liking, personally. Nano- and Cyber- stuff is cool as long as it doesn't become "that one trick" which gets used all the time.

Right, I think AI is BASICALLY just 'set dressing'. In our d6 campaign I explained that AIs were capable assistants. The ship could be ordered to do various things, pretty much in line with the Star Trek 'computer', which could run the ship in a limited fashion, perform certain types of analysis, etc. This translates pretty well into the 'programs' mechanics of Traveler, where you can dedicate a specific amount of your computer to giving bonuses in specific skills.
SOC is definitely a bit focused on the specific elements of the Imperium (or similar) setting, true. Of course that isn't a BAD baseline, as @pemerton has noted. It casts the game into a sort of "Age of Sail" kind of mold where travel and communications are slow, and sometimes unreliable, but there is still a widespread society. The only problems I see with Traveler is it kind of (even the setting specific materials) never REALLY delved into the legal, cultural, and social structure of the Imperium. What sort of rights, powers, social conventions, wealth, etc. adhere to the various social levels within the Imperium? We really do not know. Even Spinward Marches doesn't really make that clear. It also seems as though there is an 'Imperial Culture' and then 'Local Culture' (as well as Law, Govt., Economy, etc.). How things are factored is really never explained, at all. We can draw some very tentative general conclusions from the rules, but in a lot of ways the setting is close to non-existent.
So the 'SOC' ability score is very hard to interpret in Traveler. What does a 15 represent? Does that make your PC a very high ranking Imperial noble? What does that mean? How does that relate to your status in the local culture? Aside from a few tables modifiers what exactly does this very high status do for you? Nothing at all is ever stated about this. I mean, if this was a Medieval European society of, say, the 11th Century, then being high ranking nobility is a huge big deal. You can practically exercise life and death over almost anyone you meet who is a commoner. Certainly over anyone who is your subject, and EVERYONE is a subject of some nobles, unless maybe they are citizens of a free city or something. Is the Imperium similar, or does 'nobility' mean something else? It is REALLY not clear, so SOC can't do a whole lot...
Of course the GM can deal with these types of questions. However its tricky since you would assume every PC would have deep knowledge of these questions, so you will have to create answers with a good bit of detail when it comes up, or again devalue SOC and things based on it by making them "whatever is convenient right now."

 

[pemerton]

Soc is sometimes better just flipped to Charisma, and use it that way. Unless one wants to dig into the whole space feudalism thing, with Barons and Dukes and all that.

SOC is definitely a bit focused on the specific elements of the Imperium (or similar) setting, true. Of course that isn't a BAD baseline, as @pemerton has noted. It casts the game into a sort of "Age of Sail" kind of mold where travel and communications are slow, and sometimes unreliable, but there is still a widespread society. The only problems I see with Traveler is it kind of (even the setting specific materials) never REALLY delved into the legal, cultural, and social structure of the Imperium. What sort of rights, powers, social conventions, wealth, etc. adhere to the various social levels within the Imperium? We really do not know. Even Spinward Marches doesn't really make that clear. It also seems as though there is an 'Imperial Culture' and then 'Local Culture' (as well as Law, Govt., Economy, etc.). How things are factored is really never explained, at all. We can draw some very tentative general conclusions from the rules, but in a lot of ways the setting is close to non-existent.
So the 'SOC' ability score is very hard to interpret in Traveler. What does a 15 represent? Does that make your PC a very high ranking Imperial noble? What does that mean? How does that relate to your status in the local culture? Aside from a few tables modifiers what exactly does this very high status do for you? Nothing at all is ever stated about this. I mean, if this was a Medieval European society of, say, the 11th Century, then being high ranking nobility is a huge big deal. You can practically exercise life and death over almost anyone you meet who is a commoner. Certainly over anyone who is your subject, and EVERYONE is a subject of some nobles, unless maybe they are citizens of a free city or something. Is the Imperium similar, or does 'nobility' mean something else? It is REALLY not clear, so SOC can't do a whole lot...
Of course the GM can deal with these types of questions. However its tricky since you would assume every PC would have deep knowledge of these questions, so you will have to create answers with a good bit of detail when it comes up, or again devalue SOC and things based on it by making them "whatever is convenient right now."

I don't worry too much about "devaluing" because - in Classic Traveller - nearly all this stuff is randomly rolled and so there is not player investment in resources that has to be respected. Which means the "whatever is convenient right now" isn't too bad as an answer.

In our campaign, it's come out that nobility can be both local (one of our PCs is a Baron of the world Hallucida), and imperial (in the OP of this thread, one of the PCs seduced a Free Imperial Knight). I consider social standing in some reaction contexts, and it's also a consideration in resolving leadership disputes among the PCs.

This is actually somewhat like Fame in Prince Valiant (which in some contexts grants a prestige bonus to social interactions and contests), except in Traveller it's not also a PC advancement mechanic.

I don't like Soc as Cha, because that then leaves skills like Carousing, Liaison, Leader, etc a bit unanchored.

 

[dragoner]

I don't like Soc as Cha, because that then leaves skills like Carousing, Liaison, Leader, etc a bit unanchored.

It is imperfect, you are right, though using as some "Social Intelligence" characteristic it can be the stat for social combat in the same way Str is for melee and Dex for ranged combat.

What does a 15 represent? Does that make your PC a very high ranking Imperial noble?

From the 1981 printings of the Little Black Books onward, it makes them a Duke. How that all functions, it's not very well defined. It can be difficult having a campaign with Dukes, Barons, Admirals, and Generals; I mean, what are these people doing on a Free Trader? Players will go for it, because they are Duke! But too often, I find the high status in-congruent, and sort of a one trick pony that neither the player or GM has realistic ideas of playing.