(rpg) Traveller -- tell me why you like it?

[sjmiller]

I never got a chance to check out the HC Traveller book (in all my years of gaming I only saw it in a store once), but I picked up a few of the softcover Classic re-prints a few years back (and those still had full-on death in character gen).

If you look at the reprint (Books 0-8 - The Classic Books) you should look carefully at Book 1, page 10. Right there it tells that you can use the optional rule that a failed Survival roll results in injury and mustering out after only 2 years. So, if someone really wants to, they can go with the option of failing a Survival roll means death. However, they do not have to.

 

[sjmiller]

I haven't gotten around to mentioning it yet, but Sgt Hulka pretty much described the single greatest thing about Traveller. The freedom to decide your own destiny is the heart and soul of Traveller. What service to enter, what skills to take, how long to stay in service, what do you do after mustering out, where do you go, they are all in the hands of the player.

As ref you get to have the fun of seeing where the players want to take your carefully planned universe. Do they try and dominate the interstellar market? Do they try and seek fame and glory as a hired gun? Do they try and take over a planet's government and become their own petty tyrant? I've seen all of those happen and a lot more.

Traveller is incredibly easy to learn. There's nothing complex, and it pretty much explained step by step, because they were expecting that nobody had ever played something like Traveller before. They were right, and there are few things to compare to it.

 

[MummyKitty]

I'll second all the positive things that people have been saying about Traveller, the character creation, setting, open creation of the universe as you explore are all good. The other thing that I always thought was cool was that you could have characters from a barbarian backwater mixing with ex-Admirals of the Imperial Navy in the same group. Or, in one campaign you could play a group of criminals and the next the crew of an Imperial peace-keeping battleship. The Classic Traveller little black books were just cool too, from the simple design on the cover to the neat black and white drawings (some of the originals were recently on eBay, didn't get any but they were cool).

I've purchased some of the GURPS Traveller materials, and they are OK but I think if I played again I'd want to use the Classic Traveller rules. Haven't really looked at d20 Traveller or the other editions.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I like the setting and play style. It reflects my favorite science fiction books very well, those being Andre Norton's Zero Stone and Uncharted Stars, and Poul Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn, David Falkayn, and Dominic Flandry books.

As an aside, I read someplace that Traveller predated D&D by several years. Does anyone know if this is true?

 

[billd91]

That is a very dubious thing to be asserting as a positive.

I don't think it's dubious at all. You're basically playing a character who's embarking on a second career, one in which he is in total control of his life rather than some superior officers or whatnot.
And being largely established with skills and much basic education and advancement already dealt with, the game takes on a different kind of focus. You tend to see campaigns in which characters work to get more wealth or make a buck (like us normal people) rather than amass more inherent power. Motivations for characters are very easy to relate to because they are so much like our own.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Traveller was the second RPG I ever played, right after AD&D. By about 3 months.

And while I had 3 PCs in a row die in the creation process (it WAS a bad day)- I never lost another one.

Traveller was simultaneously well designed for its particular setting, and also capable of being used to model many other types of sci-fi campaigns than the one the books presented.

In other words, it was generic without being generic.

The most scientifically beleivable aliens done to date. I can't think of another SF game that has such plausible aliens.

SSI's Universe was a little better, and it featured the Delta-V (Newtonian!) space combat system (complete with a fairly accurate star chart for Sol's galactic neigborhood) and had nifty robots...but it was released mere months before the company went under.

While it was better than Traveller in those 3 areas, Traveller had it all over Universe in so many other ways (like sheer complexity), it was probably doomed anyway.

That is a very dubious thing to be asserting as a positive.

Not really- it is no different than something like Task Force Games' old product, Central Casting, in that it helps flesh out the PC.

Instead of a party of PCs all being all the same level or power point total, Traveller PCs might have radically different levels of experience- not unlike a random selection of people in a given room... Really, in play, it made starting adventures seem...more realistic.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

The most scientifically beleivable aliens done to date. I can't think of another SF game that has such plausible aliens.

I would agree to a point, but the aliens in another GDW game, 2300 (called, at first, Traveller 2300 despite no real connection between the two) had the most interesting, plausible aliens I've seen in a RPG.

 

[Jim Hague]

I'm shocked no one has mentioned this -- Traveller was (is?) the most character-driven role-playing game ever created. There is not a single moment in the game, ever, that the player can't ignore the plot hook, give the Referee the finger, and do something totally different. As Painandgreed mentioned, you could just keep travelling from system to system, forcing your referee to roll up new planets, encounters and trade goods, trying to keep one step ahead of the repo men. Or you could build yourself a little Striker merc unit and start carving out a personal fiefdom for yourself. Or you could turn outlaw pirate. Or you could go industrial espionage. Or you could turn traitor and sell secrets to the Zhodani. Or you could become Solamani terrorists. Or you could open up a starport bar somewhere and lay low keeping profits high while interstellar war wages around you. And you know what? Whatever you did, the Referee couldn't stop you. Only death or poverty could.

No, I'm pretty sure the GM could put a stop to that behavior mighty quick - "Hi. There's the door. Don't let it hit you on the way out." Or, if you're not the confrontational sort, simply don't use the charts and rolls.

See, this is an attitude that bugs the hell out of me - player vs. GM. Good gaming is cooperation, not competition. IMO, one of the quickest ways to kill a campaign, to ensure that a GM and players have zero investment in it, is by taking the adversarial mindset you see above.

Now, back on topic - I do like the freedom that Traveller has. Classic Traveller was my first sci-fi system, bought on sight after I spied an ad for it in ASFM. The universe seemed so damn big. And that's what hooked me.

 

[Jim Hague]

I think in part because it's sort of "Han Solo" the RPG. Back in the day, a lot of people wanted to be like Han Solo. Go around the galaxy in a tramp freighter. Traveller was the game to do that in, even if it wasn't that Star Wars like.


Actually, part of the reason I could never get into Firefly is because it wasn't like Traveller. Firefly seemed more like Cowboy Bebop, but with 3 times as many characters, which confused me as I could never remember who was who (I mostly tell people apart by hair color, everyone on Firefly has brown hair).

In Traveller, characters travel. They go from world to world, star system to star system. In Firefly, there's one star system. In Traveller, there's exotic and weird places. Funky alien artifacts. I don't think Firefly had anything like that.

Going to have to disagree with you here, especially considering that a line in the first episode - "Hang on, Travellers!" - is Joss Whedon's nod to the game that gave him the idea for the series in the first place. Characters in Firefly did go from world to world, did run into exotic and odd cultures (human ones). The only thing missing was alien artifacts, and that likely would have come up sooner or later. It's pretty much the quintessential Traveller TV series.

 

[SgtHulka]

No, I'm pretty sure the GM could put a stop to that behavior mighty quick - "Hi. There's the door. Don't let it hit you on the way out." Or, if you're not the confrontational sort, simply don't use the charts and rolls.

In the former you're not playing, then, though, are you?

And in the latter one might make the argument you're no longer playing Traveller (or, at least, Classic Traveller, which is the version I'm familiar with). You're using the Traveller Universe, perhaps, but it's a different game.

Note that in Classic Traveller you don't have a Game Master or a Dungeon Master. You have a Referee. That is an important distinction that reflects the philosophy of the rules. The Referee isn't supposed to jam the characters through pre-planned story arcs. He isn't supposed to side with or against the characters, he's just there run the "rest of the universe".

Look, everyone's got a different idea of fun. And there are different systems to address those different ideas. For those who want to sit around and make up stories together, there's diceless role-playing. For those who want wear costumes there's Live Action Role-Playing. For those who want to excercise grand tactical maneuver there's miniatures gaming or wargaming. I could jump up and down and say "no what you describe isn't true role-playing" but that's patently false, just as you claiming that character-driven free-form role-playing is "wrong" is false.

Classic Traveller encouraged a specific style of play, where the players were free to have their characters do whatever they wanted, and the Referee was there to challenge them every step of the way. To deny it is to deny a fundamental aspect of the game, which is what the original poster asked about. If, like you, the original poster believes role-playing should be shared story time not just between the players but between the Judge/Referee/Gamemaster and players, then this is useful information to steer him away from Traveller.