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

[ColonelHardisson]

First In

Unfortunately, it's out of print and I just checked eBay...it's kinda pricey.

GURPS Traveller did a really great thing - it infused the Traveller franchise with new life, something which even Marc Miller couldn't do. I'm not a fan of the GURPS system either, but I ordered GT as soon as I saw it available, and even got a neat promo poster.

One of the criticisms I don't exactly understand about Traveller in general is that the Imperium setting is somehow static. Given the enormous number of worlds and the various subsectors found in The Spinward Marches and The Solomani Rim, there seems to be a lot of potential for conflict.

I mean, just because the entire Imperium isn't embroiled in a vast war (at least in Classic Traveller and GT) doesn't mean nothing is going on. The Solomani Confederacy is still spoiling to get Earth back, the Zhodani hover at their border, The Spinward Marches have the contentious Sword Worlds...even a single planet can provide a campaign's worth of conflict or adventure...I mean, we here in the real world have had plenty of both, and we're "limited" to just one planet. Several adventures for Traveller have shown how much adventure can be had on just planet. Night of Conquest, for example, has the player characters caught up in the middle of the beginning of a world war, with their spacecraft holding the balance of power.

There was a really interesting setting/adventure for Traveller in Dragon (59?) in which a planet had just experienced a full-on nuclear exchange between rival planetary nations, and the Imperium had dispatched a battleship to try to help clean up the mess. Tons of potential adventure, in both space and planetside.

And that's basically an explanation of why I like Traveller's setting so much. The sheer vastness and variety of it means that even the most placid subsector of space can have a lot of trouble brewing. One just has to take it one planet at a time.

 

[Twowolves]

Not true.

The sections on space travel in the referee's guide has a task defined for every roll you need to make when travelling from world to world and system to system. Including skimming gas giants and making jumps.

Ok, bad example. The actual starship operations had some examples, as did ground combat (range bands?? wth?). But every other skill out there (and remember, this was about 10+ years ago when I read them) seemed to have almost no examples. And I stand by the assertation that there was no descriptions of what a typical person in a typical starship would see or be able to interact with. Drink prices, news outlets, how security at a starport worked. It just was very sparse on details, it seemed.

 

[painandgreed]

I do agree that the CT technology totally got dated, this is somewhat addressed in the GURPS books by saying nanotechnology was simply made illegal or restricted....

Another quite plausable explaination for the lack of nanotech is simply that it is not possible. There's big debates going on about what might and might not be possible (search for "fat fingers, sticky fingers"). What is possible will be parts of material sciences and things closer to biological sciences and not necissarily recognizable as nanotech.

Still, such things are both the joy and bane of RPGs, especially the early ones. There are lots of little holes that require house rules. Somtimes even more rules than the original rule books. When I played CT, I had many pages of stats for weapons of various TL. Not a different weapon but a chart of what the stats for a chemical slugthrower would be at each different TL rather than one weight, range and magazine size for all. Everybody I knew who played AD&D had a three ring binder of house rules needed to close up the bits in the game for things like skill systems and crits. Some where quite nice, well thought out, and fun to use. Once AD&D2 came out with rules for such, everybodies house rules got dropped for the RAW even if they might be better.

 

[SWBaxter]

What is it about the Traveller game that you liked so much?

Rules-wise, I think MegaTraveller has just about the best task/skill-based resolution system I've seen. Relatively simple, speedy in play, and yet it handles all sorts of skill complications and interactions very well.

On the character creation front, I like the mindset that Traveller characters are often at or near the height of their abilities right from the start. That puts the focus on less game-oriented goals - rather than saying "I hope I level up this session", players are more likely to say something like "I hope we can figure out what the Ine Givar are up to this time", or "I hope the patron comes through with the cash so we can catch up on our ship payments." And on a related note, I like that the game itself doesn't provide any strong hook for adventuring, leaving that up to the players. And finally, as I get older, I appreciate a game in which a starting PC who's pushing 40 isn't a washed-up old-timer .

I like the vector-based ship movement and combat in the original Traveller rules. I've got enough physics geek in me to find that cool.

Setting wise, I like the impersonal pseudo-aristocracy of the Imperium.

And to be fair, were there things you did not like about it?

I'm not a big fan of the 2-D starmaps. I don't mind them as a simplification for a small local setting, but building so much of the Third Imperium background around factors that only apply in a 2-D universe kinda rubs me the wrong way.

The various detailed design sequences for vehicles are kind of a love/hate thing for me - I like 'em in theory and when I'm doing prep work with lots of lead time, but I hate them when I need something fast (i.e. when PCs do something unexpected, which is almost all the time).

Scale can be a problem for me. For example, the later ship design rules (from High Guard on) allow for a huge range of ship sizes, 99% of which are of very little use to me when I'm running a game for a group of PCs who maybe have a Free Trader if they're lucky. I find I use the original book 2 shipbuilding rules, with a few tweaks, rather than the full glory of High Guard and successors.

I don't have much of a problem with the 1970's-era science and space opera, but that's because I never really treated Traveller as a hard sci-fi game in the first place.

The world generation system tosses out some wonky results far too often, I almost always use variant rules to generate my UWPs.

 

[Staffan]

I must have missed that part. I own the series, watched each episode multiple times, and saw the movie on opening night, but nowhere did I get the impression it was all in one solar system.

There were two intros used during the season. The first was narrated by Book:
[bq]After the Earth was used up, we found a new solar system and hundreds of new Earths were terra formed and colonized. [/bq]

The second was narrated by Mal:
[bq]Here's how it is: Earth got used up, so we terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths, some rich and flush with new technologies, some not so much.[/bq]

Like I said, it was somewhat fuzzy on the whole thing, sort of like the Bible on kneecaps. The movie was more clear on the whole thing being one big system, it's in the beginning in the VR sequence with River in school.

And the whole thing about Reavers "reaching the end of space and going mad", ....Pluto ain't the end of space! Sheesh

Movie spoiler:
[sblock]If you watched the movie, you'll know that the "reaching the end of space" thing is just a myth.[/sblock]

 

[Laslo Tremaine]

I must have missed that part. I own the series, watched each episode multiple times, and saw the movie on opening night, but nowhere did I get the impression it was all in one solar system. I'm probably wrong, but I got just the oposite impression. I mean, there was a secret, hidden planet for crying out loud! How do you hide a planet inside a solar system that is crawling with teraformers? And the whole thing about Reavers "reaching the end of space and going mad", ....Pluto ain't the end of space! Sheesh

And that pretty much sums up what I don't like about Firefly...

That and the whole "We fought a civil war, and we're on the loosing side (which makes us the confederates), but you should sympathise with us...

It really rubbed my the wrong way. There lots that I like about Firefly, but I have a hard time makeing it past those points...

 

[billd91]

And that pretty much sums up what I don't like about Firefly...

That and the whole "We fought a civil war, and we're on the loosing side (which makes us the confederates), but you should sympathise with us...

It really rubbed my the wrong way. There lots that I like about Firefly, but I have a hard time makeing it past those points...

I wouldn't read too much into the whole confederates thing. The war takes the place of the American Civil War in traditional westerns, but I think it's more of a way to generate displaced gun-slingers than to really parallel the ACW.

 

[SWBaxter]

Ok, bad example. The actual starship operations had some examples, as did ground combat (range bands?? wth?). But every other skill out there (and remember, this was about 10+ years ago when I read them) seemed to have almost no examples.

I checked through MegaTraveller last night and found plenty of examples, both in the skill listings and elsewhere. Then I checked my reprints of Classic Traveller, and also found a decent number of examples. So this myth is busted.

And I stand by the assertation that there was no descriptions of what a typical person in a typical starship would see or be able to interact with. Drink prices, news outlets, how security at a starport worked. It just was very sparse on details, it seemed.

This part is true for the core rules - since the idea was that each referee would set their campaign setting up the way they wanted, the rules don't spend a lot of time on this sort of detail. Instead, that sort of thing became a staple of the Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society and in adventures when it was considered important. Rules in the rulebooks, setting info in the sourcebooks - this is the Grognard Way.

 

[WayneLigon]

I do agree that the CT technology totally got dated, this is somewhat addressed in the GURPS books by saying nanotechnology was simply made illegal or restricted....

Also, most of the Imperium is suffused with Vilani culture. Vilani technological progress is very slow, because they see no reason to simply rush into using something new when something old works perfectly fine; they are purposefully the exact opposite of the modern terrestrial/American viewpoint. Only a few of them even actually learn how their existing technology works - to all but a few Vilani, most of their tech is a black box. The First Imperium lasted for a long, long time and they only got up to something like Jump-2.

And I stand by the assertation that there was no descriptions of what a typical person in a typical starship would see or be able to interact with. Drink prices, news outlets, how security at a starport worked. It just was very sparse on details, it seemed.

Yep. Like most RPG's of the time, there was no setting information given in the basic books: just the bare bones of what you needed and you had to do all the rest. In some of the first Traveller games I played, the player ship maps were all hand-drawn because of course there were no maps or illustrations in the books as to what a 400-tonner looked like, or even at that time how much volume a 'ton' was. We just guessed.

 

[Kesh]

Well, keep in mind that Firefly is primarily based on classic Westerns. And in a lot of those westerns, the hero was an ex-Confederate soldier, or the ex-Confederates were shown in a sympathetic light vs. the Federals who were enforcing the law on everyone. It's a genre thing, really.