Space RPGs?

[Psion]

I notice that a lot of people have recommended Traveller, but the Traveller universe has problems, most of which are legacies of its '70s design.

• Traveller was designed in 1977, based on SF that was aging even then. Its 1950s and 1960s SF tropes are sadly dated, and it no longer looks futuristic. It has become retro-futuristic, like Space 1889.

I disagree. Traveller's look isn't that different from SF of the 90s and 2000's... Babylon 5, Space: Above and Beyond, Battlestar Galactica and (especially) Firefly are all right up Traveller's alley. Traveller in no longer considered "hard", but it certainly is representative of a sort of space SF that many people enjoy.

• The original designers half intended Traveller as a generic game, and a lot of the canon for their universe was laid down by deliberately-vague statements about a semi-generic 'Imperium'. The fundamentals of how the universe works were never designed and, in important ways have never been settled. Important facts about how the Imperium works are either unstated or contradictory.

Some of us find the unstated to be a boon more than a curse, as it gives us room to create stuff to fill in, but doesn't leave us the task of filling in things by hand.

That being said, there is a huge body of work for the Traveller imperium. I've tapped into GURPS Traveller supplements like Humaniti and Starports to fill in details, books that (thankfully, not being a GT fan) I can pretty much ignore if I don't want to use it. Best of both worlds.

• Most of the published detail of Traveller consists of hundreds of planets that were randomly generated with Traveller's lame late-70s random world generation system. Connections between a planet's size, atmosphere, population, tech level, and starport are not quite absent, but are far too weak, and many of teh results are absurd.

This complaint, while overstated, is more of less true. It really only makes a difference if you are a stickler about realism in your planetary data.

Unfortunately for me, I sort of am. I did find one quick tweak that works wonders in making the canon system data make sense: make the size figure be in term of eights of Earth mass, not in terms of radius. You do that, 90% of the physically hosed-up worlds start to make sense (as it is, CT's rule for creating atmosphere way under-estimate the tendency of small bodies to lose their atmosphere.)

There is the somewhat bigger issue of habitable world in systems with white dwarfs, but that data is less "canonical" and you're usually safe to pencil in red dwarfs in the place of white dwarfs.

If you are not concerned about using canonical data but are concerned with realistic planetology, seek out and purchase a copy of GURPS TRAVELLER: FIRST SURVEY. It is world gen done right for Traveller.

• For "convenience", in Traveller space is two-dimensional.

This is true, and is actually one of the major things that has me pining for a game that is sort of the "next generation Traveller". A game that seems will never be.

In short, I could only recommend Traveller to a Traveller fan. If you're unfamiliar, and worse if you and your players are SF fans, you will find it laughable.

That, I vehemently disagree with. Albeit agreeing with many of your point, you are picking at points that just aren't that important to most SF fans. Traveller has some flaws, but has benefits in that it is highly playable game that most players can relate with. I have introduced many players to it over the years.

I bought and downloaded Thousand Suns a little while ago, which certainly sets out to be the sort of thing you want. But I haven't been able to form an opinion of it yet because (1) it is too long, and the type is too small, for me to be comfortable reading it on the screen, and (2) bizarre choice of layout and paper size (pages side-by-side on 6" by 9" pages, laid out like two-page spreads) makes it unsuitable to be printed out and bound in sensible format on any paper I can get.

I had high hopes for Thousand Suns being the next-gen Traveller game I was looking for. And it has many, many elements to be that game. However, I am finding I am thoroughly unsatisfied with the task system. It just doesn't seem to balance well against the chargen system. And for that matter, I dislike the strange decision to make ability scores static.

Perhaps I'll spin together a replacement task system that does what I think it needs to do.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

3D Space charts might be realistic, but I am afraid conveying them in text form is very difficult, and ultimately leads to no real visualization of the world.

Maybe it's best to make this a feature. Make astronomic distances irrelevant. You can open your FTL wormhole between any two arbitrary times in space. Maye the next generation Traveller FTL drives do exactly that - jump any distance, but still take 1 week of travel.

 

[Psion]

3D Space charts might be realistic, but I am afraid conveying them in text form is very difficult, and ultimately leads to no real visualization of the world.

I find that using a 3D visualization tool like Astrosynthesis or ChView works wonders, an the old "travel time chart" like those that appeared in the GURPS Space atlases seem to do the trick for conveying positional information.

 

[Shades of Green]

One possible trick would be to use wormholes or fixed stargates to create a network of stars connected by those, and then just have a flow-chart of space rather than represeting actual 3D star positions.

 

[Korgoth]

I also suggest Traveller. But I would avoid like the plague anything published by Mongoose.

Classic Traveller is still in print. And, going against the grain here... the original 3 books (called the "3 LBBs" or 3 Little Black Books) are nice because they predate all of this stuff about the Imperium and the enormous body of canonical setting material that has come about.

In the original 3 books of Traveller (also published as The Traveller Book in a single volume, or Starter Traveller as a boxed set) posit a sci-fi setting where laser weapons require backpack power sources, where the largest possible ship is 5000 displacement tons and the setting is whatever you want it to be.

It has a feeling in sci-fi not unlike the feeling of Original D&D in fantasy: generic, but quirky. Which is what I like.

Also, shotguns in space.

I'm actually in the middle of preparing a Traveller one-shot for some folks. The tone is mostly drawn from Outland, but includes elements of Alien and 2001:ASO.

In space, everyone can hear you pump the 12-gauge.

 

[Agemegos]

Say what you will, but Fading Suns holds a place of honor among my gaming collection for a reason.

It is a matter of taste, as I said. Fading Suns was one of my three worst RPG experience, the others being Hunter Planet and Immortal: Invisible War. Other people like it, some of them a lot. The OP might turn out to be one of its fans one day. But I certainly don't think it will scratch his present itch for Space Opera. If Space Opera were the dessert of science fiction, Fading Suns would be casu marzu cheese.

 

[Agemegos]

3D Space charts might be realistic, but I am afraid conveying them in text form is very difficult, and ultimately leads to no real visualization of the world.

A 2-D universe is no improvement. You can visualise it on the page, but every time you look at it or make decisions based on it it screams "I am not Space".

Maybe it's best to make this a feature. Make astronomic distances irrelevant.

I did that with earlier versions of my setting: location had been important during the exodus from Earth, but developments had made proximity irrelevant. In the current revision I am replacing the star drive to make location matter because I want to make some places remote backwaters, which didn't work when it was one Jump from anywhere to anywhere.

As for visualisation: it doesn't seem like a big problem to me. Players need to know what important systems are nearby for various values of 'nearby', and how far it is from one place to another. I use an Excel workbook wih a page of positional data to calculate distances between specified colonies and to generate lists of colonies within specified distance of a specified point (which data can easily be sorted by distance.

I have a celestial globe, one of Nyrath's largest-format maps of space within 30 lightyears, soft and hard copies of the Astrogrator's Handbook, a copy of the HYG catalogue in Excel format, and software visualisation tools such as Celestia, but I find that players don't look at them during games, because they don't need too. Though of course things would be different for a strategy game.

 

[Prince Atom]

Not to thread-jack, but avoid World of Synnibarr like the plague!

I can't really say that I got into GURPS Traveller that much, and I haven't really looked at any of the other versions, but one thing I've always heard about Traveller is that the biggest reward in that game is finding out just one more little bit of information about the game world. You don't have +3 rayguns of starkly astounding pwnage, but you can make a pretty penny as a tramp freighter crew, and get in where you don't belong well enough.

I own a copy of Alternity and the Star*Drive campaign setting. The former is very crunchy, and the latter is very creamy. I've never played it, but the dice mechanic of "roll a d20 plus another die as the GM specifies (up to rolling 4d20) against a target number" seems a little gimmicky to me.

Every time I've run a lightsaber duel in the WEG Star Wars, it's over in two turns because someone misses a parry and the lightsaber, almost always with the Jedi's Control and Sense dice behind it, cleaves someone in two. Thrilling action this is not.

I ran a Star Wars Saga Edition game, without any Jedi in it, and it went surprisingly well with space pirates/"legitimate businessfolk" in the vein of Han Solo.

(It just occurred to me that I've never thought of Han as a space pirate, although Lucas obviously thought so, because Han tends to use a blaster rather than buckle his swash with a sword. I guess dueling is Luke's niche.)

And GURPS Space is a toolkit -- SJ Games wants to let you to come up with your own space game, although their worldbooks for 3rd Edition were numerous. I'd suggest looking at GURPS Lensman for a pulp SciFi setting, but be warned: E. E. "Doc" Smith was a man of his time (the 1930's) and you're probably going to run into something aggravating in his worldview.

TWK

 

[RFisher]

I notice that a lot of people have recommended Traveller, but the Traveller universe has problems, most of which are legacies of its '70s design.

All of which I count as features. (^_^)

In short, I could only recommend Traveller to a Traveller fan. If you're unfamiliar, and worse if you and your players are SF fans, you will find it laughable.

Well, my group—none of whom had played Traveller before—seemed to enjoy it.

Classic Traveller is still in print. And, going against the grain here... the original 3 books (called the "3 LBBs" or 3 Little Black Books) are nice because they predate all of this stuff about the Imperium and the enormous body of canonical setting material that has come about.

I’d recommend getting ahold of Starter Traveller. I like the layout a lot. It has some examples that the 3 LBBs don’t have, which are nice. Plus, it can be handy to have duplication on the equipment lists and chargen stuff when creating characters.

ST isn’t really a replacement for the 3 LBBs for me, because there are a couple of things from the 3 LLBs that it lacks. (e.g. experience)

I also like to use the Citizens of the Imperium supplement for some non-military careers besides Other.

And, as I think I already mentioned, I think Book 0 is worth having as well. (If nothing else, the probability tables and index to the first 3 books can be handy.)

 

[The Green Adam]

One complaint/rant about Space RPGs...

Artist rant coming online in 3...2...1....

Why is the art work in most Sci-Fi/Space RPGs so gawdawefully horrible?! I mean, a quick look through deviantart, concept art forums and even, dare I say it, elfwood! provides better illustrations of spaceships, aliens and gear then is seen in professional products. Nothing personal to the artists of Mongoose Traveller but my lord was the art terrible. I'm willing to attribute it to poor production values or tight deadlines or anything else that will make Mongoose feel better but as a Sci-Fi Fan, Traveller Fan, Gamer and Artist I was practically offended. This is 2008 guys. Our desktop computers have art programs will more rendering power then a computer in the original edition of the Traveller universe could generate.

Please someone make a Sci-Fi game other then those with a licensed IP that I actually want to look at. Please.

Thanks. Sorry. I'm ok. The medibots are here and I'm good now.

AD

P.S. Putting my credits where my mouth is...I'm no art prodigy but this is Imperial Battle Dress from my Traveller campagin universe:

Colors indicate the Glimmerdrift Reaches Sector.