Traveller: the iconic science fiction roleplaying game

Not DnD is a weekly show discussing tabletop roleplaying games. In September we are looking at tabletop RPGs for a sci-fi setting!

Traveller is a long-beloved science fiction roleplaying game first published in 1977. The game has had several editions published over it's almost 50 year history, including GURPS and d20. It's difficult to discuss sci-fi ttrpgs without mentioning this iconic game.

The Traveller Core Rulebook Update 2022 by Mongoose publishing provided new careers, equipment, hazards, world creation, psionics and shipbuilding. Come learn more about Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition with Matt and Chris from Mongoose Publishing on this weeks (29th September) episode of Not DnD.


Not DnD is a weekly show discussing tabletop roleplaying games. Each week EN Publishing’s @tabletopjess interviews the creators behind different tabletop roleplaying games that aren’t D&D!

You can watch the live recording every Monday at 5pm ET / 10pm BST on YouTube or Twitch, or listen on the podcast platform of your choice.

We've had many other sci-fi TTRPGs on Not DnD over the last three years such as Salvage Union, Terminal, Orbital Blues, You're In Space and Everything is F***ed, Day Trippers, Alien, Paranoia, Blade Runner, Star Trek Adventures, and Dune.

You can watch any of these previous interviews on youtube here. Or listen to the podcast episodes here.

 

[Parmandur]

This is pretty similar (not identical) in Classic Traveller.

The player of the ship owner/captain in my Classic game has complained about the accounting aspect - and he's a pretty experienced RPGer/wargmaer/Civilization player. I (as GM) have a spreadsheet to keep track of his crew salary payments.

But I think that Traveller would really benefit from a more abstract wealth/resources system. Counting credits isn't that much fun.

IIRC, did5they design the legitimate business portion of Graveller to be onerous and daunting so as to encourage weird risk-takimg behavior to escape the drudgery?

 

[MGibster]

In terms of popularity, though, I think it is an issue that it doesn't offer a clear core play experience in the way that D&D does: there is no real analogue in Traveller to dungeon exploration, with its XP-for-gold level up; nor to the standard form that many D&D adventures have taken for a long time now, of a quest whose success is gated behind a series of combat encounters.

I think that might be it. I've never played Traveller in my life, I only just purchased it from Mongoose during COVID, and once I digested the rules I tried to figure out what kind of campaign I could run. It largely seemed dependent on what the PCs rolled up, which could be anything. Maybe one of the PCs would start out with a ship, maybe not. You could try to steer your character into one career or another, but who knows what might happen?

 

[Parmandur]

I think that might be it. I've never played Traveller in my life, I only just purchased it from Mongoose during COVID, and once I digested the rules I tried to figure out what kind of campaign I could run. It largely seemed dependent on what the PCs rolled up, which could be anything. Maybe one of the PCs would start out with a ship, maybe not. You could try to steer your character into one career or another, but who knows what might happen?

Yup, procedur discovery is the name of the game: I would say Session Zero before even designing the campaign is the eay to go with this.

 

[pemerton]

IIRC, did5they design the legitimate business portion of Graveller to be onerous and daunting so as to encourage weird risk-takimg behavior to escape the drudgery?

Dunno. My campaign didn't have much trade in it (only one episode of trade in 20+ sessions, as best I recall) but there was still the need to track mortgage payments, fuel payments, life support payments, upkeep and repair of the vessel, payment of crew salaries (for 12 crew), etc.

I beg to differ! Whilst I do understand the reason why folks like abstract wealth systems, and appreciate their user friendly applications, I have kind of always preferred actual bean counting. I love knowing that I have exactly 1,236,432 beans! Their my beans! It's just not the same when I have [insert statistical range] of beans. It just doesn't have the same ring to it!

The player I mentioned is no stranger to keeping track of beans. But managing all the above-mentioned expenses is simply not that exciting.

 

[pemerton]

I think that might be it. I've never played Traveller in my life, I only just purchased it from Mongoose during COVID, and once I digested the rules I tried to figure out what kind of campaign I could run. It largely seemed dependent on what the PCs rolled up, which could be anything. Maybe one of the PCs would start out with a ship, maybe not. You could try to steer your character into one career or another, but who knows what might happen?

Yup, procedur discovery is the name of the game: I would say Session Zero before even designing the campaign is the eay to go with this.

I don't know any of the Mongoose versions. But Classic Traveller has lots of tools to support low-prep play: random world generation, random patron generation, random animal generation, etc.

When I started a campaign, the players rolled up their PCs, then I rolled up a random starting world, and then rolled a patron encounter. As we went through these steps, we established backstory together (who are the PCs, what's the nature of the world they're on, how did they get there, why is this patron approaching them?) I did have a few pre-rolled worlds and NPCs ready to use, and deployed them as seemed appropriate to support the trajectory of play that emerged out of random generation.

So the one part of the "official" rules that I departed from was a pre-rolled starmap. I created my starmap, with my pre-rolled worlds, to fit the emerging situation/trajectory. This method worked pretty well, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking to start a Traveller game.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't know any of the Mongoose versions. But Classic Traveller has lots of tools to support low-prep play: random world generation, random patron generation, random animal generation, etc.

When I started a campaign, the players rolled up their PCs, then I rolled up a random starting world, and then rolled a patron encounter. As we went through these steps, we established backstory together (who are the PCs, what's the nature of the world they're on, how did they get there, why is this patron approaching them?) I did have a few pre-rolled worlds and NPCs ready to use, and deployed them as seemed appropriate to support the trajectory of play that emerged out of random generation.

So the one part of the "official" rules that I departed from was a pre-rolled starmap. I created my starmap, with my pre-rolled worlds, to fit the emerging situation/trajectory. This method worked pretty well, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking to start a Traveller game.

Mongoose Traveller is, overall, remarkably consistent with Classic Traveller...but character generation is much more narrative-generating, with a way wider array of character possibilities from the life path, and also rules to generate narrative connections with the other characters.

Creates a more dynamic possible starting group of characters than the crusty wandering military veterans of the black books.

 

[payn]

IIRC, did5they design the legitimate business portion of Graveller to be onerous and daunting so as to encourage weird risk-takimg behavior to escape the drudgery?

It had the opposite effect in my early games. Folks just wanted to find the best trade route as adventuring was too dangerous!

I think that might be it. I've never played Traveller in my life, I only just purchased it from Mongoose during COVID, and once I digested the rules I tried to figure out what kind of campaign I could run. It largely seemed dependent on what the PCs rolled up, which could be anything. Maybe one of the PCs would start out with a ship, maybe not. You could try to steer your character into one career or another, but who knows what might happen?

I think folks often confuse career paths in Traveller with class in D&D. Honestly, Traveller careers are just skill delivery systems with events to flesh out how the character came about. By picking certain careers and tables you have more control than folks realize over how a character is gonna turn out. In fact, it works in all the best ways in which id never do random character generation in D&D for example.

Mongoose Traveller is, overall, remarkably consistent with Classic Traveller...but character generation is much more narrative-generating, with a way wider array of character possibilities from the life path, and also rules to generate narrative connections with the other characters.

Creates a more dynamic possible starting group of characters than the crusty wandering military veterans of the black books.

Yeap, Mongoose touched up chargen a bit and built synergy a bit better across the party. That and some spaceship operations and combat for better playing. Which is why I found the Mongoose trade rules complaints interesting as they didnt do anything with those.

 

[Autumnal]

For me in particular, Traveller fell off the map of games I sought out to play and run for two major reasons (with the usual halo of smaller ones).

1. Falling behind the times in both reality and sf. Now, I had an unusual position in the ‘70s and ‘80s: Dad worked with Jet Propulsion Labs’ Deep Space Tracking Network. I grew up seeing Pioneer and Voyager results before almost anyone else. I was watching Trav system generation become obsolete right before my eyes, and when I went with Dad to Seminar Day (what Caltech does instead of Homecoming), I’d get updates of the same process on a lot of other fronts. Meanwhile, I was reading folks Niven, Varley, Pohl, Bester, and so many others take space-spanning sf in directions Trav didn’t seem to me to have anything to help with. Both parts of this contributed to my ‘80s-‘90s enthusiasm for GURPS.

2. Tedium. I’m not trying to be mean here, it just seemed like Trav resolutely jumped away from attempts at excitement. Planetary cultures weren’t presented with any particular flair, Imperial culture without any baroque weirdness or cool details. No exotic touches like Retief or Van Rijn mighty exploit, no sense of the sort of deep struggle that could engage a Flandry or Gersen. Fundamentally I didn’t want to manage a mortgage, but the game seemed not to recognize that it could and should call out less grindy options.

Now, just recently, I had a surprising shift of perspective, thanks to reading some E.C. Tubbs. Whoa! Dumaerest and his story are cool. And suddenly I saw what Traveller wasn’t telling me: the life of a mostly-Low Passage traveler is a life of adventure. Going some place hoping to find info relevant to a long-term goal, making your way in the next exotic society and environment, suffering ups and downs, moving on, with room for derring do, skullduggery, capers and heists, the enchilada. The author of the Loner solo RPG plans to put a Galaxy Drifter book next year, and after reading the manuscript, I’ll be all over it.

(See The making of Galaxy Drifter for comments and a link to the manuscript.)

And now that I’ve been handed the ideas, I can see how to incorporate them into Trav, if I want to. And that in turn leads me to see how to similarly transform the implementation of other elements. But I sure didn’t feel any help from the game in doing so back in the day.

 

[MGibster]

I think folks often confuse career paths in Traveller with class in D&D. Honestly, Traveller careers are just skill delivery systems with events to flesh out how the character came about. By picking certain careers and tables you have more control than folks realize over how a character is gonna turn out. In fact, it works in all the best ways in which id never do random character generation in D&D for example.

I rolled up a ton of random characters and just about every single one would have been fun to play. One of my more memorable rolls ended up with a guy who had both the Steward and Knife skill at level 4 which I thought was an interesting skill combination. I only had one psychic but I rolled extremely well and he was fairly powerful.

I don't know any of the Mongoose versions. But Classic Traveller has lots of tools to support low-prep play: random world generation, random patron generation, random animal generation, etc.

These days, I tend to run pretty tight campaigns. We start out knowing exactly what the game is about and the campaign is relatively short. I thought it might be fun to stretch myself a bit by running something by the seat of my pants. Maybe just making some broad plans for what's going on in the system and have the PCs work with that as a backdrop.

 

[pemerton]

Mongoose Traveller is, overall, remarkably consistent with Classic Traveller...but character generation is much more narrative-generating, with a way wider array of character possibilities from the life path, and also rules to generate narrative connections with the other characters.

Creates a more dynamic possible starting group of characters than the crusty wandering military veterans of the black books.

For my game, I had made my own version of the tables, based on Book 1, Supplement 4, and a few additions of my own. I added some of the newer skills to the older tables, and also took the idea of Special Duty from MegaTraveller and included that, so as to increase starting skill slightly (I think Book 1 (1977) gives not quite enough skills, especially with the expanded skill list).

My services/occupations are: Army, Wet Navy, Air Force, Imperial Marines, Imperial (Dry) Navy, Belter, Scout, Merchant, Pirate, Noble, Bureaucrat, Diplomat, Medic (Supplement 4 Doctor), Face (a few influences on this one), Tech (Supplement 4 Scientist), Drifter (Book 1 Other), Rogue, Security (adapted from MegaTraveller Law Enforcer), Hunter, Barbarian.

We identified individual narratives based on the rolls - as per the example of Jamieson in the original Book 1 - and then did the narrative connections once we had a starting world and so a bit of a starting situation.