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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8243424" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is a really good post. Upthread I quoted Gygax telling the GM to tell the players that they know nothing of the world except that they are in this village where they can pick up rumours of the nearby dnugeon.Keep on the Borderlands starts like this. X2 is like this both for the castle and Averoigne. In Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan I think the default starting point is a shipwreck.You are correct that Classic Traveller is very high level in its default setting (a noble-dominated Imperium with  navy, space marines and an Imperial scout service). My current game has involved a reasonable amount of world-hopping and so the PCs have never been in a place where they should feel at home. That is most likely to happen if they return to the ship-owning PCs homeworld of Hallucida, in which case I will give that player the stats (that I've rolled up) but probably let him decide on a lot of the details.In the BW game where I'm a player I am returning to my ancestral estate which I have been exiled from for the past 5 years. So to the extent that it feels alien that will reflect the changes that have taken place in that time - a bit like when the Hobbits return to Sharky's Shire towards the end of LotR.On NPCs as "rational actors": the only game where a version of this makes sense is The Dying Earth (in fact it's practically a trope in that game). Classic Traveller  with its bribable bureaucrats and predictable costs for travel and for goods, can come close but the reaction table changes this. When the PC von Jerrel kissed the NPC Lady Askol and the reaction roll was a 12 (genuine friendship) the whole dynamic of that relationship, and the interaction between the PCs and the local Navy outpost (which Lady Askol was in charge of) changed. She has since acted quite non-rationally to advance the interests of von Jerrel and hence (as she sees it) of her relationship with von Jerrel.Without this sort of thing, NPCs can seem like robots.</blockquote>

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