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How to answer "What's traveller like?"

I

iron warrior

SOC-12
So, we have before us a prospective new traveller player we're trying to enlarge our pool of players with, and then he asks the question "What's traveller like?"

Then it's "Is it like star trek?" Well, no, we tell him, traveller doesn't let technology do and solve everything like trek does and doesn;t have the super ultra tech trek does.

"So is it like star wars then?" Uh, not really. A lot more science and again, lower technology.

"So, what is it like then?" Our potential newbie looks at us, awaiting an answer.

Sometimes I ask if he'd ever seen "outland" and say it's kind of that sort of spirit, with a little more tech but still more about people than who has the flashiest gadget. On the incredibly off chance he's seen it I sometimes say that the little known movie "Moon 44" has some vague sense of the traveller je nai se quais to it.

Not that anyone but me's ever seen moon 44, apparently from the reactions I get when I mention it...:(

I'm maybe the only traveller fan who does not like firefly, (Yes, there's at least one.) so I can't use that comparison.

I can sometimes say it's a little what the battlestare galactica universe might have been without the cylons but with aliens, and jump drives that took a week to work. BSG and traveller had a lot in common: Advanced space tech, life support, artificial gravity, but otherwise the tech was largely understandable to people today.

So how do you describe traveller to the potential new player?:confused:
 
Traveller was originally created as a light-weight Science Fiction role-playing game that leaned toward hard science, but had soft elements like faster than light travel and psionics. It was soon given its own campaign setting, Charted Space, but no one was required to use that and many people created custom settings. Many editions of the game have been produced in it's 34 year history, each one produces a different "feel" for play based on its mechanics. Different eras of the Charted Space setting have been produced, as well, with those eras producing dramatically different gaming environments.

The original character creation system was centered around producing random results that challenged players to use what was presented. It allowed characters to pursue any of a number of selected careers and skills accumulated were based on the type of career being pursued. It also produced characters with a limited set of skills that would be far more likely, from a realism standpoint, to be possessed by an actual individual from "real life"; as opposed to piles of skills and capabilities that might be found in extraordinary individuals. Remember, Traveller's original character generation system was designed in 1977. In 1977, it was revolutionary, and most important, it was completely different from any other system available at the time (no derivative class creation mechanics here).

Character creation in later editions had other types of character creation. GURPS Traveller, for instance, uses the GURPS rules for character creation with a few extra skills and advantages/disadvantages, plus new gear written to resemble Traveller's traditional gear. T20 (Traveller for the d20 system) uses custom character classes.

The original Traveller had no setting as Charted Space was only introduced later. Because of this, Traveller was often used to play Star Wars and Star Trek. This required house rules and extra gear produced by the GM; GDW could not provide those materials in their game products because of obvious copyright reasons. It was also used to play in settings from other SF milieus and custom SF settings created by GMs.

Those groups who have used Charted Space itself as a setting have often interpreted in radically different ways. The Imperium is sometimes played as an "evil empire" that vaguely resembles the Empire of Star Wars or Dune, allowing for vast rebels against the empire campaigns. Sometimes the Imperium is done as an impersonal version that exists to maintain the status quo, allowing for play to center around travel and adventure through worlds and their immense variability, while the black ocean of space is treated as a partially protected transit zone (there may be pirates); individuals are sometimes good, sometimes evil, and more often care about themselves, their jobs, and their families. Sometimes play is set far away from the Imperium and that nation does not matter.

One version of Charted Space officially put the Imperium in a civil war that had shattered it into various components. Another version was a post-apocalypse set a hundred years after the civil war version. The GURPS version picks up Charted Space right before the civil war and continues on as though that never happened.

Traveller is many things for many people.
 
Understanding Traveller gives a good description, it should be able to be downloaded if it isn't already, GDW would send it to you for free.
 
Some of the replies I've used:

"Firefly/Serenity without the suckiness of sponsor/studio interference."

"Shotguns in Space!"

"Star Trek without the suckiness of 'Deus Ex Mechina' gadgetry."

"Lost In Space minus Irwin Allen."

"Star Wars without the suckiness of The Force."

"Stargate without the suckiness of commercials."

"Well, here's two dice, a piece of paper, and a pencil..."

"AD&D without all the suckiness."
 
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Firefly.

Just because you didn't like it doesn't mean you should discard a possibly positive reference :-)
 
More so than many other RPGs Traveller is a kit for creating the kind of game you want to play. Even if you stick to the OTU, and you don’t have to, what Traveller is to one GM is not the same as what it is to another. Plus that can also change over time.

So what’s your Traveller like?

My last campaign was vaguely inspired by Star Trek Voyager ... with bits of Farscape. It sort of ended up like Stargate Universe even though it predated that show by a couple of years. I'm writing a novel (badly) that is a blend of that campaign and Lost. Previous campaigns have been closer to Outland.

And just for the record I own a copy of Moon 44 on DVD (I used to have the VHS but upgraded). I can totally see it as the basis of a Traveller campaign.
 
Hemdian said:
More so than many other RPGs Traveller is a kit for creating the kind of game you want to play. Even if you stick to the OTU, and you don’t have to, what Traveller is to one GM is not the same as what it is to another. Plus that can also change over time.

So what’s your Traveller like?

My last campaign was vaguely inspired by Star Trek Voyager ... with bits of Farscape. It sort of ended up like Stargate Universe even though it predated that show by a couple of years. I'm writing a novel (badly) that is a blend of that campaign and Lost. Previous campaigns have been closer to Outland.

And just for the record I own a copy of Moon 44 on DVD (I used to have the VHS but upgraded). I can totally see it as the basis of a Traveller campaign.
Click to expand...

Wow, keep that up and soon we'll have 3 people in north america who've seen "Moon 44". :rofl:
 
All the "withouts" and the "minuses." :)

It's about adventures in the Far Future. People are still people, but they've found homes and lives for themselves out there amongst the stars. And some characters can literally only find a home between the stars, their feet on a starship's deck rather than on the ground.

Traveller is about characters who have had good, solid jobs, typically military like Heinlein's Starship Troopers or anything by David Drake, though there are plenty of other character career options; and at some point they grow dissatisfied with regular jobs and become Travellers, wandering traders and guns for hire.

So it's a game of stark contrasts - one game, it's grotty ship corridors, narrow, exposed wiring, ruptured conduits belching steam, flashing amber lights and shapes moving in the dark like Alien, and the next it's about floating starship platforms over a gleaming world city like Trentor, and the next, your characters could be hacking their way through a dense jungle on the trail of an explorer who's gone off in search of ruins which are more than 300,000 years old.

Traveller can take you to any kind of adventure you like, from Ice Cold In Alex to Who Dares Wins to High Noon in space to Breakfast at Tiffany's to CSI to Alien; from the Foundation Trilogy to Arthur C Clarke's "The Sentinel" and The Fountains of Paradise; from William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic and Neuromancer to the outlandish horror of Quatermass and The Pit and Lovecraft's The Colour Out Of Space, with a dash of At The Mountains Of Madness thrown in.

And yes, you can even set the stories in The 'Verse of Joss Whedon's Firefly. Though you'll find your imagination can stretch a little wider than that setting. Think Babylon 5 and BSG, perhaps directed by Guillermo del Toro rather than JMS or Ron Moore.
 
Like it or not Firefly/Serenity is a lot like many Traveller games. A group of people from differing backgrounds in a Small Merchant vessel, going from port to port trying to make deals that keep them flying. Sometimes they do stuff that's legal and sometimes not so legal. Adventures come from the conflicts that arise from the business.

A Mercenary game would be a bit like Space Above and Beyond (minus the big bad alien menace). Also most of Jerry Pournelle's books have the feel of Traveller. As do David Drake's Hammer's Slammers (which is probably why Mongoose has a licenced version of HS using Traveller).

A Scout, exploration type game would be a bit like Enterprise. Just without all of the extra crew or super tech.

Firefly isn't the perfect show. I mean the science behind the 'verse just messes with my sense of how stuff should work. Obviously, not much time was spent on world building. Just enough to get a basic background and lay out the players that the Main characters would either work with or have conflicts with. When I watch it, I watch it for the characters and their adventures.
 
It's reasonably hard science fiction that tends to be gritty, is more "real life" than fantastic and embraces a kind of 1930s pulp ethic where anyone can be an adventurer by using their wits as much as their training and experience.

At least that's how I see it.
 
Traveller is like Star Wars without the Rebels, Firefly with an oppressive Alliance set across a multitude of star systems, flourishing alien cultures (although not that many aliens) a la Star Trek, the heroism of Battlestar Galactica with the pulpy goodness of Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon - every Science Fiction novel you have ever read except those ones that I don't like (Referee) all taking place a slow steamboat between the stars - where you if don't have something to sell, you will starve and die. Similarly, do things that contravene the known laws of universe - expect to die.
 
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