10 questions to ask Joe Fugate

[jfugatesr]

Time for another question ...

32. In retrospect, do you think the DGP products might have covered the OTU in a bit too much detail - leaving less for the imagination?
====================================================
Yes.

I think less detail probably would have been better. I think it would have been better to focus on a few star systems per adventure and detail them, and leave the Imperium star system positions, etc, somewhat more vague for the most part.

Provide a detailed sector once in a blue moon.

Personally, I think Traveller is designed backwards in this regard, a topic we often discussed at DGP.

Wargames are by nature, map oriented, and tend to be more sweaping in scale. Rarely do you see wargames that get down to hand-to-hand combat level. It's most often battalions or divisions, sometimes down to companies and platoons.

But role playing games are about individual characters and what matters to them. Thats one big reason why fantasy gaming is so popular. Fantasy gaming doesn't focus on detailing half of the known universe. Just what matters to a few characters.

So Traveller was designed with this star-spanning map mentality, not character-centric. But that's all backwards. As a role-playing game, it should be designed from the character out. The farther you get from the character, the less detail you should be concerned with.

It's not surprising that Traveller would have this orientation, since GDW was first a wargamming design company, and a huge-scale wargamming design company at that. Look at their Europa game series. Massive in scale and scope.

While the wargammer in me really identifies with this orientation in Traveller, I don't think it is condusive to popular opinion in the RPG market and has somewhat "doomed" Traveller to remain a niche game.

And I'm not sure there's much you can do about this perception now. What's done is done. For a science-fiction role playing game to be more popular, it needs to be character-centric through and through, with rich world detail and an motivation that keeps you there for a while so you get to know it and it's people. The galaxy spanning star charts and constant system hopping part should remain very much in the background, because that's not role-playing, that's wargamming.

So Traveller is what Traveller is, and I think it would be real hard to re-invent a version that would appeal to a larger market. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I think the real answer would be to design a more character-centric SF game as AI was meant to be.

Or this new "Masters of Antiquity" game idea I mentioned, where intelligent beings show up on Earth during the Cretaceous, and forever alter the direction of prehistoric history ... seeding the earth with lifeforms genetically engineered to gain dominion over this planet ... warm-blooded ones to replace the cold-blooded ones. And that's only the beginning ...

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by JoeFugate:
32. In retrospect, do you think the DGP products might have covered the OTU in a bit too much detail - leaving less for the imagination?
====================================================
Yes.

I think less detail probably would have been better.

Ahhhhhhh! No, NO, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! The Void! It's Here! <disappears into a black hole>

 

[jfugatesr]

Just a quick note to say I've got a few more questions to go but it has been one of those weeks where I've been working through lunch and had meetings every evening besides.

I'll get to the rest of the questions probably this weekend.

 

[mike wightman]

And then kafka can post page two of our questions.

Just kidding, but I'm sure that there are a more to come if that's ok.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
And then kafka can post page two of our questions.

Just kidding, but I'm sure that there are a more to come if that's ok.

Yeah, let's see if we can get CotI&#146s first thread over a thousand posts!

 

[kafka47]

Well...I am hoping to get a reply from Rob Caswell and I plan to write a snail mail letter to ary Thomas and hopefully add his comments.

 

[Border Reiver]

Jings, I disappear for a few weeks for my Med Tech training and the whole thread explodes; a kinds of DGP history, a secret stash of MTJ & TD, a near flame war on creationism and all life's rich colours. Right, I've got a notebook now and I'll be staying up to date.
Big thank you to Joe for all the answers and when are we going to prepare an extra list to keep him busy for another while.

 

[jfugatesr]

Boy what a busy week last week!

Okay, time to answer another question.

31. I have recently acquired some very early issues of Travellers Digest: The first two issues of TD were not typeset - rather they seem to have been laid out in a relatively low rez (by today's standards) dot-matrix print...

a) What software was used to layout the first two issues of TD? Macintosh desktop publishing? (The PC certainly would not have had anything comparable at the time).
b) What Software was used for the artwork? Or was it done pencil and paper and scanned or illustrated directly?
c) When the issues went over to typeset starting with issue 3 what method was used? What drove the change?
==================================================

I've kind of touched on this already, but I thought it might be fun to take this question and talk generally about how we started (technology-wise), how we progressed, and where we ended up when our version of DGP shut down in 1993. For the record, I sold DGP to Roger Sanger in the spring of 1996.

When we stared out, we used Mac 512Ks, MacWord, and MacPaint to produce our issues. We printed the pages out on an Epson printer, pasted them up full size (8/5 x 11) then photographically reduced them about 60% to fit in the halfsheet format.

My wife's career experience is in the print typesetting and pasteup field, so she pasted up all our products and did all the printer liason work.

The first two issues were done this way. With issue #3, we moved to 300 dpi laser printing, but we still photographically reduced the issues to make them look better.

Somewhere in here (don't recall exactly when) we moved to ReadySetGo, which was a desktop publishing application. My wife helped with the use of this software, since this was her profession.

We went to a brief stint on MacPublisher, then went to PageMaker. We used Macs all along the way.

TD Issue 7 was the first issue with a hand-drawn art cover. Issue 9 was our first full-size issue with a color cover.

To use hand-drawn artwork or to put photographs in the magazine, we had to take them to a prepress outfit and they would make a postive photo screen for us. In all cases we had to measure the spot where the piece was to go and then specified to the prepress guy the percent reduction we needed.

Once all this stuff came back from the prepress guy, we would print out the text on a laser, and my wife would paste up all the graphics on the pages as tabloids (11 x 17", that is two pages each.

The pages were built so the proper page for that sheet was across from the other sheet so the printer could assemble the sheets and get a book that had the pages in order. In other words, for a 48 page book, page 1 would be opposite page 48, 2 opposite page 47 and so on.

The color cover was interesting how it was done.

First we would get the painting photographed on a 4x5 direct positive. Then we would take the photo and our cover pasteup (the text part) and give them to the prepress guy. He would build us a composite that included the artwork and the text, in color. We would get back 4 pieces of film ... one each for magenta, cyan, yellow, and black.

The cover stuff was easily the most expensive part of any product, both the artwork and the prepress work, and of course the four color printing was pricey too.

So that's how we did our products from a technological point of view.

Today, there's enough power that you can do all of this digitally without any physical pasteup. And you can target either print plates for a physical product, or you can target a pdf document for online distribution.

We operated DGP in the tail end of the transition from physical to digital, and shut down before the transition was complete. The one irony is we were often ahead of GDW in our use of state-of-the-art publication technology once we moved to full-size, full color cover products.

GDW had older technology that they had paid big bucks for and couldn't afford to just pitch it overnight. We, on the other hand, were much smaller and as a new outfit, we could get the best of what was available technically, and had no older stuff that we had to "use up".

That's the advantage of being small, it also means you are often more nimble than the bigger guys. But then, you also have to struggle more to meet payroll if you are smaller, so not everything is rosey if you are a startup outfit.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Hmmm, the sweet yet sickly smell and feel of running your own (or working in) a small, small business.

I'm glad I'm out of the one I was working for.

And yet, while it ran, it had many advantages.

 

[jfugatesr]

Next question!

33. How do you feel about the thought that the MT copyright holder's (Marc W. Miller) decisions may result in that entire chapter of Traveller history being sort of papered over or ignored as 'Forbidden Canon', and that much of the work done there will end up being edited out, written over, or ignored?
====================================================

I am understandably sad that DGP's work may end up being "thrown out" but I can see Marc's position. If Roger Sanger wants to be so hard-nosed about DGP's work, and wants money for it (anything more than a token fee is uncalled for in the gaming business), then Marc has little choice.

But by effectively forcing the original DGP's past work to be thrown in the dumpster, Roger isn't making any friends among the original DGP staff. Sadly, Roger will be largely responsible to burying DGP's work for good.

But on the other hand, I also think this gives Marc a lot of new freedom. One of the problems with constantly detailing the background like DGP did is you end up with this mountain of material that you need to stay consistent with, or come up with some excuse as to why what you thought was true wasn't really true after all.

It's tough to make those sorts of excuses not sound lame.

So it becomes easier to just carve off a part of the background from a certain source and declare it not so. Now the constraints have been removed and you don't have to worry about some fan writing in and telling you that page so and so of some DGP product said the opposite.

So I'm not sure how much Roger's hard-nosed position is responsible for Marc's stand on DGP materials these days. I know Marc always praised our work, so I suspect Roger's inflexibility plays a significant part in relegating our work to the dumpster.

 

[aramis]

Hey, Joe, How did you guys come up with the Battledress costs, weights, etc? Was there a design sequence, or was it off the cuff?

 

[jfugatesr]

Aramis:

To come up with the stats for higher tech stuff, we didn't do anything all that spectacular.

Depending on the item in question, we would try to make it lighter, more functional, better endurance etc. But we would also see if we could make it have some minor disadvantage too, like increased cost, greater power needs, harder to fix if it breaks, etc.

And then we would wing it. Life's too short to build a design rules set for *everything*.

 

[jfugatesr]

Next question!

34. In your farewell editorial in MTJ4, you mention that DGP inquired about buying the IP rights to Traveller from GDW. Had you been granted those rights would you have remained in the game publishing business longer (and do you think you might even have still been publishing games today?), or would the circumstances that led to DGP's closing have happened regardless?
====================================================

I think this would have probably kept DGP in business longer, but I would likely have actively pursued selling the business and it would have made it a more attractive commodity with the Traveller rights themselves associated with it.

But alas, that was not to be, and were I in Marc's shoes, I would never have let go of those rights.

We can speculate all we want, but that's not what happened.

I truly burned myself out bigtime on Travller with all the extra hours I put into DGP so I don't think I could have kept going, for all the reasons previously discussed in my other answers.

I'm actually glad this *did not* happen now looking back, because my family would have suffered even more with me being essentially an absent father and husband.

Traveller's great, and I had a blast writing for it and seeing DGP get some measure of notariety for the quality of our efforts. But nothing's more important than family, so in the final analysis, I made the right choice.

 

[RandyT0001]

If you had bought the IP rights to Traveller then Roger Sanger would probably own them now. And we know what has happened to the DGP material he did buy. I am very glad Marc didn't sell the IP rights.

My questions are 1), Which is your favorite CT adventure and why? 2)Which is your favorite MT adventure and why?

 

[jfugatesr]

What's my favorite CT adventure and why?

My all-time favorite is Twilight's peak. It wasn't very heavily illustrated, but what illustrations were there added a lot to the atmosphere of the adventure when reading it for the first time. And I love an archeological mystery.

I also love the Keith brothers' Sky Raider's series for the same reason.

The Traveller Adventure was a lot of fun to read through and as an adventure product it is an amazing work.

As to MT adventures, that's a lot tougher because by that time I was heavily into the production of product myself and less of a pure fan.

The adventure we printed in MTJ4, Lord's of Thunder, comes to mind. But that could be played as a CT adventure just as easily. Once again, the archeological aspect makes it lots of fun to read.

Of all the adventures listed, the ones I have played the most was the Sky Raiders series. I've run those adventures for at least two different groups.

I don't recall most of the NPC's names from the Sky Raider's series, but I do remember there was the female archeologist, a smart-alec son of an archeology professor this woman brought along (she felt obligated to do so out of respect for the guy's father), and this pain-in-the-rear guide they had.

I recall the smart-alec guy's name was Drew.

Anyhow, I was playing all three of these characters as NPCs, and play acting doing some actual role playing to the group.

I had this Drew character come and get right in the face of the guide late one evening in camp after the guide had been drinking.

I role played their exchange and then suddenly had the guide pull out his gun and shoot Drew stone dead. Everyone in camp heard the gunshot and the first one to reach Drew was the woman archeologist.

She checked him quickly to see he was dead, then she looked up at the guide in unbelief and said,

"He's dead! You animal! You KILLED him!" Then she ran off in tears.

I'll never forget the group's reaction. They were stunned.

"He shot Drew! He SHOT Drew!" The guide had been rather cranky but they never expected this!

It was great. None of these characters really existed, and I was playing them all. Yet it was apparently real enough for them that all three of these NPC's had personalities that they had come to know (or thought they knew) as distinct people.

That situation and the group's reaction stands out as one of my fondest memories as a Traveller ref.

 

[Whipsnade]

Originally posted by JoeFugate:
It was great. None of these characters really existed, and I was playing them all. Yet it was apparently real enough for them that all three of these NPC's had personalities that they had come to know (or thought they knew) as distinct people.

That situation and the group's reaction stands out as one of my fondest memories as a Traveller ref. [/QB]

Mr. Fugate,

Having had a very similar experience, I know exactly what you mean. Those moments make getting 'stuck' as the GM all worthwhile.

Being a lazy type of chap, I always ran 'hub & spoke' style campaigns; you heavily detail one world or small group of worlds to use as a 'hub' and then run the PCs out along the 'spokes' in search of adventures. The odd little system of Grote in the Marches was usually my 'hub'.

I fleshed out a certain seedy section of Grote with various businesses, ne'er do wells, and other bits of color. One NPC was a fellow named Soapy who was mostly based on Angel Martin from the 70s TV show The Rockford Files. Soapy was always good for a scraps of information, tips on where to find certain things, and who to ask about certain people. Then during one campaign I killed off Soapy.

There really wasn't any reason for it. I wasn't sick of the NPC or anything, it was just something I had penciled in if a certain series of unlikely events occurred. I guess I was looking for an incident that would tip the PCs off to the fact that they were dealing with something big. Well, those unlikely events occurred and Soapy got knifed.

A few hours after buying Soapy lunch and getting precious little in return (the usual result of dealing with Soapy), the PCs get dragged out of their bedsit by the Habitat Constabulary and hustled down to the rooming house where Soapy lived. There a pair detectives grilled them about their relationship with Soapy and the PCs got a glimpse of the NPC when the bag squad came to collect him.

He was hanging upside down in his shower cubicle with his arms trussed behind him. Someone who was 'good' with a knife had obviously questioned him for awhile. Once they got whatever they came for, they put Soapy out of his agony.

My players were EXTREMELY ANGRY over all of this. (It wasn't that death never occurred in our sessions, although we didn't kill dozens each time like some groups.) They also weren't merely angry with me in the game, they were angry with me in real life!

In the game, they went through the remaining parts of the adventure like something out of the Old Testament. It only took a few more sessions to play out and the PCs were frighteningly focussed through it all.

In real life, I got quite a tongue lashing after each of the adventure's post-Soapy sessions. Any eavesdroppers in our post-play conversations back at the cafe would have believed I had killed someone in real life. Even after we finished the adventure and I had shared my notes with them, thus proving I hadn't offed Soapy on a whim, my players were still quite put out with me.

Eventually, I was 'forgiven'. Still the episode, while not exactly pleasurable, is a favorite memory of mine.


Sincerely,
Larsen

 

[jfugatesr]

Larsen:

Great story!

Yes, it reminds me of an NPC sidekick I created for the group. He was sort of a cross between MR-T and the incredible Hulk. He was this big brutish guy who was as onery and tenacious as a bull dog. But he was fiercely loyal to the group and would defend them at all costs.

He was also very lucky. I decided in any combat situations or dice rolls I would construe things to always be in GaaTae's favor. Most of the time.

(I called him gaw-tay, a play on my last name as it is sometimes mispronounced ... Few-gaw-tay. We keep it simple and just say Few-gait.)

Anyhow, GaaTae became a group favorite. They could always count on GaaTae to use brute force to somehow save the day.

Sometimes I would let things turn bad for GaaTae (knowing that I would turn the tide later in his favor, but they didn't know that) and everyone would be on the edge of their seat wondering what was going to happen to GaaTae.

Yes, also some fun memories, good ol' GaaTae.

 

[ronaldo1]

All of this, a great read. I am really grateful you took the time out to thoughtfully answer all those questions.
Thanks for your time, and all the great work DGP has done.

 

[aramis]

Favored NPC's can be a wonderful color bit. Even if you don't kill them off.

I have, in several campaigns, emplaced a former PC turned "Random Monster" into a bit of a running gag. Xen Xanfried, 8+ terms IISS. Xen is the archetypical scout party boy. Sober when working, drunk almost all the time when not. (First character I ever subjected to DGP's Scout Brew Rules, BTW...)

At first, he was just this guy they got to meet at parties. Later, he occasionally provided important info or help.

Later on in life, he became the "Mention his name often enough, and he'll show up" kind of wandering monster...

Well, late in this sequence, the party was in a REAL BAD JAM. They'd just found out about a major conspiracy in the SR Navy, by winding up under naval guns despite (Ne, because) the fact that the Fleet Admiral there knew they had a warrant and was about to blow his plot sky high... summary execution kind of high treason. Well, they hadn't yet refueled, were out gunned (A type T versus a Batron and it's Desron and Esrons), and had no allies in reach... so a certain player started chanting "Xen, Xen, wherefore art thou, Xen."

Well, I stuck with the running gag, and indeed Xen showed up... but not how nor with the bail-out factor the players had hoped for. (He crawled out of their gig with a whopper of a hangover, a mushy note, a cask of Scout Brew, and a bottle of special.)

Fortunately, the PC's had a 'porter (also a former scout), who dealt with the Admiral... All the special did was see to it he had time to argue the merits of the warrant with the Flagship Captain.

Which leads me n a roundabout way to a further question:

Where in the ____ did you come up with the idea for scout brew and the effects tables for it???

 

[jzeitlin]

Having finally caught up with this thread, I just wanted to say "thank you" to one of the people that made one of my favorite games possible. I've enjoyed Traveller for almost its entire existence (I was introduced to it in 1982, at college), and have stuck with it through thick and thin. There have been things I like (the whole premise, the Rebellion, the DGP supplements) and things that I didn't like (Virus - hit a little too hard at my Suspension of Disbelief; I'm a computer techie), but overall, my net feelings are quite positive - they better be, given how much time and energy I've invested in Freelance Traveller.

Thank you, Mr Fugate, for your work on Traveller, and thank you again for coming back to talk to us.

--
Jeff Zeitlin
Editor, Freelance Traveller