ShawnDriscoll
SOC-14 1K
That all depends on the scope used by the Referee for the game. Some games take place entirely in a week in a small town. Some take place during a character's lifetime, travelling across the Imperium a few times.
CT Only: Character Advancement and goals
- Thread starter jaz0nj4ckal
- Start date
When I ran games it was one of my aims to avoid the "save the universe" syndrome. Where I tossed some pretty big threats and put some of my players in some pretty fantastic settings, ultimately it was up to them to carve their own path.
I'll amend my comment by stating that I am assuming the referee will be using mote than just LBB1-3, which has the result that the 3I is neither distant or weak, but is certain to be capable of overshadowing just about anything the PCs try to do.
If, OTOH, the referee is using just the first three books (or little beyond them), it does mean the PCs have more room to maneuver.
If, OTOH, the referee is using just the first three books (or little beyond them), it does mean the PCs have more room to maneuver.
The chargen in Classic Traveller largely produced ex-service, and mostly military...
Mission based goals, rather than just seeking personal wealth, stuff and power would definitely be in character.
Most of my sessions are Firefly like - PCs are just aiming to survive and falling into adventure. But if things morph into multiple sessions/campaign style, I sometimes find a way to morph into a Serenity style - where PC activity affects the greater 'verse - more epic final session to end the 'story' on.
As to in character advancement - Traveller chargen makes fully formed PCs. They have already had on the job training and experience and gone through a career. They are ready to do.
Mission based goals, rather than just seeking personal wealth, stuff and power would definitely be in character.
Most of my sessions are Firefly like - PCs are just aiming to survive and falling into adventure. But if things morph into multiple sessions/campaign style, I sometimes find a way to morph into a Serenity style - where PC activity affects the greater 'verse - more epic final session to end the 'story' on.
As to in character advancement - Traveller chargen makes fully formed PCs. They have already had on the job training and experience and gone through a career. They are ready to do.
Loose tangent here; with regards to advancement, if Traveller was ever to get a reboot, then I would propose what I did on the Traveller Renaissance thread in the Lone Star.
You can start a character out at any age, even kindergarten, but that the adventures and tasks assigned them would be suited to their ability.
Dungeons and Dragons, for all intents and purposes, is a giant chargen session played out with the game rules. You start as a teen and get thrust into the big wide world with sword, shield, wand, what have you. If Traveller took that approach, then you could start your character out at 18, and then they would go through an adventure accumilating skill points to add to skills and/or "life force" (if MgT uses that ... I don't know, I'm only going off of MT and CT).
As it is now Traveller, to my mind, as created, is a game where you play a retired military-cum-security character that plays out law enforcement scenarios. In essence you're playing cops and robbers in space with the Epic / golden era and Classic Adventures.
Starting out as a greenhorn in one of the services, and having adventures that revolved around that, would have been interesting, and might have cinched up a lot of loose ends, loopholes, and perhaps attracted some D&D types who liked scifi.
Just some rambling musings and prattle that I wanted to share.
In either case I think it would once and for all solve or alleviate the experience / level mechanic that comes up a lot.
You can start a character out at any age, even kindergarten, but that the adventures and tasks assigned them would be suited to their ability.
Dungeons and Dragons, for all intents and purposes, is a giant chargen session played out with the game rules. You start as a teen and get thrust into the big wide world with sword, shield, wand, what have you. If Traveller took that approach, then you could start your character out at 18, and then they would go through an adventure accumilating skill points to add to skills and/or "life force" (if MgT uses that ... I don't know, I'm only going off of MT and CT).
As it is now Traveller, to my mind, as created, is a game where you play a retired military-cum-security character that plays out law enforcement scenarios. In essence you're playing cops and robbers in space with the Epic / golden era and Classic Adventures.
Starting out as a greenhorn in one of the services, and having adventures that revolved around that, would have been interesting, and might have cinched up a lot of loose ends, loopholes, and perhaps attracted some D&D types who liked scifi.
Just some rambling musings and prattle that I wanted to share.
In either case I think it would once and for all solve or alleviate the experience / level mechanic that comes up a lot.
creativehum
SOC-14 1K
I don't believe this to be true. Certainly many people play the setting of the Third Imperium this way, but it does not have to be this way. And certainly was not established this way in the original material.
By definition "Traveller assumes a remote centralized government (referred to in this volume as the the Imperium), possessed of great industrial and teehnalogieal might, but unable, due to the sheer distances and travel times involved, to exert total control at all levels everywhere within its star-spanning realm." (Book 4: Mercenary, page 1.)
The notion that the Imperium's power is "remote" was baked into the early published material. Yes, there is a powerful centralized government, but it was assumed that the PCs were not near that centralized government but far from it.
And from Supplement 3: The Spinward Marches:
Exactly what "does not have the strength nor the power which it once had..." means is up to the Referee to determine for his campaign. But certainly the passage suggests that it is not all-powerful and able to influence all matters everywhere.
On these boards the notion of "proto-Traveller" has been developed. (Forgive me for restating an obvious point if everyone know about it!) Proto-Traveller works from the earlier books of the GDW Classic Traveller line. Roughly: Books 1-4, Supplements 1-4, and Adventures 1-4. And, in general, with these materials the Spinward Marches is still a great deal of a frontier. Certainly District 268 and the Five Sisters subsectors are... but others can be as well to taste.
It is perfectly possible to have a Traveller game set in the Spinward Marches with a Third Imperium that is both "remote" and "does not have the strength or power it once had."
The fact that many people do not play this way and focus on the strength of the Third Imperium in contrast to the insignificance of the Player Characters does not mean this is the only way to use the setting materials of the early products.
creativehum
SOC-14 1K
We all approach the same elements with our own experiences and histories, so I'm not saying your reading of the game isn't correct for you.
But I have to say you keep saying this and I never, ever have seen the game this way.
For me (and this is my limited view of it!) the quintessential Traveller scenario is the 1975 film "The Man Who Would Be King" in which two 19th Century soldiers drummed out of the British Army load up with rifles and journey beyond the borders of the British Empire into a low tech landscape to conquer the land and become kings.
Other inspirations for Player Character activities closer to Miller's inspirations for the games would include Jack Vance's "The Demon Princes" in which the protagonist travels the stars seeking vengeance on a group of men who destroyed the world he loved; the Dumarest books in which the protagonist works his way across the stars from adventure to adventure as he looks for a lost world (Earth); Piper's "Space Viking" in which the protagonist builds up military strength as he raids worlds across the stars and gains political power as he seeks his wife's murderer; Pournelle's "King David's Spaceship" in which a mercenary commander on a world conquered by the Imperial navy is sent on a mission off-world to gain technology that can keep his world safe; and, well, frankly a lot of other inspirations to draw from SF literature and genre movies.
I also offer that both the Scouts and the Merchant Marines are not military, and this is important.
I'm not saying one can't use the game as you suggest. But to see it as limited to cops-and-robbers scenarios seems weirdly limited to me. If only because my imagination goes quickly toward politics, exploration, and treasure hunting as default scenario templates.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Perhaps it would be helpful for D&D players to think of Traveller chargen as one that creates 2nd level to 12th level characters right up front, average 7th level, and the 'party' is a mix of levels unless you intentionally set a term min/max.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Might be the thing to do for the adventure baked into the starter set.
creativehum; well, I'm not ex-military, but both parents (I recently discovered) were more than just social workers, and there was a law enforcement or security aspect to their careers. So I see a lot of my personal experience with them in some of the adventures. Notably "The Argon Gambit", which ... (I really have to jog my memory here) ... I think when I ran it I had to turn it into a kind of Blade Runner-ish scenario, because otherwise you're just breaking into some rich guy's mansion. Even "Twilight's Peak" or "The Chamax Plauge" have international security overtones in them, and it's when I pondered why there weren't more "monster" or "parallel" or "alternate" universe scenarios that I questioned Traveller's premise.
I still love the game for what it's become, because I was there in the proto-Traveller days, and even though I've been able to pull back the curtain and see that man behind the great and power Oz, I still have fond memories and experiences with creating scenarios, stories and adventure seeds with the system, however flawed it was.
I don't want to get too off topic, but if you look at a show like Doctor Who or Space 1999, both have health and law enforcement themes as premises for their stories. A lot of film and TV scifi has that as a component for story telling. Traveller takes its cues from them, and I've talked about the Imperium and what it represents on my blog.
But yeah, you don't have to play the game as is.
I still love the game for what it's become, because I was there in the proto-Traveller days, and even though I've been able to pull back the curtain and see that man behind the great and power Oz, I still have fond memories and experiences with creating scenarios, stories and adventure seeds with the system, however flawed it was.
I don't want to get too off topic, but if you look at a show like Doctor Who or Space 1999, both have health and law enforcement themes as premises for their stories. A lot of film and TV scifi has that as a component for story telling. Traveller takes its cues from them, and I've talked about the Imperium and what it represents on my blog.
But yeah, you don't have to play the game as is.
Last edited:
Well, that's kind of what I thought. Instead of starting out as a retiree, you start as a recruit, the only disadvantage being that you'd be subject to a lot of NPC decisions from whoever's in charge.
But I can imagine say a group of teenagers (boys and girls) maybe exploring a leftover alien ship and avoiding some rogue treasure hunters or something. And if the players use things like electronics, or mechanical skill to evade or capture that bad guys, then they gain experience in that, and they get EXP points allocated to those skills.
It's not something I've thought about in great detail, but it seems to be the thing that newcomers like the OP crave. Because otherwise you're just gaming out various scenarios without any incentive other than hoping the experience will be fun enough. If you have an experienced Dungeon Master, then hopefully that can happen. But the CT adventures can be somewhat vanilla flavored in presentation.
creativehum
SOC-14 1K
I think I see where the disconnect is coming from. You are discussing "the game" as being the rules and all the attendant Adventures and Supplements that were published along with the rules.
For me Traveller is a set of light, flexible, and brilliantly interlocking rules that allow a Referee to make ruling on the fly but always connected to the rules element in play (characteristics, skills, DMs, Throw Values, and more) that keep the game from becoming arbitrary. Additionally, the rules come with a toolkit for building your own setting and creating, as a Referee, lots of cool enigmas, mysteries, SF developed societies and so on. And of course all those bottom slots in Tech Level table are waiting to be filled in by the Referee. And so, by all of this, I mean Traveller Books 1-3.
If one defines Traveller as you do -- with the setting of the Third Imperium (a strangely not-very-SF place) and the specific adventures you mention, then sure, yes, one could see it as "the game as is."
But that's not my game "as is" at all.
For the first two years after Traveller was published there was no Third Imperium, no adventures. Everyone was making up their own settings, their own kinds of adventures. They had to. And it wasn't shaped by the Third Imperium at all, or the adventures that would later be published -- because those things simply did not exist yet. They were working off the pulp adventure stories that Miller had read and inspired the game. Those aren't at all what you are describing (and I'm kind of boggled you decided to ignore all the references I put in my previous post -- but it's the Internet, so whatever)...
So your Traveller is literally different than my Traveller. I'm perfectly willing to believe it is as limited and fixed as you claim. But it isn't what Traveller is. It is what you are choosing to limit Traveller to.
ShawnDriscoll
SOC-14 1K
I never once played Traveller that way in 1980. I wasn't in the military. And I didn't watch cop shows. Most everyone did the low-berth lottery thing though, only because there was a rule for it.
Yeah - and then totally forget about levels.
That is basically what we did when we started Traveller, having come from a D&D dominated background. We had gotten tired of playing 'to level up' and were already playing D&D with 1st level PCs through the higher level modules. We had been playing with multiple PCs per Player, and even randomly bumping up some PCs so we could manage the really high level modules. But that got old pretty quick and we wanted more. Enter Traveller!
ShawnDriscoll
SOC-14 1K
I only bought the Supplement and regular books (number 4 on up) as they were released. I didn't buy any adventure books because I didn't liking running games from modules. Still don't. And I had a subscription to JTAS. By 1983, I think half of the games I was doing was in the 3rd Imperium setting. I had no idea what the Core sector was like (wanted to know though). Most everything was happening in the Spinward Marches back then.
creativehum
SOC-14 1K
I agree! I say this all the time!
But -- also -- we live in a time of RPG wonders. The old games are available in PDF form. OD&D, B/X D&D, original Traveller, Runequest 2nd Edition, and so on.
If one wants to take the time to read the text and see how different games were played differently in the first years of the hobby one can do that.
If one wants to pick up Traveller Books 1-3 and see what actually is contained in them for how to play and what kind of play style they encouraged one can do that!
So yes... when one started playing. But the other component might be curiosity or desire to see what play was like when RPGs had different design agendas.
Well, Traveller, as we first played it, was a dynamic empty canvas as per the statement in the rules saying that you could create any situation or setting you wanted. That's how we saw it. The CT adventures, and even the ones created for Hunter's T20, tend to be grounded in contemporary events projected into the OTU.
Staying on topic, characters striving to achieve seems to be one of the core issues. And how do you achieve that when you have characters that already have some money and life experience? That's what the OP is wondering about.
I use it almost pejoratively, that is you're not actually playing cops and robbers, but the premises of the supporting material tended to lend themselves towards security scenarios, as is the case with a lot of science fiction, not just Traveller. It tends to be more pervasive in visual media (films and TV) than in books or computer games where the media is more free form.
The key is how do you take those stories and turn them into life building experiences for characters.
ShawnDriscoll
SOC-14 1K
In 1980, visual media was four (maybe five) affiliate air-wave TV channels to turn to with good picture quality. And spaceships were still designed using slide rules and mainframes.
Similar threads
