In Person Pen and Paper RPGs

[Supplement Four]

I think Traveller's problem vis a vis games like D&D or Pathfinder is that it's not as conceptually easy to GM. At 11 (or whatever age I was) I ran a D&D game for my brothers within a few hours of reading the rules - draw a dungeon on a piece of paper, random roll for monsters and treasure in each room and it's done and just as importantly they grasped the concept straight away.

There are some "dungeon crawl" Traveller adventures that were published. I know of a few by Judged Guild.

And, adventures like Research Station Gamma is exactly what you describe, except the "dungeon" is drawn for you. You just have to make up what you want to populate the dungeon--er---research station with. More Robots? A covert enemy tactical team? Some renegade psions who are looking for answers...or psi drug.

If you've ever played the MegaTraveller computer games, they are set up very much like a "D&D" campaign. Players go to a world (town) and they hear rumors that leads them to ancient starship wreckage and scientific underground installations (dungeons).




But, I do understand what you are saying. Probably because I did have an "adjustment" to make back when I was learning to Ref Traveller games, coming off of the only other RPG I had played at the time, Dungeons & Dragons.

For me, it wasn't the adventure style that stumbled me. It was, well...technology. I had to think in a much more complex way. For example, if you come to locked dungeon door, the D&D characters will try to use spells or the thief's abilities...or just plain chop it down.

With Traveller, in the early days, my players were always stumping me at first. If I locked a hatch and had the power out, then a player would say something like, "What about the manual over-ride! It's an airlock! There's got to be one." I hadn't thought of that, and boom, the players were through the hatch and somewhere I wasn't prepared for them to be at that point.

I remember the Aliens movie came out. What was that? 1986. One player liked the motion detectors in that movie and asked if he could have one. Sure, I said, not realizing that I had just created a problem for myself in that player always being able to tell the position of my NPC enemies that I was going to throw at them.

I just wasn't prepared--hadn't thought enough about--the consequences of technology and the game world. In D&D, if you needed a pulley, then you throw a rope over a tree branch. It's easy to deal with that. It's not as easy if you're not used to players coming up with all sorts of creative uses for the grav-belt.

One game, I had these standard cargo crates loaded aboard the PCs' ship where, inside, were cold sleep commandos. After a time, they broke from cold sleep and removed themselves out of the canisters and proceeded to attack the crew. Their mission was to take over the craft.

But, in the game, the players were like, "C'mon! There's got to be some sort of sensors in the hold! At least a camera seen from the bridge!"

So, my high-tech, stealthy warriors were detected early...and that was it.

They didn't even fight the crew. I set up the scenario as a slam dunk to take over the ship and move the story along. The players, out-thinking this Ref that was not near prepared for the Traveller universe, flat out beat my butt.

As soon as the bridge discovered the invaders (before all of them were out of the cold berth crates), the bridge PCs simply put the hold into zero G, then opened the hold doors and sucked them out.

Problem mostly solved.

The ones that were still in the crates (the one thing that went my way) managed to get out of his crate and float to the bulkhead and blow a hole in it with explosives. At this point, I only had a handful of bad guys left.

Of course, every move they made was being monitored and countered by the bridge personnel. The PCs threw the corridor into zero G. My mercs took out the local camera. The PCs came at the corridor from both sides, but they found nothing. I had them hiding in the fuel scoop access. The PCs reasoned out where they were, and that's when one player said, "Halon."

What?

"Halon gas. We use it today to quickly extinguish fires. It's highly toxic. It'll kill you quick. There's got to be some type of emergency fire retardant system on the ship, especially around machinery like the scoops. And, it probably uses some version of Halon gas. Let's just manually flood that compartment."

They did.

And, the rest of my mercs died right there.





It's not the game's fault. It was my fault. I wasn't ready to Ref a Traveller game. I guess I hadn't read enough science fiction at the time (I'd mostly read fantasy back then). My brain just wasn't geared to forsee all the things that can happen via technology in the Far Future (or even modern day!). A medieval type setting was so much easier for me.

 

[rancke]

The thing to remember is that the referee is not an expert space commando. So every obvious flaw in his plan has a very high chance of being something a professional space commando planning to hi-jack a starship would have thought of in advance and brought the technological tools to counter along. It would therefore (IMO) be perfectly legitimate to change the plan retroactively. Although really creative player ideas deserve to have a chance of surprising the attackers (roll vs. something). Things like sensors in the hold, turning off the artificial gravity, and opening the cargo hold to space are all pretty standard stuff, though. Any space commando who is not prepared to deal with that has gotten his space commando's badge out of a cereal box.

(No, I'm not going to inflict a list of suggestions for defeating these measures on you . But a paragraph in the "How to referee" chapter about refereeing NPCs who know things the referee doesn't would IMO be a very good idea for future editions.)


Hans

 

[Supplement Four]

I'm not an expert Warrior, Thief, or evil sorcerer, either, but at the start of my gaming career, I had no problem guiding a D&D game. I didn't know about the realities of wearing armor, or what goes into making a fine sword, or really anything about court etiquette. Yet, I handled fantasy games quite easily, the point being: I wasn't as near as competent running my first Traveller games.

In my estimation, fantasy is far easier to run than games set in the far future.

 

[salochin999]

@Supplement Four

For me, it wasn't the adventure style that stumbled me. It was, well...technology. I had to think in a much more complex way. For example, if you come to locked dungeon door, the D&D characters will try to use spells or the thief's abilities...or just plain chop it down.

With Traveller, in the early days, my players were always stumping me at first.

Hehe yes, reminds me of myself creating intricate D&D style encounters and then getting mad when the players got round them in three seconds with psionics

It used to bug me but now it's what I'm thinking of actually aiming for i.e. deciding or letting dice decide if a combat encounter is going to be completely unbalanced or not and if the players can't win then they need to come up with a clever hitech way of cheating.

In other words shift the whole thing round to the opposite way I used to run D&D. Instead of creating a sequence of combat encounters create a sequence of combat *avoidance* encounters.

 

[salochin999]

I'm not an expert Warrior, Thief, or evil sorcerer, either, but at the start of my gaming career, I had no problem guiding a D&D game. I didn't know about the realities of wearing armor, or what goes into making a fine sword, or really anything about court etiquette. Yet, I handled fantasy games quite easily, the point being: I wasn't as near as competent running my first Traveller games.

In my estimation, fantasy is far easier to run than games set in the far future.

Yes and I think part of it is a) the lethality of the combat and b) players don't get exp. In D&D type games they want to kill every encounter for the exp whereas when I was running Traveller they often didn't want to risk combat so I had all these prepared combat encounters - which they avoided - and nothing else.

 

[aramis]

I'm not an expert Warrior, Thief, or evil sorcerer, either, but at the start of my gaming career, I had no problem guiding a D&D game. I didn't know about the realities of wearing armor, or what goes into making a fine sword, or really anything about court etiquette. Yet, I handled fantasy games quite easily, the point being: I wasn't as near as competent running my first Traveller games.

In my estimation, fantasy is far easier to run than games set in the far future.

On this I tend to agree. Fantasy requires less general background knowledge to run well, because there's less expectation of realism.

 

[simonh]

Face to face gaming certainly isn’t dying. Games conventions are generally doing well, Gen Con in fact is absurdly big these days, and sales overall are doing well.

There is a huge amount of fragmentation though. Desktop, DPF and POD publishing alongside Kickstarter are lowering the barrier to publishing your own game right to the floor. The only real obstacle is the hard work it takes to produce something worthwhile, but the technical barriers are almost completely gone. This has lead to an explosion of new content addressing every conceivable niche category. That inevitably means a ‘dilution’ of the fan base for any one individual game.

On the story game thing, there are a very few (but vocal) storygamers that are a-holes about it and say bad things about traditional games. There are a very few (but vocal) traditional gamers that are also a-holes about it. It has always been thus. The reality is that most gamers play both kinds of games, and frankly don't even think of them as different kidns of games.

Story gaming concepts have been used in RPGs since the very early days of the hobby, it’s just that by and large there were no rules for them and it just worked on consensus. Players introduced game elemnts in their character's backstories. GMs would hand over regions of the setting for a player to write up. Story games weren’t conceived outside of gaming and then imposed externally by rules sets. They came from people who played trad games coming up with rules and mechanics for things they were already doing anyway, and that people had been doing for decades. As long as I’ve been playing RPGs there have been some people that were into games as stories and people who weren’t. Now there are specific rules sets we can talk about that make these sorts of discussions more concrete and specific and no longer a matter of convention within individual groups, that’s all.

Personally I don’t really think of story games and trad games, or even freeforms as being different kinds of things at all. They’re all roleplaying games, which makes them fundamentally a different sort of thing from e.g. card games and board games.

Simon Hibbs

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

Just a suggestion, but if you are ever unsure of whether or not your Big Bad Evil Guy is prepared for your Players' shenanigans, I have found that reading the entire Evil Overlord List helps tremendously.

 

[Ulsyus]

He is paying a lot of 'tabletop games' with a large group at the store we all play Traveller at. Mainly these are all pretty mainstream games like Firestorm Armada and Warhammer's various iterations. He and some others are starting a new wargaming group because they want more 'crunch' and seriousness in their games now, and they are finding it hard to attract new players because no one wants to read all the rules, learn the mechanics, or they balk at all the different units and organizations depending on the era. Yet these games like Panzerblitz, October War, and even something as simplistic as Command & Colors. Games that back in the 70's I cut my teeth on and were considered entry level in the industry.

The Wargames club I belong to hasn't had this sort of problem, in that there's always members willing and interested in trying new game systems. The problem is that those are the extant members. Bringing new members in is slow, and generally seems to only replace those who drop out (or off...).

 

[Ulsyus]

On this I tend to agree. Fantasy requires less general background knowledge to run well, because there's less expectation of realism.

Have you ever tried running Runequest? Anything that takes place in Glorontha requires more than just a little background knowledge by the ref. I think this setting at least would have to be an exception to your general rule :]

 

[aramis]

Have you ever tried running Runequest? Anything that takes place in Glorontha requires more than just a little background knowledge by the ref. I think this setting at least would have to be an exception to your general rule :]

Glorantha's an exception to the Easier to Run part. It still has a lower expectation of realism; need I really cite Jack-o-Bears and the infamous Drulz (Anatathropos donaldi, aka Ducks), let alone the genuine non-existence of female Mostali, and that the Alrdyami are plants?

RQ3 on Fantasy Earth is just as surreal, but a LOT less work than Glorantha. (And is ALSO in the same core box).

The only game I've run set in Glorantha was Hero Wars. But I've run RuneQuest, just not on Glorantha.

 

[simonh]

Have you ever tried running Runequest? Anything that takes place in Glorontha requires more than just a little background knowledge by the ref. I think this setting at least would have to be an exception to your general rule :]

Only if you want it to be. You could have the same problem with any world that has a lot of established Canon, even the real world or any historical era. I can't believe there's as much setting material and canon for Glorantha as, say, Europe in Imperial Roman times, but I don't see that as a good argument that it's hard to set games in ancient Rome.

Of course one of the joys of running roleplaying games is the world building aspect of it. There are many ways to do that. One is to pick a particular area in an established setting and either become an expert on that area and build on it, or to just say that within that scope you're going to do things your way.

Another is to take the aspects of the game that you like, including perhaps many of the settign assumptions, but in your own world. That's a very popular option with Runequest and Heroquest. You get the advantages of a well worked out system and coherent set of setting concepts and resources to build on (cultures, cults, magic, pseudo-bronze age flavour, monsters, etc) but without being tied to specific setting details.

Traveller of course is ideal for that, because it gives you a whole set of setting-building tools right out of the box.

Simon Hibbs

 

[salochin999]

The Wargames club I belong to hasn't had this sort of problem, in that there's always members willing and interested in trying new game systems. The problem is that those are the extant members. Bringing new members in is slow, and generally seems to only replace those who drop out (or off...).

I think this was both the genius and problem with the old school games like Basic D&D. The simplicity brought in a huge wave of players - who eventually got bored of the simplicity and wanted a more complex game which then acted as a barrier to newbies.

There needs to be entry level games for newbies/youngsters which grognards enjoy enough to run/play to act as a bridge between the two.

 

[WarriorKnight]

I only do pen & paper table top play. Only use computer to store charaters so I have less to carry.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Are these a dead art form? Is Traveller slowly dieing off as the majority of game players switch to an all electronic format? And, if so, what if anything could we do to arrest this process, or, move Traveller as we know it into the electronic/online gaming world?

Discuss.

LR

For Extra Credit: Did you actually play Striker as a miniatures rule set, or just use it for its vehicle building options?

If Drivethru.com is any indication, then I would say it's a growing market. Also, other gaming websites, sites dedicated to hard copies of games, appear to be doing exceptionally well.

Will Wheatons "Table Top" has also been renewed for a third season to a growing audience (although strictly speaking he does board and card games, and not so much RPGs and warsims).

 

[rancke]

Will Wheatons "Table Top" has also been renewed for a third season to a growing audience (although strictly speaking he does board and card games, and not so much RPGs and warsims).

His kickstarter got so much money that he will be making a spin-off series about roleplaying.


Hans