Except that former GDWers will tell you that there was no connection between the two.
Interesting. I never heard that.
New thought about the course of Traveller
- Thread starter Garyius2003
- Start date
Except that former GDWers will tell you that there was no connection between the two.
Interesting. I never heard that.
I suppose. I think there's a grey area where the Well-Intentioned are blurred with the Mercenary, and therefore it becomes difficult to judge the hearts of who was in earnest of presenting material for people to enjoy, and who was trying to make a name and $$$ for themselves.
An extreme example is Star Fleet Battles. SFB is based off of Classic Trek and the Star Fleet Technical Manual written and published by Franz Joseph, a fan of the show. When Star Trek the Motion Picture came out the author of SFB put out "Expansion #1" with modifications to a Federation CA and Klingon D7 that point for point emulated the vessels portrayed in the film. The author now has to deny it because the owners of the ST property probably sicked their lawyers on him, and now when asked he'll tell you it was a coincidence that the rules for the then "new" uprated Fed and Klingon vessels happen to match those of the movie.
Such is life.
I think SFB's author was well intentioned, didn't think for a minute that he was crossing any lines, and, not being a Hollywood version of a rules-Entertainment-lawyer, went ahead and published the new material with content addressing the film without calling the film by name.
I think Dragon published an article called "The Electric Knight", which had official rules for a light saber in AD&D (tried to get our DM to let my paladin have one ... to no effect
). They even called the "laser sword" a Light Saber, but there were no reprecussions at the time. Probably because A) Lucas is a bit cooler than Paramount, and B) it probably wasn't a big enough article to attract attention from the Lucasfilm legal minds. Additionally Lucasfilm has treated the online gaming community with a great deal of respect, and has made requests here and there with bringing in lawyers only when it seemed to be necessary. And the online gaming community at that time (Dark Forces and Jedi Knight) were pretty compliant (a few exceptions).I think the worst Traveller has ever done is to site Trek and Star Wars or other movies, TV and novels as examples of how players can use the rule set to emulate settings. I think Vader and Luke had broadsword skills listed in 1001 characters or something.
I think it's an interesting topic, and I think there's probably a good amount of truth in it, but I also think that Miller and Traveller know where they stand. If nothing else there was a Star Wars RPG that came out around 1989, so any question of who was copying who was probably put to an end to speculation or actual copying right there.
Well, that wasn't actually complying with the desires of that vocal group of people, was it?
I'm aware of the reason for the 70 year fast-forward. I'm just saying that IMO it was not necessary to solve the problem. Nor, as you note, was it successful.
And if it had worked, it would only have been a matter of time before the same problem arose in the TNE setting. If you want to publish a setting that spans several tens of thousand star systems, you're going to run into learning curve problems for newcomers sooner or later.
Hans
The mechanics and design team membership put the lie to "No connection" - they may not be the same setting, but mechanically, it's a clear spur. And easier to convert to/from CT than TNE is.
Garyius2003
SOC-13
This is why we need an upvote, so I don't have to quote to say ditto.
Vladika
SOC-14 1K
The various publishers are quite aware that if they put a glossy black cover with a red stripe on it with the word "Traveller" the fan base would buy used toilet paper.
Point is, if it has a glossy black cover with a red stripe on it and the word "Traveller" we are going to buy it. We're a captive market so they get creative to get new customers, knowing we are going to buy it, no matter what.
Point is, if it has a glossy black cover with a red stripe on it and the word "Traveller" we are going to buy it. We're a captive market so they get creative to get new customers, knowing we are going to buy it, no matter what.
TNE had no glossy black covers. Not a one. Nor did MT.
Vladika
SOC-14 1K
I was specifically thinking of MgT & T5. MgT because of all the "Canon" changes and T5 because, as laid out, it's about as useful as used TP.
Chuck Anumia
SOC-14 1K
My Thoughts
When the Rebellion came out I bought it because the Encyclopedia and referees information was terrific, expansive and gave me more ideas and settings to play in.
When TNE came out I was blown away with the concept of "Star Vikings" (or Pirates as some have called them; and I play an online game of that name today)
This made every subsector of the universe into an instant frontier needing exploration (and in depth filling in)
I started buying every book for the setting as they came out (and made my first ever pre-ordered book order from GDW)
I am much more concerned with the effects that the “Empress Wave" will have than with any remnants of Virus IMTU.
I am unsure if T5 has fixed anything or simply gone backwards to address other issues brought up in CT?
I played CT in the 80's as a get away from D & D (AD & D) because they were so different.
When the Rebellion came out I bought it because the Encyclopedia and referees information was terrific, expansive and gave me more ideas and settings to play in.
When TNE came out I was blown away with the concept of "Star Vikings" (or Pirates as some have called them; and I play an online game of that name today)
This made every subsector of the universe into an instant frontier needing exploration (and in depth filling in)
I started buying every book for the setting as they came out (and made my first ever pre-ordered book order from GDW)
I am much more concerned with the effects that the “Empress Wave" will have than with any remnants of Virus IMTU.
I am unsure if T5 has fixed anything or simply gone backwards to address other issues brought up in CT?
DGP had a bigger role in creating MT. Others, not Marc, had influence on TNE as Marc eventually did less with Traveller and GDW.
This was long ago. But I don't think it ruined the product lines. It provided new alternatives. More than cinema, in the later 80s/90s it had to compete with new inventive gaming (computers, etc). We had global military buildups. There were a lot of deciding factors on the outcome of MT, TNE and 2300AD.
There are some seriously poorly communicated concepts. The Regency conversion to democracy, and then later, 1248 made virus briefly all powerful
rofl.
This was long ago. But I don't think it ruined the product lines. It provided new alternatives. More than cinema, in the later 80s/90s it had to compete with new inventive gaming (computers, etc). We had global military buildups. There were a lot of deciding factors on the outcome of MT, TNE and 2300AD.
There are some seriously poorly communicated concepts. The Regency conversion to democracy, and then later, 1248 made virus briefly all powerful
rofl.
Chuck Anumia; well, with our group, and I guess this is more of me talking, there just weren't any adventures being published. I mean there was absolutely nothing. And it was at that time that I was really questioning just how much of a sci-fi game Traveller really was, because every adventure seemed a little grounded. But then, at that time, I had a career to attend to and some family matters.
Well my feeling are well noted here, I think MT and later TNE were disasters of the first magnitude in terms of setting. MT was Star Wars in Traveller, with a healthy dose of Twilight: 2000. TNE was AFTERMATH and Morrow Project in space. The later house system sucked badly, as they tried to take the essential space opera feeling of CT and make it "more realistic". Also MT/TNE threw away the classic writers like the Keith Brothers, and others who made it so good. Plus the Deus ex machina of the assassination was hard to believe, and made no sense. I pretty much quit Traveller after MT came out, and went to other systems since they ▮▮▮▮▮▮ed up a classic.
Possibly. I was working a lot back then, and most of the sci-fi I was watching happened to be anime at the time. I wasn't seeing a lot of western sci-fi because it just wasn't interesting nor compelling. It was essentially more of the same; revenge against some alien kind of plot, with the usual dramatic flourishes.
I dropped Traveller after MT hit the shelves. Our group got into char-gen with MT, and loved reading the background, but, and this is the BIG but, ... where're the game modules? Where's MT LBB Adventure 1 "The Spinward Marches Plot" (I made that title up just now).
That was the only drawback that I saw to MT. It's like writing down the rules for Monopoly, describing the playing pieces, the money, titles, deeds, the Chance and Community Chest cards, and everything else, but not providing the board and playing pieces.
Our group was no slouch in the imagination department, and we were well used to creating our own adventures, but we did expect some new adventure material forthcoming to help fuel campaigns. And none was published until a year or two later, and it was slim pickens at best.
*images of Slim Pickens riding the bomb at the end of Dr. Strangelove go here*
SpaceBadger
SOC-14 1K
Exactly. Which was probably one reason I had trouble getting a stable campaign going in college, as I kept rewriting my setting in search of the perfect balance, including frontiers to explore (the other reason being that the other gamers preferred D&D).
Oh, yeah! Another on my list of Traveller settings I'd like to run someday would be something along the lines of H. Beam Piper's Space Vikings, in which a split-off branch of civilization has been out of touch with the main body for some centuries, and when contact is re-established they find that civilization has fallen, much regression and war has occurred, and they are among the top dogs technologically. Some respond by raiding the fallen for riches, while others seek to help and rebuild a new civilization. There is a lot of stuff in Hard Times that would be very useful in such a setting.
The hinterlands of every world with a population level of less than 8. There are enough "Darkest Africa" planets in the Marches to keep me in exploration campaigns for the rest of my life.
The IISS used to need an exploration branch and to keep up its budget the Exploration Branch branched out (so to speak
) when the need began to lessen.Hans
That was a big sticking point for me, they went to all the trouble of leveling the Imperium and then did almost nothing with it. I don't really count Knightfall or Flaming Eye because they're not really about the Rebellion even though they are set within that timeframe. I suspect they were attempts to split the difference between those people who wanted Rebellion adventures and those who didn't want much to do with the setting.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
MT didn't become a usable setting until hard Times - everything prior to that was too meta-plot driven and too grand. But Hard Times showed the effect of the chaos caused by the rebellion and more importantly gave us a setting where PC scale action made a difference..
Just a thought, and I've never tried this but may give it a go, it may be an interesting setting to stretch out the timeframe of Hard Times a bit and slowly collapse the worlds of a sector/subsector during the earlier rebellion period, with the large fleet actions being used as random 'acts of god'. keep them in the background but occasionally a world may be flattened due to fleet action.
Just a thought, and I've never tried this but may give it a go, it may be an interesting setting to stretch out the timeframe of Hard Times a bit and slowly collapse the worlds of a sector/subsector during the earlier rebellion period, with the large fleet actions being used as random 'acts of god'. keep them in the background but occasionally a world may be flattened due to fleet action.
Vargas; complete agreement here. I was truly and honestly baffled as to why that was.
I think that this was unintentional and incremental.
During the development of Traveller as a game, there were three slow, somewhat unintended, but certain nonetheless currents of development from the three little books of Classic Traveller to the massive electronic (and soon physical) tome which is Traveller 5. I call this kind of development "creep" as it was, as far as I can tell, unintended, and usually quite slow, but it did change the game considerably.
The first creep, and the only one with relatively undebatable detrimental side effects on the game, was the Modifier Creep. You see, Classic Traveller (like most editions of Traveller) uses a 2d6 curve for task and combat resolution; this kind of curve is far more sensitive to modifiers than, for example, the 1d20 curve used by the D20 family of games. A +1 modifier influences the 2d6 curve in quite a significant way, and higher modifiers have much more effect than the simple incremental effects they have on 1d20. A big enough modifier would "break" the curve - that is, force either an automatic success or an automatic failure, which is an undesired result in an RPG, where "swingy" mechanics are usually preferred.
So Classic Traveller, very reasonably, kept skills very low - to an average of 4 skill points per character and usually no more than 1 point in each skill. Skills of 2 or 3 were uncommon and skills beyond that were rare. Also, the combat modifiers were, for the most part, quite modest. But Book 4: Mercenary and the books that followed, as well as later Traveller products, started adding more and more skill points to characters and more powerful weapons with bigger to-hit modifiers. The end result was a "broken" 2d6 curve and less interesting mechanics.
A second type of creep, which is more a matter of taste, is complexity creep. Classic Traveller was a very simple game, where a character can be described in a few rows of text and a starship in a single paragraph; character generation and ship-building were very simple, sometimes too simple, and very quick (about five minutes per character). Book 4: Mercenary and Book 5: High Guard added many more details, including a much more cumbersome character generation system, as well as much more technical ship design rules. While the High Guard design rules were excellent, they started a trend in Traveller which led to more and more complex design rules up to the highly technical Mega Traveller and Fire, Fusion and Steel design systems (and Traveller 5), which were very detailed and very complex. That's not a bad thing in itself, mind you, but a major departure from Classic Traveller's simplicity nonetheless.
A third type of creep is scale creep - the gradual change from pocket empires or a loose Imperium as implied by the first three books to a much grander, more secure and much more powerful Imperium as implied by later products. I think this trend started with Book 5: High Guard. While I love High Guard, I think that it started a chain reaction which made Traveller extremely different from what was apparent from the original three little black books. HG did two main things: 1) it increased the size of military starships, as well as they costs, by one or two orders of magnitude; 2) it changed the focus from small civilian and paramilitary ships with light weapons to big naval engagements.
The result was, of course, a VERY expensive navy - not 4x 1,200 dton cruisers per subsector, but rather multiple 30k dton cruisers. This costs a lot of money, and a loose Imperium or pocket empires as implied by books 1-3 can't finance and maintain such an expensive fleet. So then came a huge, powerful Imperium of 11,000 worlds with strong Imperial rule and large interstellar military presence making piracy and smuggling much less feasible. A large, powerful, stable Imperium became, at one point, a bit boring, so they started a Rebellion, which, due to the huge ship sizes, was mostly fought above and beyond the players' level. Because it involved such huge fleets and empires, it eventually fell into stagnation and the slate had to be cleaned by the Virus. But the Virus was controversial and so fractured the fan base.
Now, MT and TNE aren't necessarily bad, but they do have a completely different tone than LBBs 1-3 and the first few adventures. The same goes with the two previously-discussed processes.
During the development of Traveller as a game, there were three slow, somewhat unintended, but certain nonetheless currents of development from the three little books of Classic Traveller to the massive electronic (and soon physical) tome which is Traveller 5. I call this kind of development "creep" as it was, as far as I can tell, unintended, and usually quite slow, but it did change the game considerably.
The first creep, and the only one with relatively undebatable detrimental side effects on the game, was the Modifier Creep. You see, Classic Traveller (like most editions of Traveller) uses a 2d6 curve for task and combat resolution; this kind of curve is far more sensitive to modifiers than, for example, the 1d20 curve used by the D20 family of games. A +1 modifier influences the 2d6 curve in quite a significant way, and higher modifiers have much more effect than the simple incremental effects they have on 1d20. A big enough modifier would "break" the curve - that is, force either an automatic success or an automatic failure, which is an undesired result in an RPG, where "swingy" mechanics are usually preferred.
So Classic Traveller, very reasonably, kept skills very low - to an average of 4 skill points per character and usually no more than 1 point in each skill. Skills of 2 or 3 were uncommon and skills beyond that were rare. Also, the combat modifiers were, for the most part, quite modest. But Book 4: Mercenary and the books that followed, as well as later Traveller products, started adding more and more skill points to characters and more powerful weapons with bigger to-hit modifiers. The end result was a "broken" 2d6 curve and less interesting mechanics.
A second type of creep, which is more a matter of taste, is complexity creep. Classic Traveller was a very simple game, where a character can be described in a few rows of text and a starship in a single paragraph; character generation and ship-building were very simple, sometimes too simple, and very quick (about five minutes per character). Book 4: Mercenary and Book 5: High Guard added many more details, including a much more cumbersome character generation system, as well as much more technical ship design rules. While the High Guard design rules were excellent, they started a trend in Traveller which led to more and more complex design rules up to the highly technical Mega Traveller and Fire, Fusion and Steel design systems (and Traveller 5), which were very detailed and very complex. That's not a bad thing in itself, mind you, but a major departure from Classic Traveller's simplicity nonetheless.
A third type of creep is scale creep - the gradual change from pocket empires or a loose Imperium as implied by the first three books to a much grander, more secure and much more powerful Imperium as implied by later products. I think this trend started with Book 5: High Guard. While I love High Guard, I think that it started a chain reaction which made Traveller extremely different from what was apparent from the original three little black books. HG did two main things: 1) it increased the size of military starships, as well as they costs, by one or two orders of magnitude; 2) it changed the focus from small civilian and paramilitary ships with light weapons to big naval engagements.
The result was, of course, a VERY expensive navy - not 4x 1,200 dton cruisers per subsector, but rather multiple 30k dton cruisers. This costs a lot of money, and a loose Imperium or pocket empires as implied by books 1-3 can't finance and maintain such an expensive fleet. So then came a huge, powerful Imperium of 11,000 worlds with strong Imperial rule and large interstellar military presence making piracy and smuggling much less feasible. A large, powerful, stable Imperium became, at one point, a bit boring, so they started a Rebellion, which, due to the huge ship sizes, was mostly fought above and beyond the players' level. Because it involved such huge fleets and empires, it eventually fell into stagnation and the slate had to be cleaned by the Virus. But the Virus was controversial and so fractured the fan base.
Now, MT and TNE aren't necessarily bad, but they do have a completely different tone than LBBs 1-3 and the first few adventures. The same goes with the two previously-discussed processes.
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