Saving T5 or How to make an old Traveller actually accept and like T5?

[Spaceresearcher]

Well so far, it's great to see positive comments and support but in all honesty and I hate to break this to everyone, it's only here on this forum, I'm reading or hearing of any good things at all about the mega huge T5 book.

To explain: Over 40 fellow Travellers (a handful I game with, the rest in various online sites such as this one), have very little to say about the tomb.

They find it:
1. Too full of rules they don't want and will never use(happy with CT and MT and MgT).
2. Some sections seem to be detailed but there not required and the sections they do want more on, are too thin.
3. It's breaking into the realm of "When does a game get so many rules that it's just not fun anymore?"
4. They will not be recommending it to any new player in order to uphold the good name of the Traveller legacy. (Worries and concerns of it turning new players off the game and the Traveller setting).
5. They can't be bothered correcting all the errors in it. (Of which they feel there are simply too many for the money they paid).
6. Not enough information on the actual Traveller universe to pin down the game.
7. They found the character generation system to be something that was simply unusable. (Which is sad because I happened to like the idea of all the new career paths etc).
8. The idea of requiring buckets of dice was not something they wanted in there games.
9. They didn't like the expansion on the tech levels etc because this is something they have firmly laid down in stone and used for years. Similar for other expanded rules.
10. Too many misc rules, not enough game presented. (They were looking for new additions to the Traveller universe).

There's more but those were the main points.

It's been making me think of another game that came out years ago(sorry fellow Travellers I'm not allowed to mention other game systems on this site, that's the policy on here) and it was so full of rules, it was imply unplayable.

While T5 is not as bad as this game, my own opinion for what it's worth is this:

The best RPG system's in the world are the ones where 'female' players will actually be interested and have a go. So far, I think I've met 2(one may be a guy) online players who actually like Traveller, the rest are males. Why? Because most female players, play games for fun and to socialise(I'm not being sexist here either and I'm an equalitarian this is just facts if your female and reading this). I can't blame them. Myself I like to play games to enjoy them and in the case of an RPG for the escape to live out ideas and explore places I simply couldn't go to any other way.

When I do this and 'equalitarian' players get together to have fun in the game, they want to be able to game without having to wait while rule 266 on starship travel is argued and agreed upon by several players for example. In short they don't want to be bored. Without doubt while some rules are necessary to maintain an order to the game, too many rules are simply boring.

So to conclude, Traveller should be fun and exciting. It's travel through the stars with not just a handful of core races but an unlimited by the imagination plethora of lifeforms and atmospheres to explore.

Traveller is a well established setting(although as I've discovered the frustrating part is that there's not one setting and everyone has all there own maps of the galaxy). The rules have been around for such a long time, it just seems too late to start changing the system to suit a massive pile of new rules that add little to no value to the actual original setting(which seems to be what most Travellers love the most. The good ol Third Emperium(just look at the continued success of the Mongoose Traveller line)).
Everything else seems to be read about, but no one actually uses it for gaming(Well perhaps some MT but no other editions to date(if you do, great for you but that's what I've seen so far).

Some of the most popular games in the world have the simplest rules. I wish I could give an example of some other SciFi RPG's which give terrific easy to get into rules and provide great games but I'm not allowed to mention other games on this site.

So to conclude, what really needs to happen in my firm view, is for the entire rules book, to become more of a story and a way to set out a lush and rich universe for players to explore and weave the rules(which should be straight forward, clear, error free and ready to role(requires play testing, the best RPG's in the world had a lot of play testing to ensure there success)play. The system should be emersive but not convoluted with complexities that make it feel like a number crunching session. In it's current state, T5 presents only a small sample of what the Traveller universe actually is. For old time players, I guess that's no big deal but seriously for the actual creator to set out the universe and pin it down would remove a lot of ambiguity, assumptions and to be honest guess work from many players.

Personally, I'll support a new T5 Version 2.0 book if the time is put into it but I'll have to read it first before I suggest it to fellow Travellers because honestly, I felt bad to back and spread the word on a product that simply didn't deliver to so many.

Finally(seriously this time), it's also come to my attention that explaining Traveller to a new person is no easy battle either and if they delve into all the different rules and systems there going to have lot's of questions and possibly even be confused. That's not just new players, even experienced players get confused at times with Traveller rules. If there is to be a new release and perhaps it will be a Kickstarter, then I have a suggestion that will provide a great money injector into the project even if a lot of folks don't want another T5 book(eg all the Travellers who wouldn't back it just for another book would back it for this).

Do a DVD or series of DVD's where the creator actually plays a game session with some other experienced players. Simply set up a couple of camera's(or even a single camera set at a decent position to see the gamers and the table) and play a full adventure or 2 etc, showing the world of Traveller fans how you actually play Traveller. It would provide more explanation and outlay the rules and players new and old alike would learn a great deal on playing Traveller. (Seriously I love watching other gamers play and seeing how people react to situations etc and I'm sure I'm not alone). It would be a filmography of a gaming session. That I would pay more for than the actual game itself by far and I think you would find many other Travellers and new comers to the game would also, so they could check out a definite RPG gaming session on Traveller played by the actual masters of the game system itself.

That's the best I can come up with for saving the T5 system and let me sign off by thanking Marc for all his hard work during the project(your video's where great as well and I could tell you have a lot of enthusiasm for this new game). My apologies if this is a dampner but as others have said, maybe it took a release like this to bring out the depth of Traveller and set a starting point for fleshing it out and getting it to be 'The Ultimate Edition Of Traveller' which is the overall noble goal.

 

[cuTTer]

The best RPG system's in the world are the ones where 'female' players will actually be interested and have a go.

Why is female in inverted commas?

 

[Supplement Four]

It's been making me think of another game that came out years ago(sorry fellow Travellers I'm not allowed to mention other game systems on this site, that's the policy on here) and it was so full of rules, it was imply unplayable.

Why do you think you can't mention other game systems on this forum? That's ludicrous. I mention other game systems all the time, and so do the mods and other forum members.

Heck, a few posts up-thread, I mention the Top Secret/SI task system.

 

[Quint]

Lots of excellent snipped content, but these are the two most important points that I see here:

The best RPG system's in the world are the ones where 'female' players will actually be interested and have a go.... ...it's also come to my attention that explaining Traveller to a new person is no easy battle either... ...That's not just new players, even experienced players get confused at times with Traveller rules.

Yup.

I play with two women at the moment, and have played with many more over the years. They like playing RPG's, they don't like the OTU. The game and OTU is a hard sell, the general setting, or the general idea of a SciFi RPG is not. Traveller locked into the OTU has a huge hurdle to overcome when people get online and start trying to figure out "what they need" either as players or as gamemasters. D&D you get some clear rules and sense that it's ok to create your own world, Traveller the opposite is the case sometimes (or with some people) - this is because instead of there being multiple "universes" of Traveller in official publications there is instead multiple spots in the official timeline being used as the setting for an ostensibly "generic" game.

My best games of "Traveller" have used the CP2020 game engine and been an unholy amalgam of the OTU and stolen bits of lore from a couple of dozen different game settings and scifi/fantasy novels/series. That was a solid ten years of gaming right there that I'll be honest, I'm not going to discuss much more on this list because my perception is that "it doesn't count".

Pretty sad when you think about - because my players all loved the games and ended p steeped in all sorts of OTU lore - just not the actual rules of Traveller and they were able to enjoy all sorts of other references that they recognized from other sources.

D.

 

[robject]

I play with two women at the moment, and have played with many more over the years. [...] The game and OTU is a hard sell, the general setting, or the general idea of a SciFi RPG is not.

That's interesting! How would you describe the general setting? Sort of a dumarest-like setting? Lots of places to visit, but little or no empire? Less like Rome, more like the Middle Ages, or Renaissance, or ?

 

[mike wightman]

The best Traveler campaign I ever ran was actually based on Dumarest and used the FGU Space Opera rules. It played like a Traveller game.

IMHO - T5 should flatten the OTU or at least re-boot and simplify, use the Galaxiad to look back from the far far future and say all that we know about the earlier eras of the OTU are not quiet right hence the inconsistencies. Once and for all produce a coherent setting book, but do it in generics so that referees can make stuff up to suit their 'verse.

 

[Hanson's Roughriders]

Once and for all produce a coherent setting book, but do it in generics so that referees can make stuff up to suit their 'verse.

I get that feeling from this current one.

Frankly people this is not like D&D 4th ed they have not reinvented the wheel but balanced it and gave it up to date rules -yes an index would be great and perhaps alternate dice mechanic options - but as a master rules its going to be hard to beat - there is little verse info and its easily adaptable. A lot of the griping I feel is starting to be trolling. Frankly we are as bad as Napoleonic wargamers arguing about the bricole.

Take what you got and make the best with it - frankly roleplaying games are all about what you put into it, squibbling about rules makes the brand look bad - soon we will be the last players playing it.

 

[rancke]

Once and for all produce a coherent setting book, but do it in generics so that referees can make stuff up to suit their 'verse.

I think you would need to make up your mind on one or the other. IMO the only way to have a coherent generic setting is to make is so bland that there's no point.

That's just my opinion, of course.


Hans

 

[pendragonman]

I think you would need to make up your mind on one or the other. IMO the only way to have a coherent generic setting is to make is so bland that there's no point.

That's just my opinion, of course.


Hans

It doesn't happen often, but I am in agreement.

Too generic would be chili with no spice. What's the point?

 

[Blue Ghost]

Well so far, it's great to see positive comments and support but in all honesty and I hate to break this to everyone, it's only here on this forum, I'm reading or hearing of any good things at all about the mega huge T5 book.

To explain: Over 40 fellow Travellers (a handful I game with, the rest in various online sites such as this one), have very little to say about the tomb.

They find it:
1. Too full of rules they don't want and will never use(happy with CT and MT and MgT).
2. Some sections seem to be detailed but there not required and the sections they do want more on, are too thin.
3. It's breaking into the realm of "When does a game get so many rules that it's just not fun anymore?"
4. They will not be recommending it to any new player in order to uphold the good name of the Traveller legacy. (Worries and concerns of it turning new players off the game and the Traveller setting).
5. They can't be bothered correcting all the errors in it. (Of which they feel there are simply too many for the money they paid).
6. Not enough information on the actual Traveller universe to pin down the game.
7. They found the character generation system to be something that was simply unusable. (Which is sad because I happened to like the idea of all the new career paths etc).
8. The idea of requiring buckets of dice was not something they wanted in there games.
9. They didn't like the expansion on the tech levels etc because this is something they have firmly laid down in stone and used for years. Similar for other expanded rules.
10. Too many misc rules, not enough game presented. (They were looking for new additions to the Traveller universe).

There's more but those were the main points.

*much snippage*

Spacesearcher, I guess what I was saying in my previous post is that T5, as is, is more of a work of love for the long time Traveller grognard, and not really a good book to give to new prospective players who are interested in playing a science fiction themed game.

In other words, it's not sell-able to new players. It's a codex for old timers who want a fresh new "final" version of the game.

Your 1-10 bullet points, to me at least, describe both Car Wars and Star Fleet Battles. I don't play SFB for a plethora of reasons, but one of the main ones is that it's too weighted with rules. Car Wars, because it basically had the same "impulse movement / fire sequence" engine, ran into the same problem in the mid 80s when new rules for new devices were coming out almost every couple of months or so.

Me? If I was going to run a Traveller campaign? I think I might wait for a new Players' Handbook (a bargain one) to give to my players so they could roll up characters, get familiar with combat, weapons and tasks. If I had a bunch of veterans, then I would go ahead and run the adventure out of the book, and maybe print out key pages from the CD to give to players.

I hope that clarifies my recommendation.

 

[Almuric]

I think you would need to make up your mind on one or the other. IMO the only way to have a coherent generic setting is to make is so bland that there's no point.

That's just my opinion, of course.


Hans

Traveller up to about c. 1981 or so was a pretty coherent "generic setting."

Then came meta-plot (Fifth Frontier War), then came the Rebellion, and then came the end of the Imperium as a generic setting that people could comfortably use for just any setting. The nail in the coffin was Atlas of the Imperium which replaced the comfortably vague maps of the Library Data with something that gave referees the choice of either giving up their own creativity for much of the setting or no longer playing in the "official" setting.

Should anyone wish to ever return Traveller to a "generic" setting it once was, the best things would be:

* Disown Atlas of the Imperium and even the Library Data maps
* Do not map or specify size of the Imperium or its neighbors in anything but Relative sense ("the Solomani are 1/x the size of the Imperium")
* By all means keep specific "Official" sectors like the Marches and the many others. But do not tell anyone how far they are away from each other except in the most general terms and do not "link" them together.
* Declare that space (being 3 dimensional of which the 2d maps are simplifications) results in the imperium having lots of borders

That's how I'd create a "generic" Traveller while still retaining most of its rich history. Such a version - more or less identical to what referrees worked with in the 1979-1980 period that saw Traveller's greatest flowering of popularity as a generic game - keeps all the rich history, but tosses out the stuff that referees choke on.... I'm not necessarily saying this SHOULD be done - there is much to love with the Imperium in all its fully-mapped out obsessive detail - but I think that the simple
move of decoupling the existing sectors from a grand "Map of Everything" and removing all statements on the size of the Imperium and its neighbors and their precise borders, and more than that that, some statements to the effect that many areas of the Imperium border on unexplored space (it doesn't now) would utterly open the setting by fully embracing room for creativity while permitting almost all other library data and history to remain within canon. That is: all canon exists except trans-sector map canon

 

[Blue Ghost]

Almuric; what if Traveller went the classic D&D route; different modules had different "settings" or "milieus"?

 

[mike wightman]

You have just hit the nail on the head.

On another thread I have mentioned the difference between original SM and GT BtC, the former is a "generic" book in that the vast majority of the detail is left to the referee to develop, while BtC is a perfect example of too much detail spoils the setting.

 

[rancke]

On another thread I have mentioned the difference between original SM and GT BtC, the former is a "generic" book in that the vast majority of the detail is left to the referee to develop, while BtC is a perfect example of too much detail spoils the setting.

To me, "leaving the vast material for the referee to develop" is another way of saying "providing far too little information to be useful without further development". BtC is an example of BAD detail marring a setting, and by no means a perfect example of that, as far more of the details are useable than not.


Hans

 

[rancke]

Almuric; what if Traveller went the classic D&D route; different modules had different "settings" or "milieus"?

You'd get more settings at the expense of getting less material about each as publication efforts would be split between them.


Hans

 

[Vargas]

The game and OTU is a hard sell, the general setting, or the general idea of a SciFi RPG is not. Traveller locked into the OTU has a huge hurdle to overcome when people get online and start trying to figure out "what they need" either as players or as gamemasters. D&D you get some clear rules and sense that it's ok to create your own world, Traveller the opposite is the case sometimes (or with some people) - this is because instead of there being multiple "universes" of Traveller in official publications there is instead multiple spots in the official timeline being used as the setting for an ostensibly "generic" game.

I'm not trying to be difficult but I don't necessarily see why the OTU is so complicated and such an impediment to understanding the game for new players. I would think it's fairly straightforward to summarize the timeframe being played in and to throw out some generic types of Traveller games. Certainly no more difficult, and maybe even easier, than describing a Star Trek or Star Wars universe to someone not familiar with the shows and/or movies. Perhaps I’m missing something . . .

 

[Quint]

That's interesting! How would you describe the general setting? Sort of a dumarest-like setting? Lots of places to visit, but little or no empire? Less like Rome, more like the Middle Ages, or Renaissance, or ?

Actually, I sort of melded the Third Imperium with the Imperium of Man from WH40K (including a whole massively complicated version of the Emperor on the Golden Throne and an alternate version of inheritance based on cloning Cleon as a "Prince-Regent") as well as adding in elements of DKM's Tales of the Continuing Time (a somewhat obscure, incomplete cyberpunk series of novels) and a mess of other stuff like Chronicles of Riddick - including Ancients/Forerunners/etc.

It had none of the decayed notion of WH40K and more the epic flavor of Star Wars with the players being Imperial agents saving the Imperium from within and without.

I'd love to run a Dumarest setting but I'm don't think my players would, LOL!

D.

 

[Quint]

I'm not trying to be difficult but I don't necessarily see why the OTU is so complicated and such an impediment to understanding the game for new players. I would think it's fairly straightforward to summarize the timeframe being played in and to throw out some generic types of Traveller games. Certainly no more difficult, and maybe even easier, than describing a Star Trek or Star Wars universe to someone not familiar with the shows and/or movies. Perhaps I’m missing something . . .

If we were talking about understanding the game engine, then no, it doesn't make that more complicated. But the "game" is the combination of engine and setting, and unless someone has very deep pockets the days of Proto-Traveller are long gone.

I'm a grognard, I have... well more invested in Traveller than I like to think about. I've done it honestly since I've been playing since 1979 or so, but none of my players are interested in reading the corpus of "Traveller Lore" either from my Library or from what they can find online (and then have to sort through canon and non-canon material). Plus they'd have to figure out what time I'm setting it in, then find the right materials. Then, beyond that, I don't know many players that are that interested in playing a game with a "foregone" (sp?) conclusion - that's the real problem with TNE, who cares about the 5FW when everything is going to wiped clean in less than a hundred years anyways...

The OTU, as portrayed, as succeeded in doing the one thing that every campaign should strive to avoid - make players feel like what they are doing is utterly irrelevant to the good of the setting. The days of gritty, nihilistic cyberpunkish games was pretty much... well... never there in the forst place - look at the actual adventures that FASA and RTG published for Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun? In a world of crap they were essentially about just how much power the characters had to influence the world (the hidden message of most cyberpunk - the power of the individual against the Man/Machine).

D.

 

[SpaceBadger]

I don't think players need to know the whole published background of the OTU, or any other setting. Sure, if I was a player I would want to know as much background as I could for full immersion in my PC, but not everyone wants or needs to do that.

What players really need is some simple background the GM can give them, preferably less than a page or two in length, so they understand where and when their PCs are living, and what is going on around them, well enough to start the adventure. Additional details as needed for the particular adventure can be supplied via rumors, library data, etc.

 

[SpaceBadger]

I don't know many players that are that interested in playing a game with a "foregone" (sp?) conclusion - that's the real problem with TNE, who cares about the 5FW when everything is going to wiped clean in less than a hundred years anyways...

So tell your players that TNE (or even MT) isn't going to happen IYTU. There, problem solved, the future is now unknown.