kilemall
SOC-14 5K
The group Human League literally took their name from the polity in SPI StarForce.
Skill Frequency
- Thread starter Badenov
- Start date
Someone picked up Andromeda Dragons, looked at the cover and said it looked like cheesy 80's sci-fi, and I laughed. I did try to get some artists, and instead fell back on my 80's zine making skills when that failed.
Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
For a while, I was in a gaming group that allowed me to "DJ" the action happening in the game with anime BGMs.
After a few sessions, it became almost Pavlovian for them that when I cued up these tracks (timepoints selected in embedded links) from Shin Cutey Honey ... it's was time to get Ready to RUMBLE!
I'm just going to say i wish we'd all known each other about 40 years ago. Would have been a great party! 
Why would a hi-tech interstellar society have a social pyramid at all?
I see TL10+ as effectively a post-scarcity society where most citizens will be relatively well-educated, skilled and affluent and you'd have to work hard or not at all to belong to a genuine underclass.
Also remember it is a 1970s American game and Americans had and have a uniquely expansive definition of 'middle class' so it seems entirely appropriate that chargen produces diamond characters.
Indeed bearing this and the actual realities of 1970s America society in mind and particularly given current American developments I'd posit that the lower class (say Soc <5 which in MGT is where you get a negative SOC DM and are literally discriminated against) is on most worlds often associated with a minority that is for some reason downtrodden.
The real problem for me has always been the assumption that even PCs who may indeed be 'special' have a 3% chance of being from a hereditary nobility - and I speak as someone from a nation that still has one.
So the UK now has c.1,500 peers of whom only half are hereditary so even if we assume the peers have say an average 4 descendants each who also count as noble (which in the British system they actually don't being mere honourables - say SOC 10 - unless they are heirs or children of a marquess or duke) we are looking at 0.01% of a 65 million population which would be what rolling 24 on 4d6 probability?.
Of course other societies had many more nobles - in early modern Poland up to 10% of the population belonged to the Szlachta or nobility only a few of whom held actual titles like baron, count or prince, whereas in Germany and France participle inheritance produced many more aristocrats than the British system as all children were noble and not just heirs - but everything I've read about the OTU suggests the model is that of Britain with a tiny class of hereditary high nobles and a rather larger but still miniscule one of honour and rank nobles.
How to model this in Traveller is another matter - are King Oleb, Duke Norris, Archduke Dulinor and Emperor Strephon all really just SOC 15 which any PC with just a bit of luck and a career that has +1 SOCs on its skill, rank and benefit tables can easily equal?
How to model this in Traveller is another matter - are King Oleb, Duke Norris, Archduke Dulinor and Emperor Strephon all really just SOC 15 which any PC with just a bit of luck and a career that has +1 SOCs on its skill, rank and benefit tables can easily equal?
Soc has traditionally been the dump stat for trav. However, I use it somewhat differently in my game: 2 is a robot, 3-5 are clones, 10+ are oligarchs of some sort, maybe politcal. The average citizen of Earth, and the core worlds are generally well educated, skilled, and comfortable. Adventurers are of the 1% that for some reason strike out on their own versus staying back in an orbital community where it only rains after 9pm, and they load the kids in their electric stationwagon, for a trip to the beach on a saturday afternoon. The frontier is where the action is, and people are thin on the ground, so that the player characters can really stand out.
Because the baseline upon which the Traveller game (or at least the OTU and similar settings) was based was the Golden Age Sci-Fi literature of the 1950s-1960s, which was NOT post-scarcity (as can clearly be seen from the assumptions in the OTU Setting). Many or most of those short stories, serials, and books did have Interstellar Empires with a nobility structure and/or Trade Economics (and associated Trading Empires and Politics) - (Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, the individual worlds in E.C. Tubb's Dumarest Saga, the Terro-Human Future History series books by H. Beam Piper, the Dominic Flandry series and Nicholas van Rijn Trader to the Stars Series from Poul Anderson's Technic History, to name a few). These were the primary inspirations for the game designers at GDW of Traveller back in the day before Star Wars hit the Big Screen and before computers were miniaturized into the microcomputer (and Marc Miller has said as much and mentioned these very sources).
The default assumption of Traveller is most certainly that the setting is NOT post scarcity. The idea was a game where people still had to do things in order to make it big, make a name, or in some cases even survive. Not just simply let the Sapient-AI and its associated infrastructure do it for them.
As a system Traveller was designed to be setting independent and "bare-bones"; you of course can use the ruleset to develop any kind of setting you wish, but a post-scarcity egalitarian universe was not the fundamental presupposition in the backs of the minds of the game designers for the default setting when they made the game.
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Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
There will always be social stratas, but expressed at a cultural or individual level.
They can be hard, or soft, which would imply social mobility.
Even that bastion of equality has them.
Since we're tourists, interaction with the locals would depend on their culture, and if they are profiting from that interaction.
They can be hard, or soft, which would imply social mobility.
Even that bastion of equality has them.
Since we're tourists, interaction with the locals would depend on their culture, and if they are profiting from that interaction.
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
You look rich, you act rich.
I can be your guide to wondrous experiences in our exciting city!
I can be your guide to wondrous experiences in our exciting city!
40 years ago? I was in high school. My views of Traveller were... different. Still "Traveller=OTU." But it was a much different view of the OTU, due to far fewer sources.I'm just going to say i wish we'd all known each other about 40 years ago. Would have been a great party!
Because humans still have most of the limits of any ape on maximum social sphere. Past 150 people, you MUST have
0.01% 1/10000?
24 on 4d6 is 1/6^4 is 1/1296
30 on 5d6 is 1/6^5 is 1/7776
36 on 6d6 is 1/6^6 is 1/46656
35 on 6d6 is still over...
But the UK comparison is not all that valid, since there's been consistent movement to delete hereditary peerages through the 20th C.
'87. 4 years NJROTC, 4 year Choir Letterman.Class of '85.
Badenov
SOC-12
So the 36 of 6d6 for actual nobility is about 21 per 1,000,000. If you'ver got 1500 peers for 65 million population, that's way fewer than 36 in 6d6. So, as you say, not a close comparison. But it seemed playable to me.
40 years ago I was 15, and very much a dork. I am now 55 and have reached a much higher level of dorkiness, but also I think I have become a better human being. I am much mellower in my old age, such as it is.I'm just going to say i wish we'd all known each other about 40 years ago. Would have been a great party!
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Man, you have no clue about the zany we were doing in 1983-1987... I ran one adventure in the net of Tron... as a misjump effect.
And I wound up taking over the Traveller group at school start of 1984-85... We had, thanks to student government, reduced passing times in exchange for longer lunch. 40 minute sessions 4 days a week can be surprisingly productive.
Start of the 1984-85 school year, the only RPGs I knew were AD&D, BX D&D, the nasty hybrid of those two we actually had played, Star Frontiers, The Fantasy Trip, and SpaceMaster. I'd also gotten into Starfire, Star Fleet Battles, and Advanced Civilization. Spring of 85, I also got T2K 1e...
I had urges for gonzo that rivaled that of Ken St. Andre.
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