So I own Traveller 5 but...

[flykiller]

"lonely fun" RPG

....

 

[flg]

And supposedly, no one has time or interest for lonely fun anymore, so D&D has scaled waaaaay back on supplements

And yet the D&D 5e DMG is chock-full of advice on how DMs can make their own campaign settings... but that's all there is for that. The infuriating thing about 5e is exactly that lack of support for people who want to create their own settings (and for whom adventures/campaigns are pretty useless). That stuff isn't so much "lonely fun" as "necessary prepwork for which we have the barest mininum of support".

I was looking through my 3e Unearthed Arcana book again the other day and frankly I think that's one of the best RPG books ever written. It is absolutely packed with ideas and alternatives and rules options that a DM can use for their setting - 5e desperately need something like that, I think (yes, I know there's the unearthed arcana web articles but they're pretty sparse and often are not that great).

 

[DickNervous]

In many ways, Traveller is the ultimate "lonely fun" RPG. Character gen, world gen, ship design: these can all be incredibly engrossing solo activities, and with the addition of various makers T5 is in some ways the apotheosis of these subsystems.

MgT 2e, in contrast, is very much in the modern spirit of being accessible and easy to run "out of the box."

An underlying premise to many of these discussions, and one that I reject, is that these "lonely fun" activities are somehow not really fun or less worthy than live game sessions.

Now, I love getting together with a group, I love interacting and being surprised by other players.

But I have also gotten a lot of enjoyment and satisfaction out of the solitary stuff, as well. I certainly would rather play around with worldgen than fiddle with some phone game.

This is a good way to explain it, though I find that while not as deep as T5, MgT does allow for numerous hours of "lonely fun". In my case it is trying to design tools, forms, and apps to enhance the game or make my job as a referee easier. But I have spent many, many hours tooling away designing ships and other stuff.

 

[flykiller]

The infuriating thing about 5e is exactly that lack of support for people who want to create their own settings

here be dragons ....

 

[flg]

here be dragons ....

It's still way better than what Traveller has though - I would say that Traveller currently has NO support whatsoever to help people make their own settings (and no, a 500 page book full of tables is not "support". Advice and ideas are what's needed - a toolkit is absolutely useless without instructions for how to use it).

The only book I can think of that was released for Traveller that did provide any kind of support for coming up with one's own own setting was TNE's Fire Fusion and Steel (and that was fantastic for giving GMs ideas for what tech to include in their settings and what the effect would be - again, because it included explanations and advice and not just tables).

 

[flykiller]

Traveller currently has NO support whatsoever to help people make their own settings

yeah. but that also means you can do whatever you want.

what do you want to do?

 

[flg]

yeah. but that also means you can do whatever you want.

Oh sure, and how many people do you think do that with Traveller? I suspect that the vast majority of people who have Traveller use the 3I setting (or something that looks very much like it, with the same technologies, ships etc) and don't make their own, basically because there's no guidance for them to do otherwise.

But what if you want a different set of assumptions to what Traveller uses? What if you don't want to do "Age of Sail in space"? What if you want technology to change people? What if you want transhumanism? What if you want more cyberpunk? What if you want different aliens? Where is the advice within Traveller for that?

Sure, T5 has plenty of tables and charts and rules, but it's also incredibly inaccessible and has little (if any) advice for how to integrate that into a setting or what the implications of those things are. Essays and articles are far more useful for giving ideas about what to do with a setting than tables, IMO. It just gives you tables to randomly generate stuff - so great, you can make a bunch of worlds and ships, but where's the advice on how to put them together? (and do resist the temptation to say "it's not so hard, we did it like that in the old days", etc etc. Worldbuilding isn't easy, and there's no disadvantage to having advice on how to do it). That's where the 5e DMG and 3e UA (and FF&S) really shine and I think Traveller desperately needs something like that.

Thing is, I can pick up the D&D books and get to work on making my own setting (more 5e books would be nice, but I guess the older editions have supplements to cover a lot of things that can be adapted). With Traveller, I can't really do that. It's easy to blithely say that no advice means that "you can do whatever you want", but what that really means is you have to do everything from scratch, and you're on your own. You have no choice but to figure it out for yourself because Traveller gives you no help on that front, and I think that is a big part of why D&D is so popular and Traveller isn't.

 

[Condottiere]

Fantasy settings are easy to adapt, mix, match or merge, and possibly that capability is an inherent part of D&D's DNA; you could tone down DragonLance, and make it part of a general war in another setting.

Because wizards could easily and plausibly be blamed for anything, it's easy to slide through different universes, times, alternatives and/or planes, whereas the expectations for linear consistency are more stringent for a scifi setting.

 

[flg]

Because wizards could easily and plausibly be blamed for anything, it's easy to slide through different universes, times, alternatives and/or planes, whereas the expectations for linear consistency are more stringent for a scifi setting.

You wouldn't think so, given how many people who play Traveller are very disdainful of adding anything like science or scientific consistency to it. Cue cries of "it's just a game" or "it's fiction" or "you're overthinking it", "we have jump drive therefore all science should go out of the window", etc.

But I think that's all the more reason to have a lot of advice on what to think about when making a scifi setting, detailed descriptions of how various technologies work, what the effects of introducing new tech or concepts would be, how those could affect things in unexpected ways and so on.

D&D has copious advice for making settings, pantheons, magic, classes, etc that can result in a wide range of settings. Traveller needs the scifi equivalent of that - the rules are there (whether they actually work or not is another matter), but the advice is lacking.

 

[Condottiere]

Mongoose may be encouraging it's stable of writers to be more user friendly, though I have the distinct impression that the hit or miss style may not be unconnected to the rushed tone.

 

[aramis]

[m;]Closed before several users cross the edition warring line[/m;] that at least two posts above put toes upon.