CT Only: The Rules as Tools of Play

[creativehum]

Most posts around here are about the 3I setting or tweaks in the rules. A few are about techniques of play (usually from Supplement 4 and uniformly awesome).

But I see few posts about setting up play and the process of play. So I'd like to discuss that.

As usual, I'm focusing on the rules found in LBBs 1-3. I also want to be clear about where I'm coming from (and where I think the rules are coming from.)

The original Traveller rules are a product of the late '70s. They are a kissing cousin to the Little Brown Books of Original D&D. I believe there was wisdom in how those early games were buit to facilitate effective RPG play. Looking over the original Traveller rules while prepping and running a campaign with rules based off Basic Dungeons & Dragons, I'm seeing a lot of similarities about efficient use of prep and play. (There are differences as well.)

So I'm going to list the tools that I see the game offers a Referee, and from them what I consider the expectations to be.

In regard to all of this, I want to point to several blog posts from folks that have inspired my thinking on this matter. I'll post quotes and links in posts after this one.

Rules to Set Up and Conduct Play

• Character creation
• Personal combat rules
• Space combat rules
• A skill system with a specific and limited list of skills*
• Random Rumor Table
• Random NPC encounter tables
• Encounter range tables
• Reaction tables
• Random animal encounter table
• Random Patron encounter table
• Starship encounter table
• Generating a Subsector
• Generating system main worlds
• Generating space lanes (1977)
• Starship expenses tables
• Starship income tables
• Experience rules
• Phonic rules
• Drugs and their effects on other rules
• Weapons, vehicles, and equipment with effects on other rules
• Ship component/construction tables

*compare, please, to most contemporary RPG rules... And Mongoose Traveller[in particular

Before going any further, I'm curious and want to talk about the rules I've just dumped out on the table:
Who uses the rules above? (If you're using a variant, let's just say you're using them)
What rules do you use?
What rules, if any, do you use to generate content and adventure before and during play?

 

[creativehum]

Blog Posts from Sandbox of Doom Pt. 1

I began digging into Classic Traveller a couple of years ago. Which led, in turn, to me examining the early days of Classic Traveller and thinking how the game was played before the Third Imperium and became conflated with the game itself. That led to working up the notes that led to my Out of the Box series.

However, I just came across a series of blog posts from 2010 by Victor Raymond. Raymond started role-playing in 1975 and have had the good fortune to game with some great people over the years. He was a regular at Professor Baker's Thursday night Tékumel game.

At Raymond's Sandbox of Doom site he wrote a series of posts about the 1977 version of Traveller and how people saw the game at that time in RPG's history. The posts are fascinating for the care with which he digs into the text of the Little Black Books, explains how the RPG community in Minneapolis used the game c. 1977, and how the 1977 edition contrasted to the games and play styles of later editions of Traveller and later RPGs in general.

Below are links to each of his Traveller Tuesday, as well as passages from each of the posts. Each post is worth reading in whole.

The Other "Three Little Booklets"

I started playing Traveller back in 1977. I had been role-playing for a couple of years at that point, and I remember gamers coming back from Origins with a new game they were all very excited about. Within a couple of months the black box with the above text, containing three digest-sized booklets, had arrived and we all started setting up our Traveller universes.That last bit is rather important.

The booklet titles and organization were an homage to Original D&D: Characters & Combat, Starships, and Worlds & Adventure. A fairly quick read of the rules showed science fiction influences including Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, E.C. Tubb, Isaac Asimov and H. Beam Piper. Aside from the cover quote, and a bit of detail about the example character, Merchant Captain Alexander Lascelles Jameson, there's little if any background inherent in the original game.

So it was up to the referee to come up with their background and setting for adventure, and it was nearly two years before GDW began providing their own "official setting" for Traveller - the Third Imperium. In that span of time, there were a lot of campaigns developed, and they reflected a wide range of imagination, much like the original D&D campaigns started c. 1974. What makes this all interesting yet today is that - like Original D&D - Classic Traveller represents a much larger range of gaming possibilities than the GDW in-house campaign that eventually became synonymous with these "three little black booklets."

The Influence of OD&D

But the deeper point here is that the perceptive crew at GDW did not see very much value in messing with success. Besides the parallel in structure (which I mentioned earlier), what Traveller and Original D&D had in common was a design that expected referees and players to add their own elements to the game. Put another way, the lack of background was seen as a design feature, not a "bug" or "missing part."

What did this all mean, back in 1977? Mostly that it felt perfectly natural to sit down and randomly generate characters, build starships, and come up with worlds and adventures - just like we had been doing with D&D for several years up until that point. There wasn't any "Third Imperium" - at this stage of creation, rather than designing sandbox fantasy realms to explore, we set forth creating sandbox star systems to explore. If that's not "old school" I'm not sure what is.

Our Original Inspiration

One of the interesting rules modifications that was adopted by several referees around the Sixth Precinct Gaming Club (aka the Golden Lion Gaming Club of Gary Fine's book, Shared Fantasy) and the Little Tin Soldier Shop, was to cut fuel consumption during FTL "jumps" in half - so instead of 10% of the ship's mass per parsec traveled, it was 5%. That made it possible for ships to travel farther, and for empires to be larger. My own attempts in this regard - like many others - were fairly small by later standards, "pocket empires" in later parlance - somewhere around 10-20 star systems, surrounded by various lower-tech star systems. But some of the referees had put together maps that were much much larger - if I recall correctly, several sheets of paper with small hexes (each sheet would easily hold an entire Traveller sector, and possibly four of them), so these would be empires on a scale not much smaller than the Third Imperium of later fame.

Within a fairly short time - easily by the spring of 1978 - there were easily a bunch of different campaigns running, some of them sharing the same universe, some of them dividing up the galaxy like earlier efforts to have different dungeons all in the same (or connected) universe(s). What I regret now is that so much of this has been largely lost in the mists of time; it would be great if there was some effort to gather the history of these campaigns and others that existed before the coming of the Third Imperium.

Continued in next post...

 

[creativehum]

Blog Posts from Sandbox of Doom Pt. 2

Continued from the previous posts, links and quotes from Victor Raymond's series of posts about playing Traveller with the 1977 edition of the rules in the first years of the game's release.

Characters

Classic Traveller is iconic. It was the first really successful science fiction role-playing game, preceded by Metamorphosis: Alpha and Space Quest and a number of other largely forgotten games. What made Traveller different was that there was actually a minimum of background provided in the rules - most of the other games has assumed a great deal about the background setting for a game. In providing little background, the designers clearly followed the path of Original D&D, which did not attempt to model any one fantasy setting, but instead drew from many different authors and backgrounds... But the advantages of this are difficult for people to see today, after 30+ years of accretion in the GDW house campaign of the Third Imperium. My intention in this series of blog posts is to go back to the original 1977 rules set, looking at it from a fresh perspective as informed by the recent Old School Renaissance...
Possibly the first hint of embedded background comes on page 4: "Should a player consider his character to be so poor as to be beyond help, he should consider joining the accident-prone Scout Corps, with a subconscious view to suicide." That's it - no "Imperial Scout Service" but the "Scout Corps" - whatever that might be...

The choices of careers were themselves interesting: Navy, Marines, Army, Scouts, Merchants, and Other. None of these were explained in any way, except by reference to actual character generation. Thus "Navy" represented the "space navy" while "Marines" might be anything from "Mobile Infantry" a la Heinlein's Starship Troopers to the Marines in Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye. "Army" could be Andre Norton's Star Guard to Pournelle's Falkenberg Legion. "Scouts" were less clear, but "Merchants" had several science fiction inspirations, ranging from Andre Norton to Robert Heinlein to Poul Anderson (see below). Lastly, the "Other" occupation was conspicuously opaque in inspiration: were such characters criminals? (Mike Ford thought so) Or possibly spies? (My reading at the time.) In any case, each career provided a range of possibility, and thus invited a player to spend hours generating characters - which everyone I knew at the time sat down and did, almost immediately...

What is important to note about all of this is how GDW deftly drew on gamers' previous familiarity with both Original D&D and with popular science fiction to provide a sense of comfort with their new game. Not too surprisingly, Traveller players and referees made good use of "space opera" to shape their campaigns, long before the Third Imperium was introduced to them...

Combat

The combat system itself is relatively abstract and in retrospect fairly elegant, using a straightforward determination of surprise, initial range between parties, determination of escape or avoidance, and then resolution of combat, including movement and attack. Initial range, in particular, was dealt with abstractly, using a system of "range bands" (short, close, medium, long and very long range) which I'm sure now was designed as an alternative to a more precise (and therefore complicated and fiddly) miniatures-related system. However, I don't recall many of us at the time using the combat system as written. The advantages of the abstract character of combat were something that I think many of us missed at the time, unfortunately.

Starships

Keep in mind - we didn't have a dedicated background setting, merely assumptions about how interstellar travel worked and its various hazards, including hijacking, skipping, and piracy. I've always found it strange just how much effort has been put to interpret Traveller's rules as an internally consistent worldview, when it was clear to us back in 1977 that the game was inspired by many sources and encompassed many different possibilities.

Experience

The idea that experience developed during game play improves player ability runs in parallel with more recent ideas about Old School game play. Additionally, the absence of a defined background setting for Traveller meant that referees had to come up with their own settings and universes - and the experience rules actually suggest ways in which a referee might develop something different. In this sense, Classic Traveller provided a blank canvas - and encouraged referees to make it their own - and the experience rules were no different than the rest of the game.

Worlds, Part One

One of the daunting tasks faced by the creators of Traveller was how to deal with mapping out space. Being good wargamers, they realized that attempting to map out space in three dimensions was going to be difficult (though not impossible) for the average wargamer/roleplayer. So they settled on an abstract representation which was referred to as a subsector. The map of the subsector represented an 8x10 section of space, with each hex being one parsec across. For anybody familiar with astronomy, this two-dimensional representation was completely artificial and unrealistic, but that was unimportant from a role-playing perspective...

Star system creation therefore was not terribly "realistic" at all. However, what it did do was provide a template to follow for mapping out adventure, in much the same way as dungeon and wilderness maps did for Original D&D. This was, I think, a significant part of the success of Traveller when it initially appeared - the maps did not need to be hard science for the game to work; a structure suggesting a science fiction setting was sufficient and relatively elegant to implement.

Worlds Part Two

Alternate World Forms: Several alternatives to the traditional spherical world form are possible. Most occur when a civilization wishes to trap and use energy from its central star, and needs great land surface to do so. In addition, population pressure (especially on a civilization unable to develop interstellar travel on a large scale) may be a contributing factor. Alternate world forms are not included in the world creation sequence, but may be provided on a sparing basis by the referee. They are ideal for large population worlds, but may also be populated by smaller numbers, as in degenerate or decimated worlds.
Worlds and Adventures, pp. 8-9
Traveller, 1977 Edition

The above paragraph is an example of something found in the 1977 edition that doesn't show up in the later, revised edition of the game. The different kinds of alternative world form were mentioned, but the rationale for including them was not. This may seem like a minor editorial decision, but it indicates in a subtle way how much more open the 1977 edition was to different ideas and ways of doing things...
It's difficult to convey just how much of a difference these seemingly minor subtractions and additions actually made in world creation, but it was significant. It also shows how the various assumptions and details of the GDW-in-house campaign, the Third Imperium, emerged rather slowly, allowing for nearly two years of campaign play in a myriad different universes.

 

[creativehum]

Blog posts from The Ongoing Campaign

Chris Vermeers is doing a series of terrific posts on Classic Traveller over on his blog The Ongoing Campaign.

This post in particular caught my eye. The first half is about the often misunderstood Experience System for Classic Traveller.

The second half discusses the structure play that works best for Classic Traveller:

In the standard CT campaign, the characters will be pursuing ways of making money. Usually, this is through trade and commerce, which often does little more than pay for the ship the characters travel in, and frequently enough not even that. As a result, the players are on the lookout for Patron encounters, which can result in more adventurous activities and higher payouts compared to the time taken. Normally, Patron encounters occur once every three weeks on average (in port, as the weeks spent in Jump don't count for such encounters). The other sort of encounter that can result in payouts is the Rumor. Rumors occur around seven times in every twelve weeks, but most are not useful for getting paid. The third sort of adventure is the sort pre-designed by the Referee, but those are dependent on the specific Referee's campaign and not regular at all. I would suggest that most come about as a result of the Referee judiciously using regular Rumors and possibly Patrons in any case...

So, the basic structure of play in CT is based around random encounters, but the specifics of those encounters were designed to be the seeds of adventure - the Patron especially, but also the Rumor. Other encounters, such as Legal, Random, and Animal, were intended to be either color or a tax on time spent, or both. In some cases, Random encounters were apparently intended as a possible adventure hook (fugitives, for instance), which would require a flexible and improvising Referee.

In a typical CT session, the players would set their characters to doing the boring things that paid the bills - finding cargo, usually - but could find them embroiled in events involving bandits, fugitives, law enforcement (rightly or wrongly), or people looking for help (Patrons). They might also find Rumors that could lead them toward some sort of possible payout, like treasure maps in D&D. In any case, their intent to stay safe and paid could be overrun by events around them and the temptations of even greater paydays.

This points to a specific sort of adventure design, not based around plots and stories, that was set aside. Sadly, my favorite edition of Traveller was overrun by adventures that were not well-suited to the game, ones that tried to impose a story on the players. What CT (and MegaTraveller) really needs are Patrons, locations, and adventures that are the object of Rumors. It also needs deep background, so that the players can get their characters involved in wider situations - but those sorts of extended adventures work best when they arise out of the adventuring group interacting in their own particular ways with that wider background.

 

[creativehum]

Blog post from Hack & Slash

Over at the terrific blog Hack & Slash Courtney Campbell posted an article from a thread on EN world that, in Campbell’s words, brilliantly summarizes the difference between playstyles of old and new school play. The original article is here. The author is Daztur.

Campbell posted the entire article. I’m only going to post a passage. But the whole thing is worth a read.

I’m posting it here because reading it was the last piece I needed to “get” OSR play and feel confident running my Lamentations of the Flame Princess game. (But the same logic of the article would apply to a game of Classic Traveller as well.)

[Very Long] Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War: a Key Difference in D&D Play Styles…

…and how to reconcile them in 5ed.

On another forum I’ve been running in circles with fans of other editions about different D&D play styles and how different editions support them, but I think I’ve finally nailed a key difference that sheds an enormous amount of light about so many disagreements about 5ed development.

Without quite realizing it, people are having the exact same debate that constantly flares up on MMORPG blogs about PvP: should combat resemble sport (as in World of Tanks PvP or arena combat in any game) or should it resemble war (as in Eve PvP or open world combat in any game).

People who want Combat as Sport want fun fights between two (at least roughly) evenly matched sides. They hate “ganking” in which one side has such an enormous advantage (because of superior numbers, levels, strategic surprise, etc.) that the fight itself is a fait accompli. They value combat tactics that could be used to overcome the enemy and fair rules adhered to by both sides rather than looking for loopholes in the rules. Terrain and the specific situation should provide spice to the combat but never turn it into a turkey shoot. They tend to prefer arena combat in which there would be a pre-set fight with (roughly) equal sides and in which no greater strategic issues impinge on the fight or unbalance it.

The other side of the debate is the Combat as War side. They like Eve-style combat in which in a lot of fights, you know who was going to win before the fight even starts and a lot of the fun comes in from using strategy and logistics to ensure that the playing field is heavily unbalanced in your favor. The greatest coup for these players isn’t to win a fair fight but to make sure that the fight never happens (the classic example would be inserting a spy or turning a traitor within the enemy’s administration and crippling their infrastructure so they can’t field a fleet) or is a complete turkey shoot. The Combat as Sport side hates this sort of thing with a passion since the actual fights are often one-sided massacres or stand-offs that take hours.

I think that these same differences hold true in D&D, let me give you an example of a specific situation to illustrate the differences: the PCs want to kill some giant bees and take their honey because magic bee honey is worth a lot of money. Different groups approach the problem in different ways.

Combat as Sport: the PCs approach the bees and engage them in combat using the terrain to their advantage, using their abilities intelligently and having good teamwork. The fighter chooses the right position to be able to cleave into the bees while staying outside the radius of the wizard’s area effect spell, the cleric keeps the wizard from going down to bee venom and the rogue sneaks up and kills the bee queen. These good tactics lead to the PCs prevailing against the bees and getting the honey. The DM congratulates them on a well-fought fight.

Combat as War: the PCs approach the bees but there’s BEES EVERYWHERE! GIANT BEES! With nasty poison saves! The PCs run for their lives since they don’t stand a chance against the bees in a fair fight. But the bees are too fast! So the party Wizard uses magic to set part of the forest on fire in order to provide enough smoke (bees hate smoke, right?) to cover their escape. Then the PCs regroup and swear bloody vengeance against the damn bees. They think about just burning everything as usual, but decide that that might destroy the value of the honey. So they make a plan: the bulk of the party will hide out in trees at the edge of the bee’s territory and set up piles of oil soaked brush to light if the bees some after them and some buckets of mud. Meanwhile, the party monk will put on a couple layers of clothing, go to the owl bear den and throw rocks at it until it chases him. He’ll then run, owl bear chasing him, back to where the party is waiting where they’ll dump fresh mud on him (thick mud on thick clothes keeps bees off, right?) and the cleric will cast an anti-poison spell on him. As soon as the owl bear engages the bees (bears love honey right?) the monk will run like hell out of the area. Hopefully the owl bear and the bees will kill each other or the owl bear will flee and lead the bees away from their nest, leaving the PCs able to easily mop up any remaining bees, take the honey and get the hell out of there. They declare that nothing could possibly go wrong as the DM grins ghoulishly.

Does that sound familiar to anyone?

Some D&D players love the tactical elements of the game and well-fought evenly matched combat within it while other players prefer the logistical and strategic elements and if only end up in evenly matched fights if something has gone horribly wrong. These two kinds of play styles also emulate different kinds of fantasy literature with Combat as Sport hewing to heroic fantasy tropes while the Combat as War side prefer D&D to feel like a chapter of The Black Company. This was really driven home by one comment from a Combat as Sport partisan talking about how ridiculous and comedic it would be PCs to smuggle in all kinds of stuff in a bag of holding so they could use cheap tactics like “Sneak attack with a ballista!” However, sneak attacking with a ballista is exactly what happens in Chapter Forty-Eight of Shadows Linger (the second Black Company book) and the Combat as War side think that’s exactly the sort of thing that D&D should be all about.

While either form of D&D can be played with any edition, it works better with some editions than others. A lot of people have played TSR editions from more of a Combat as Sport Mindset and a lot of later TSR products seem to consist of trying to frog march poor Croaker into heroic fantasy, but TSR-D&D mostly sucks at Combat as Sport. It’s not easy to gauge what would be a good fair fun fight for a given party and the same fight could end up as a cakewalk or a TPK, melee combat is repetitive, there’s one-hit kills etc. Also a lot of elements of TSR-D&D design that drive Combat as Sport people crazy, really tie into the Combat as War mindset. Things like tracking rations, torch usage, rolling for wandering monsters, etc. are important for this kind of gameplay since they make time a scarce resource, which is vital for strategic and logistical gameplay since if the players have all the time in the world so many strategic and logistical constraints get removed and without those constraints you get all kinds of problems cropping up (most notably the 15 minute adventuring day). As Gygax says, in all caps no less “YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT” (DMG page 37), which sounds like crazy moon logic for people who like Combat as Sport gameplay but is a central factor in making Combat as War gameplay work.

 

[salochin999]

Before going any further, I'm curious and want to talk about the rules I've just dumped out on the table:
Who uses the rules above? (If you're using a variant, let's just say you're using them)
What rules do you use?
What rules, if any, do you use to generate content and adventure before and during play?

This gets to the crux of it imo.

In a lot of ways Traveller is set up to be a sandboxy kind of game but a sandbox can mean

1) players have at least some information about what is around them and based on that information they pick a metaplot objective and an initial direction which influences the ensuing random hexcrawl

or

2) players go on a random hexcrawl

where hexcrawl in this case = random patrons or random encounters.

However I find the information the players have from the UWP is too slight for option 1.

.

Imagine you had a fantasy version of the Traveller sub-sector generation where you randomly build an 8x10 hex fantasy region map in the same way you do a Traveller sub-sector where no system = wilderness and a system = something e.g. caves, town, ruins etc and then you randomly roll what the something is in a similar way you roll a UWP in Traveller except the numbers mean different things.

So for example instead of A758564 meaning what it means in Traveller in the fantasy version say those numbers mean "wealthy walled town, human population of thousands with undead ruler, internal conflict".

With this if the players decided to head that way and rolled a random encounter of "fugitives" on the way to the town I immediately picture rebel humans being chased by skeleton cavalry and that encounter immediately creates a potential plot which the players can choose to pursue or not.

I can easily create stuff on the fly like that in a fantasy setting because the standard fantasy setting comes with so much common background lore already built in that can be combined with the random rolls to create a consistent feel.

I have a problem doing this with Traveller as A758564 doesn't necessarily conjure up a clear enough picture to add context to the random rolls. It may be for some people but not me.

.

This isn't a problem for campaigns of pre-prepared adventures and not so much of a problem for trading campaigns as trading is an end in itself but it's a problem (for me anyway) trying to run a sandbox game where the players can go in any direction.

So what I need personally is a clear enough mental picture of the setting - modified OTU in my case - and a collection of rules of thumb which I can use on the fly to add extra depth to the world stats so the random patrons, encounters etc are easier to turn into something that feels like it fits together and not something entirely random.

I've been working on that off and on and in the meantime I've just been running ultra railroady dungeon crawls.

.

So in a nutshell taking your list of rules I use most except

1) i don't use world gen or trade system as it's OTU data but I'm adding extra levels to the world gen to make it easier to describe worlds on the fly

2) i don't currently use the random encounter tables to generate the plots on the fly but I will once I've finished (1)

 

[Condottiere]

How you intend to enter combat may turn out to be very much a moral and ethical issue(s).

Paladins tend to have a short life expectancy.

 

[atpollard]

Rules to Set Up and Conduct Play

• Character creation
• Personal combat rules
• Space combat rules
• A skill system with a specific and limited list of skills*
• Random person encounter tables
• Encounter range tables
• Reaction tables
• Random animal encounter table
• Patron encounter table
• Starship encounter table
• Generating a Subsector
• Generating system main worlds
• Generating space lanes (1977)
• Starship expenses tables
• Starship income tables
• Experience rules
• Phonic rules
• Drugs and their effects on other rules
• Weapons, vehicles, and equipment with effects on other rules
• Ship component/construction tables

Who uses the rules above? (If you're using a variant, let's just say you're using them)

I do ... I like The Traveller Book for its everything in one package character.

What rules do you use?

Almost everything that you listed [except space lanes ... because I didn't have the 77 rules until recently and never actually read them closely to see what was different.]
Psionics get used sparingly ... I find them unbalanced in actual play forcing the Ref to choose between turning the Psion into a Mary Sue (the Psionics bypass almost all other skill checks and grant superhero solutions to every situation) or playing the role of 'killer dm' and finding some stupid reason why every Psionic shortcut will not work or will bring the 'thought police' down on the situation to punish the whole group. By the 1980 rules, 'too powerful' or 'useless' was sort of baked into the psionics already. Can anyone else remember the first time you encountered the rules where a psion only had enough PSR rating to teleport naked ... can you remember rolling your eyes and thinking WTF were they thinking?

What rules, if any, do you use to generate content and adventure before and during play?

The PbP in my signature has some examples, but in general, I view EVERYTHING as fair game for generating content before a game. I loved creating my own subsectors and worlds, then designing polities and histories from the random worlds. Lately, I have too little free time, so every hour is weighed on a cost vs reward scale. For the current PbP, that meant grabbing a corner of the Traveller Map, leaving the world names and rewriting the history and worlds on an as-needed basis.

I also freely appropriate rules to new purposes. A recent example concerned a trade convoy with a caravan of trucks travelling across a super-continent needing some cargo. So the TTB Trade Tables were pressed into service to generate cargo for the trucks. Each town was then given a chance to buy or sell 1 dTon of cargo for each 1000 people living there and the price modifier became 2d6-7x5% (-25% to +25% of base price).

The Patron and Encounter and even ChargenSkill tables all become quick and dirty random generation sources of inspiration for ideas for the next encounter. One of the goals in the current PbP game is that I have no grand adventure planned out ... random encounters provide 'allies, contacts, enemies and rivals' along the way, random events provide doors to new (related or unrelated) adventures and player decisions determine the path to adventure that is actually chosen. I just look for opportunities where paths might cross, where threads might pick up, or where a previous action may have started something that now has visible consequences ... good, bad or neutral.

 

[atpollard]

There is nothing sacred about the CT rules. This mindset can be used with any source of data. A recent (actually current) example from my PbP game illustrates how I use anything as fodder for an adventure:

Robert, Doc and Kalista [3 PCs] have just hitched a ride with Janice (a young heiress) across an ocean on her flying yacht and arrived at her family estate. It is early morning and the PCs have an entire day, perhaps two, before the fourth member of the team can meet them. It seemed like an opportunity to check for a different sort of 'adventure' ... a high-society encounter/event ... perhaps a concert or a dinner party ... I had no real idea what it would be, just less paramilitary than recent events. I had thought that it might be interesting if 'manners' counted more than 'gun combat' or 'stealth' in this encounter.

I have a copy of "Mongoose Traveller Book 8: Dillitante" and decided to use it to draw some random inspiration. So first roll was what sort of Career and Specialization would define this Encounter/Event ... [Connoisseur: Critic].

That was unexpected. Let's roll a Mishap and an Event to see if they might inspire me with what is happening with this "Critic":
[paraphrased] Mishap = Exposed as fraud and hounded by media
[paraphrased] Event = Associated with bad work; clear reputation but legal fees cost 1d6 x 1,000 credits (roll 4000 credits)

So let's just roll one skill from each table to fill in some details:
Personal Development = +1 Social
Service Skill = Deception
Advanced Education = Diplomat
Specialist Critic = Computers

So this is what my 'random muse' had given me for inspiration ... exposed as fraud; clear reputation; Social, Deception, Diplomat, Computers

In the game, I had already established that Janice was a thrill seeker and the daughter of an industrialist who ruled by a cult of personality (like Jobs being Apple or Gates being Microsoft) and specialized in special alloys for starships and spacecraft as well as operating a maintenance shipyard for prospectors on a moon in the system. So I made her father the critic, drew in an incident from the start of the story where the PCs destroyed a SDB to enter the system and drew on a previous rumor that the 'bad guys' wanted to increase piracy to earn more money selling weapons. So now, there is a secret report that will save his reputation. It is located in an embassy, that will require characters to pass a Social test and interact with diplomats to gain access. Getting the data from the computer is the easy part, knowing which fork to use so you can get a chance to get near the computer is the hard part.

All from past data and some random rolls on a chargen table for a completely different version of the game.

 

[Kpeterson]

Who uses the rules above? (If you're using a variant, let's just say you're using them)

I use a good portion of the rules listed above, with some variants.

What rules do you use?

It'd probably be quicker to list those rules I don't use than those I do:

-Random person encounter tables
-Patron encounter table
-Starship encounter table

Never used these tables before. In the past, I've either run adventures (taken from other systems) or run sandboxes that are rather plot-filled (which was about 10 years ago, and not something I'd do again).

-Generating space lanes (1977)

I'm fairly new to the 1977 edition of Traveller. I only stumbled on copies of the '77 LBBs a few months ago when I found them at a local Half Price Books. Most of my CT experience has been with TTB and the '81 LBBs.

-Ship component/construction tables

I'm not much of a ship designer, relying on the 'canon' starships.

What rules, if any, do you use to generate content and adventure before and during play?

Random animal encounter tables.

I'm also a big fan of the supplemental material provided by the BITS Traveller 101-series: http://bitsuk.net/Products/101Books/101Books.html, and use them for inspiration for content generation.

 

[mike wightman]

Rules to Set Up and Conduct Play

• Character creation
  I use CT and S:4 - with two changes. Any career with no commission or promotion roll gets two skills per term. Every career gets a special duty roll which can grant an extra skill roll. Special duty target number is 5+ for careers with no commission or promotion, 6+ for careers with a low promotion roll target number, 8+ for careers with a high promotion target number.
  Players usually generate characters at the same time and a note is taken of which terms a special duty roll is made. If players can come up with a scenario whereby two or more of them meet during this special duty they gain a mustering out benefit.
• Personal combat rules
  I want them fast and not to hold up play, so I have gone with a modified version of T4, roll to hit, roll for damage, armour reduces damage dice.
• Space combat rules
  Range band system from Starter Traveller or just wing it using the ship's boat skill combat system. I have something for everyone with a relevant skill to do during a space combat turn, and even unskilled characters may end up on a damage control party
• A skill system with a specific and limited list of skills*
  I use the CT list, with weapon skills trimmed down to brawling, handgun, rifle, small blade, large blade
• Random person encounter tables
  I use these to generate scenarios for an evening's play - sometimes a whole campaign has grown out of a few random encounter/patron table rolls
• Encounter range tables
  Yup, use these for random stuff
• Reaction tables
  I use these a lot to determine initial encounter set up - not just NPC/animal reactions but how nasty the universe is being to the PCs as the encounter begins
• Random animal encounter table
  Used when necessary
• Patron encounter table
  Used along with random person and reaction roll tables to generate off the cuff scenarios
• Starship encounter table
  Used pretty much the same way as the patron/random person encounter
• Generating a Subsector
  My favourite games have often been in randomly generated sub-sectors - world of the week Dumarest like Travelling from world to world and adventure to adventure
• Generating system main worlds
  See above, very rarely will a whole system have to be detailed
• Generating space lanes (1977)
  I have just begun re-investing time in generating these
• Starship expenses tables
  Only if the players want to operate a ship - I've had players gain a ship during an adventure just to sell it the next week because they couldn't be bothered with the bookkeeping. The money pays for a lot of gear and high passage travel
• Starship income tables
  Again only if the players want a merchant campaign or they come across a very lucrative deal
• Experience rules
  CT rules are the only ones I use
• Phonic rules
  I'm not sure what you mean by this
• Drugs and their effects on other rules
  I use these, but explain the drugs as bio-nanites
• Weapons, vehicles, and equipment with effects on other rules
  This is where I deviate the most from CT - I use MT IE, FCI Consumer Guide, T4 CSC, T4 Emperor's Arsenal as sources for extra gear
• Ship component/construction tables
  I use a cherry picked version of LBB2 '77 and '81 edition, with power plant fuel rules borrowed from HG1e since the CT ones are broken

*compare, please, to most contemporary RPG rules... And Mongoose Traveller[in particular

Before going any further, I'm curious and want to talk about the rules I've just dumped out on the table:
Who uses the rules above? (If you're using a variant, let's just say you're using them)
What rules do you use?
What rules, if any, do you use to generate content and adventure before and during play?

As I have mentioned above, I use the random person and random patron table to generate off the cuff scenarios. 1d3 rolls on each with the order of encounters adjusted by me to make for an interesting evening's play. Animal encounters or ship encounters may become necessary depending on what the players get up to.

 

[robject]

I've played in one campaign and run another recently, and here are the rules we actually used:

Characters

• Character generation including character death
• Skill checks

====> Also Characteristic checks.
====> Psionics, with one character only, and it was peripheral to the game

Combat

• Combat (including damage, armor, and range rules)
• Positive and negative die modifiers based on cover and other situations
• Combats vs. animals
• Mass combat rules for fighting large numbers of animals (mimicking the 'Hordes/Chamax Plague' probably rules to simplify combat vs. large numbers of creatures)

Vehicles & Ships

• Dealing damage by strafing ground target with shots from our ship
• Vehicle speed and vehicles taking damage
• Effects on occupant when a vehicle is destroyed
• Travel time from planet to orbit and between planets within a system

=====> Simple trade (Book 3 trade tables)

Convention Games:


The following additional rules came up during two convention games [Stan Shinn] ran:

• Fatigue
• Space hazards such as asteroids, x-ray burst and gravity shear and their effect on a ship
• Damage on occupants of a spaceship when a ship was hit from the above effects
• Effects of ship damage on ship systems (e.g. grav plates malfunctioning) and the subsequent skill checks to repair of those systems
• Gambling almost came up (bar scene in The Neutron Star Directive) but didn't have time to get into that

The above represents a calendar year of gameplay, and about 50 hours of gaming.​

The following rules were abstracted and handled narratively (no dice rolling)

• Outside the game, ships were built and upgraded with armament, but the only thing that came in the play was ground strafing
• Jump rules and refueling ships (no dice rolls)
• Buying, selling and trade (didn't use accounting tables; we hand-waved the accounting and said 'you made enough to buy a ship' or what have you)
• A mass battle between starships
• A nuclear explosion
• Welding a hole through a hull
• EVA

 

[whartung]

• Welding a hole through a hull
• EVA

In that order?

 

[salochin999]

atpollard

The PbP in my signature has some examples, but in general, I view EVERYTHING as fair game for generating content before a game. I loved creating my own subsectors and worlds, then designing polities and histories from the random worlds.

I think what CT missed is a settings chapter before the world gen chapter - not *a* setting but a listing of different kinds of setting.

One of the base setting options would be as in the quote - roll a sub-sector randomly and then reverse engineer the polities and history out of the rolls.

(with an example sub-sector)

For example if a world has a rolled TL below the minimum necessary to protect themselves from their rolled atmosphere then the rules of thumb listed might be

1) population are aliens or modified humans
2) population are a colony from a higher TL system nearby - directly ruled or independent depending on the govt. type - who trade for the protection equipment with the mother world

.

Also a list of pre-decided alternative base settings which come with various optional rules for modifying the random world gen rolls e.g.

1) edge of re-expanding empire: star port DM-2, population 2D6-3
2) late imperial core: star port DM+2, population DM+3

etc

.

I think this is the crux of the Traveller problem as a sandbox (when it ought to be ideal for it).

The world gen has no context so either roll randomly and create a context that fits or decide the context first and let that influence the random rolls.

(The 3I problem would then be it was neither; the setting wasn't built out of the random rolls - if it was then I think the 3I would have been built around the alpha systems from the beginning - and the random rolls weren't modified to create worlds that made sense as part of a giant 3I.)

 

[atpollard]

atpollard
I think what CT missed is a settings chapter before the world gen chapter - not *a* setting but a listing of different kinds of setting.

One of the base setting options would be as in the quote - roll a sub-sector randomly and then reverse engineer the polities and history out of the rolls.

(with an example sub-sector)

For example if a world has a rolled TL below the minimum necessary to protect themselves from their rolled atmosphere then the rules of thumb listed might be

1) population are aliens or modified humans
2) population are a colony from a higher TL system nearby - directly ruled or independent depending on the govt. type - who trade for the protection equipment with the mother world

.

Also a list of pre-decided alternative base settings which come with various optional rules for modifying the random world gen rolls e.g.

1) edge of re-expanding empire: star port DM-2, population 2D6-3
2) late imperial core: star port DM+2, population DM+3

etc

.

I think this is the crux of the Traveller problem as a sandbox (when it ought to be ideal for it).

The world gen has no context so either roll randomly and create a context that fits or decide the context first and let that influence the random rolls.

I would go even a little further and caution people not to be a slave to the rolls. They are there to inspire, and often, solving a strange paradox of random rolls (like a size 1 world with a breathable atmosphere) is a challenge that inspires a great and unique encounter (like a web of interlocking inflated plastic bubbles covering the entire surface to make it habitable) ... but sometimes it is just a stupid roll that needs to be ignored (change it or re-roll it).

One thing that I found fun was to generate a random sector as a starting point (complete with TLs) and then roll back the clock and TL on all of the worlds in 20 year turns. Every 20 years the population is halved and every 40 years the TL is -1 until just one world in the sector (or two if it is a tie) reaches TL 9. At that point, the history of the race-to-the-stars begins.

Now you can step forward in 20 year turns. In that turn each TL 9 world gets to explore J1 in all directions from any colony they possess, planting flags and footprints until they reach a J2+ gap or bump into another world's flag and footprints or reach 6 parsecs from a colony. They can settle on any inhabitable world that they encounter granting it a POP=1. Flags and footprints for a turn usually stop when you encounter a colony worthy world (all of the resources go into colony building rather than exploration).

Then you can advance the sector 20 years. All populations double. On home worlds, POP will soon start to exceed size, so I start to shuffle the extra people off to new worlds in a massive colonization effort. Colonies quickly grow. Every other turn (40 years) the worlds gain a TL. New worlds enter the Race to the Stars. An old Star Kingdom suddenly gains J2 and can leap some gaps and explore new areas.

At first, 'pocket empires' bump into each other but have lots of other directions to explore, so you build up the frontier to support your claim and define your territory, but there is no real hostility necessary at first contact. Eventually, late comers are faced with someone having a flag where you would like a colony ... or perhaps NEED a colony to open a new area to exploration or settlement.

From the initial random rolls, worlds were 'destined' to grow to a certain point based on their own local merits, but playing out a century or two in 20 year turns will show you where and why various star polities will build, grow, invest and develop.

I have done it twice and it was a lot of fun. It also yielded some non-intuitive results that now had valid historic explanations.

 

[kilemall]

I would go even a little further and caution people not to be a slave to the rolls. They are there to inspire, and often, solving a strange paradox of random rolls (like a size 1 world with a breathable atmosphere) is a challenge that inspires a great and unique encounter (like a web of interlocking inflated plastic bubbles covering the entire surface to make it habitable) ... but sometimes it is just a stupid roll that needs to be ignored (change it or re-roll it).

One thing that I found fun was to generate a random sector as a starting point (complete with TLs) and then roll back the clock and TL on all of the worlds in 20 year turns. Every 20 years the population is halved and every 40 years the TL is -1 until just one world in the sector (or two if it is a tie) reaches TL 9. At that point, the history of the race-to-the-stars begins.

Now you can step forward in 20 year turns. In that turn each TL 9 world gets to explore J1 in all directions from any colony they possess, planting flags and footprints until they reach a J2+ gap or bump into another world's flag and footprints or reach 6 parsecs from a colony. They can settle on any inhabitable world that they encounter granting it a POP=1. Flags and footprints for a turn usually stop when you encounter a colony worthy world (all of the resources go into colony building rather than exploration).

Then you can advance the sector 20 years. All populations double. On home worlds, POP will soon start to exceed size, so I start to shuffle the extra people off to new worlds in a massive colonization effort. Colonies quickly grow. Every other turn (40 years) the worlds gain a TL. New worlds enter the Race to the Stars. An old Star Kingdom suddenly gains J2 and can leap some gaps and explore new areas.

At first, 'pocket empires' bump into each other but have lots of other directions to explore, so you build up the frontier to support your claim and define your territory, but there is no real hostility necessary at first contact. Eventually, late comers are faced with someone having a flag where you would like a colony ... or perhaps NEED a colony to open a new area to exploration or settlement.

From the initial random rolls, worlds were 'destined' to grow to a certain point based on their own local merits, but playing out a century or two in 20 year turns will show you where and why various star polities will build, grow, invest and develop.

I have done it twice and it was a lot of fun. It also yielded some non-intuitive results that now had valid historic explanations.

GDW did that with The Great Game, the 300-year history of the world in 5 year turns from Twilight 2000 nuclear war to interstellar 2300. So pretty much a validated approach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_2000#Later_History

 

[whartung]

One thing that I found fun was to generate a random sector as a starting point (complete with TLs) and then roll back the clock and TL on all of the worlds in 20 year turns. Every 20 years the population is halved and every 40 years the TL is -1 until just one world in the sector (or two if it is a tie) reaches TL 9. At that point, the history of the race-to-the-stars begins.

I love this idea.

What kind of guidelines did you have in terms of colonization. Specifically, let's say you had your T9 world, that was adjacent to a habitable world, that was also adjacent to another world. (Basically, 3 hexes in a row, T9 on one end). How long before there were footprints, flags, or colonies on the other worlds? You seem to be using colonies, rather than gas giants as your stepping stones for exploration.

Since you're halving, then doubling the populations, how did you get "excess" population?

How did you account for any indigenous populations?

Finally, were you doing this at the full sector level, or the sub sector.

 

[salochin999]

atpollard

Yeah, that's exactly the sort of thing.

 

[atpollard]

I love this idea.

What kind of guidelines did you have in terms of colonization. Specifically, let's say you had your T9 world, that was adjacent to a habitable world, that was also adjacent to another world. (Basically, 3 hexes in a row, T9 on one end). How long before there were footprints, flags, or colonies on the other worlds? You seem to be using colonies, rather than gas giants as your stepping stones for exploration.

Since you're halving, then doubling the populations, how did you get "excess" population?

How did you account for any indigenous populations?

Finally, were you doing this at the full sector level, or the sub sector.

I just had the Traveller Book and LBB 5 when I started, and I was delighted with all that toolbox to build MY space universe. So I generated a full sector worth of stars and worlds (which in hindsight, was probably a mistake ... too much breath usually means too little depth).

The secret was to think of the UPP as a sort of 'manifest destiny' for the world. Not what the world is but more like it's natural destiny based on climate and resources and a million invisible things that the rules don't have a value for. What will probably happen, but not what must happen.

Generating the worlds does give you the first three UPP values as fixed. Then rolling back TLs and POP will create lots of worlds that are either too low TL to support the POP (TL 3 on an airless world) or that have a negative POP or TL ... in either case you convert it to an empty (pop 0) world.

When you finally get down to just one TL 9 world (or more if there was a tie), then the worlds with a population and TL at that point have populations. Since this is all about building a universe, this is the point to establish the highest TL worlds as the home world for your major races, groups or species. One or more worlds with minimum populations or TLs could be selected as alien species ... especially if they have very thin or tainted atmospheres. The whole point is that it is your chance to be creative.

I have a personal pet rule ... more rules of thumb ... I think that a world will naturally and comfortably support a POP up to its SIZE, so once POP exceeds SIZE (IMTU) I view it as a sign that there is natural social pressure to expand beyond the main world ... at first into the solar system, and eventually to other worlds. I also believe that a population can locally support a TL equal to POP. So a Size 8 world like Earth will support up to POP 8 before it begins experiencing pressure to move into the rest of the solar system, and at that point it would also be capable of sustaining TL 8 without outside support. By expanding to the rest of the solar system, it could eventually reach a total system POP of 9 or 10 (supporting a TL of 9 or 10). At this point, the core world is both capable of and experiencing social pressure to expand to other star systems. As it expands, multiple systems are required to contain a POP of 11, 12, 13 and higher, and to support the corresponding TLs of 11 to 13 and higher.

So a system with a Size 5 world will begin (IMTU) to experience social pressure to expand to other worlds at POP 6+. If there is a colony on a size 7 world with a POP 1 just J1 away, then it makes more sense to me for the extra population that would be expected to happen on the POP 6 world to relocate to the POP 1 world instead, creating brief periods of rapid colony growth.

 

[flykiller]

In a lot of ways Traveller is set up to be a sandboxy kind of game

... and that is where the original lbb's just trailed off into the void.

traveller has no "keep on the borderlands" equivilant. even a single planet has a huge population, it's own economy and government, and it's own history that may stretch back hundreds of years and definitely stretches back thousands of years of human history. and none of this - none of it - can be ignored without breaking the entire game. the players don't step forth as ignorant teenagers in a limited medieaval setting with swords and backpacks to attack the goblins that live down the road to the cheers of the local villagers - they venture forth in a world that spans thousands of years already and hundreds of planets already and multiple tech levels already and that is barely aware of their existence at all.

and how could there be? how could such a vast setting 1) be realized? 2) be affordable? 3) be comprehensible? and, above all, above ALL, 4) be acceptable to an intelligent player base known for its fractiousness?

that ct had no setting was neither bug nor feature. it was necessity.