CT Only: The Rules as Tools of Play

[kilemall]

... 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.

That seems a bit emotional retrofitting there.

In the heady world of 1970s RPG I think it was more 'isn't this neat/hey guys let's put on a show' and less of figuring out that you had to have a business model and content past your core books to pay the bills and not have relations, girlfriends/future wives and debtors question your cash flow.

 

[flykiller]

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

That seems a bit emotional retrofitting there.

read leviathan. a trade expedition to planets that have a few thousand primitive peoples? "colonies" with a few hundred? a merchant ship arriving in-system would be sorely challenged even to find these tiny pockets of humanity on the face of a planet, let alone trade anything with them, let alone trade anything worth the cost of a starship, let alone make a profit - yet there they are, sent by some unspecified body for some inarticulable reason for some unachievable purpose. the writers elevated a d&d game to a traveller environment - and left it just hanging there by itself with no background. they had to.

 

[creativehum]

flykiller,

I'm having trouble understanding what you're getting at.

Are you saying no setting is possible with the Traveller rules? That no one made a setting with the Traveller rules? That no one made a setting that made sense with the Traveller rules? That there can't be one setting since people will disagree about what that setting should be? That GDW's Adventures didn't make sense? Or other things completely and I'm missing the mark by a crazy margin.

I would like to understand.

Thanks!

 

[flykiller]

That there can't be one setting since people will disagree about what that setting should be?

mostly that. the game 1) requires a setting to make any sense, and 2) an official setting is impossible.

consider the existing "settings". classic, virus, alternate, foreven, and others I can't even be bothered to recall. each has detractors and proponents - "you can't adventure in this one! you destroyed the other one! ahhhh!". and each is woefully incomplete. look at my imperial culture thread, what, 5-10 pathetically short paragraphs per popA planet is thought to be very helpful? why? because almost nothing else official but noble-level history was written, that's why. and how could there be? how do you describe 100 billion people "officially"? now throw in everyone's personal interpretations, and it's hard to get a group together and just plain old start up a game without constant orientation to how the ref sees and runs his 'verse.

(and for a sideshow, look at the rulesets. ct, hg2, mt, tne, t4, and now t5 which requires a boot camp just to figure out how to generate a character.)

baron von (can't remember) asked me what I felt about atu's. I answered that every game is an atu. they are. it's impossible for them not to be, because there's just too much personally interpreted yet affective backhistory for any game to match up with any other game.

 

[creativehum]

mostly that. the game 1) requires a setting to make any sense, and 2) an official setting is impossible.

...every game is an atu. they are. it's impossible for them not to be, because there's just too much personally interpreted yet affective backhistory for any game to match up with any other game.

I think I got confused because your points are so self-evident there's no need to argue them. (For me, at least.)

And the reason they are self-evident to me is the text and the rules found in LBBs 1-3. The text and rules work as written, I believe. Cohesive, interlocking, and building on each other to create sketches of an exotic environment of 40-80 worlds ("a subsector or two" per the 1977 rules) to be detailed as needed; and on-the-fly inspiration for situation and challenges for SF adventure-themed RPG play.

This is why I'm looking at the actual text ands rules before GDW started stamping the Third Imperium into the Traveller products. The game was built to do many things well. But then, because of the setting details that got introduced, it started failing to be a game that worked for the setting. For example, with all the focus on Imperial shenanigans, one might wonder why the Main World generation system made no sense for an Imperial Core. But, of course, that wasn't what it was built to do.

So, instead of blaming the rules for not doing what they were never meant to do, I'm stripping out the setting GDW introduced two years after the original rules came out and looking at the rules directly. And not just the rules, but the text which presents the game, which was in many ways radically shifted for The Traveller Book and Starter Traveller. For example, both books state: “In the distant future, when humanity has made the leap to the stars, interstellar travel will be as common as international travel is today.” Which flies in the face of the pages and pages of rules devoted to all the ways starships, crews, and passengers can be lost, destroyed, attacked, and slip into death. The books are positively schizophrenic on this point.

So, the rules first, with the cruft scraped off. What kind of adventure environment is created? What sort of adventures are created? What sort of RPG play is created?

I'm still thinking through as I dig into the rules. But I'm enjoying the posts from everybody so far!

 

[infojunky]

This is why I'm looking at the actual text ands rules before GDW started stamping the Third Imperium into the Traveller products. The game was built to do many things well. But then, because of the setting details that got introduced, it started failing to be a game that worked for the setting. For example, with all the focus on Imperial shenanigans, one might wonder why the Main World generation system made no sense for an Imperial Core. But, of course, that wasn't what it was built to do.

Got it in one, and boy have a lot of electrons have been sacrificed trying rectify the rules with what the setting fluff was saying.

Those 3 little books in '77 did have a implied setting, just not the one so many argue it has to be. The original setting was that mass of 50s and 60s sf that was omnipresent in used book stores everywhere in their SF and Adventure sections.

And the rules as there were written supported that setting, where you grabbed your favorite bits and ran a game. Then the "official" background started to leak out in little funky bits in Journal, also add in the funky bits of all different fanzines and articles added with their own implied settings and/or takes on the official setting as they saw it. It was still a pretty fractured setting.

Then came DGP and MegaTraveller in which they tried to codify everything.

But back to my original point, read a bunch of SF and go play some games in that fractured subsector and half that you and your dice have come up with.

If you want a funky multi-polity setting try rolling just the starports for a couple of subsectors then apply the trade route rules, then go fill the rest of the uwps....

 

[salochin999]

@flykiller

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.

The trouble is there's implied setting in the rules though - little bits of it hidden away which trip people up (or at least me) till I realise they're there, for example...

Atmospheres

The rules about masks etc imply the protagonist species (humans) started on a type 6 planet but the world gen doesn't show any preference for type 6 atmospheres at all and most of the planets rolled require breathing equipment of some kind.

So how come? Why would people travel hundreds of light years to live on an airless rock?

If you look at the history of earth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth

it was mostly horrible most of the time with not enough oxygen and tons of radiation and no life except at the bottom of the ocean etc so type 6 planets being rare is fine and one of the things that makes Traveller, Travellery.

However when you think of some of the most common *visual* sci fi like Star Trek, Star Wars etc that was around at the same time they're nearly always breathing - cos visual media doesn't want the actor's faces covered. So there's a visual disconnect (at least for me).

In Traveller - because atmosphere has no effect on population even the big Coruscant type planets mostly have a crappy atmosphere but can you picture a Coruscant type world where everyone is walking around carrying respirators? I can't. Glisten holds billions and doesn't have a planet at all.

If there's no distinction made in the world gen for the atmosphere type then the sentence of context that makes it work for me is that over the centuries of expansion from that remote center of power mentioned in the LBBs people have became so accustomed to living in artificial habitats that they see it as the new normal possibly even to the extent where they see it as preferable and maybe it literally is - maybe at say TL12+ most people prefer artificial habitats to natural and it's mostly only "back to nature" types that want to live on dirt.

So even on type 6 planets, if the TL is high enough, people may still prefer to live in domes.

.

It's a small thing but that switch in visual conception - domes not dirt -makes the Traveller setting implicit in the world gen better imo.

.

Alternatively if someone wanted to set the game in a context where breathable worlds were favored then roll up a sub-sector but change the world gen so atmos type gives a DM to the population roll e.g.

population roll D6

atmos 0-3 DM-2
atmos 4 DM+2
atmos 5 DM+0
atmos 6 DM+4
atmos 7 DM+2
atmos 8 DM+2
atmos 9 DM+0
atmos 10+ DM-2

hydro 0-2 DM-2
hydro 3-4 DM-1
hydro 6-8 DM+2
hydro 9+ DM-2

 

[creativehum]

The trouble is there's implied setting in the rules though - little bits of it hidden away which trip people up (or at least me) till I realise they're there, for example...

Atmospheres

So even on type 6 planets, if the TL is high enough, people may still prefer to live in domes.. - domes not dirt -makes the Traveller setting implicit in the world gen better imo.

Fascinating. I never would have ended up where you did given the rules.

For me, the unique nature of the government types, law levels, and tech levels suggest scattered worlds, barely connected socially. The starships available in the rules (and again, I'm talking the Basic Traveller rules) as well as the trade system suggest infrequent commercial traffic and limited communication between worlds. (Mail between worlds being handed over to sporadic trips run by private contractors, for example.) I always assumed worlds that were culturally isolated, many of them quite exotic. The thing that connected them, and could see each world with perspective, were the Travellers -- the adventurers, the traders, the mercy companies.

Also, keep in mind, when I'm speaking of "setting" I'm speaking of a limited number of subsectors specifically generated for RPG play. What the cultures are like "off stage" is interesting... but not what the Basic Traveller rules do.

For example, I never assumed in any way Star Wars or Star Trek had any influence on Traveller. (The story Miller tells is that Traveller was at the printer when he first got a chance to see Star Wars.)

And as for Star Trek... Basic Traveller, for me, assumes military vets out to build their fortunes in the kind of interstellar environment described above: a few key worlds connected by regular trade and commination... and a lot of cool worlds off those routes where adventurers and/or a merc cruiser or two can make a difference. And, aside from journeying to exotic worlds, I never made much of a connection.

The influence for me were the SF stories of the 50s and 60s -- where each tale usually involved going to a uniquely built world or dealing with a unique culture or aliens. (Again, I'm talking Basic Traveller. Not the Third Imperium.)

I'm not posting this to engage in a debate about this. We're simply approaching things so differently. I'm posting it to say, "I think the two of us seeing things so differently flykiller's point is proven!"

As for the die rolls, the text explicitly tells the Referee to ignore results as desired, or to build specific UWPs as desired. They were never meant to represent "real" astronomy or "average" worlds -- clearly! As the text says, the process is a "prod to the imagination." It is there to produce edge results, strange results, and results that demand justification and rationalization. In this way they produce unique, specific, entertaining worlds for the PCs to encounter.

But if the Referee wants more logic, consistency, or homogeny in his subsector, reworking the tables or simply crafting UWPs makes perfect sense.

 

[salochin999]

Fascinating. I never would have ended up where you did given the rules.

Strange, I don't see how you can avoid it - once noticed.

Population isn't effected by atmosphere type.

Explanation?

For me, the unique nature of the government types, law levels, and tech levels suggest scattered worlds, barely connected socially.

Yes I agree but that's all the more reason for breathable atmospheres to matter.

I'm not posting this to engage in a debate about this. We're simply approaching things so differently. I'm posting it to say, "I think the two of us seeing things so differently flykiller's point is proven!"

I'd say the opposite - this is a pretty clear cut case of implicit setting lurking in the rules.

But I agree we are coming at it from opposite directions so it's not surprising.

I've been trying to make the OTU make sense (for me) and the last thing I have been stuck on for a while is a decent explanation why so many bad atmosphere worlds had high pops and so many good atmosphere worlds had low pops. A few would be okay but dozens of individual hand-wavy reasons one for each system why population was unrelated to atmosphere got too annoying.

I now have one simple explanation: artificial habitats became normal.

so ty this thread.

###
###

For people who like creativehum's or atpollard's way of looking at Traveller but think making atmosphere count is a good idea then the modified back story might go something like

1) previous empire rolled over sub-sector creating colonies etc
2) collapse
3) colonies with the most breathable atmospheres survived best
4) most of the more vulnerable colonies died out leaving lots of ruins to explore
5) now a new polity is expanding and the players start on the edge of a sub-sector one or two sub-sectors ahead of the expanding border

then i'd make the world gen sequence

1) roll star port as usual but at first treat A, B and C as trade potential rather than actual star port, maybe put it in brackets like (A), (B), (C) and treat an (A) as a C, (B) as a D, (C) as an E until they get developed.

2) roll physical stats as usual

3) modify pop according to atmosphere (trial and error to get numbers right) - this should get you a more Firefly type sub-sector where most of the larger populations are on atmos 4, 6 or 8 worlds
- surviving populations on bad worlds could have various adventure worthy explanations like they survived in a vault but are now all crazy

4) roll govt, law as usual

5) roll TL don't add potential star port DMs to TL

6) if world has TL8+ and pop 6+ and potential star port (A), (B) or (C) then make it C or B or treat an (A) as a B.

 

[creativehum]

I have been stuck on for a while is a decent explanation why so many bad atmosphere worlds had high pops and so many good atmosphere worlds had low pops. A few would be okay but dozens of individual hand-wavy reasons one for each system why population was unrelated to atmosphere got too annoying.

I always assumed that the circumstances of history/culture/SF premise of sort could easily provide justification for specific worlds. That is, the UWP is where the world is often where the world is now--not where it has always been. A high pop world might have been ruined by war or pollution or resource exploitation gone bad. (The meat for this, of course, is how the circumstances are creating dramatic, playable circumstances ripe for RPG play now: Is the civilization falling apart? Is there a fresh war going on for areas where breathable sir (at higher or lower altitudes) exist? Is the world serving as a base for conscription for a neighboring world's military as people desperate to escape are willing to risk almost certain death in someone else's war? Are plans being made by some to wipe out huge portions of the planet to bring the ecosystem back into alignment?)

Also, as I've posted elsewhere, for be the UWPs are not absolute descriptions of a world. And they are definitely not part of a catalogue by a scout service. Instead, they are interesting features to figure out in combination with each other. A Dense, Tainted atmosphere, for example, might be a world with a mostly breathable atmosphere and a massive, dangerous storm that roams the world. The large population might live mostly in floating cities buoyed by huge dirigibles filled with light gasses that sail out of the storm's way, stopping at surface points to mine or fish or whatnot while it is safe.

This might be hand-wavey to you... But I see some adventure possibilities and set-pieces. For several sessions of RPG play it could be awesome.

Now, I get it. One point of view with the Main World creation rules is, "Why would people ever settle here? It makes no sense. People would never do this. This whole thing is screwy."

Whereas my point of view is, "People are amazing. What is here that would make people show up? And then, given the difficulties, what crazy schemes would they come up with to survive?" Because, for me, that's the magic sauce of _Traveller_. But that's me.

 

[flykiller]

And then, given the difficulties, what crazy schemes would they come up with to survive?

perhaps genetic alteration.

 

[creativehum]

perhaps genetic alteration.

Perhaps a zillion things.
That's the point.

 

[kilemall]

As for the die rolls, the text explicitly tells the Referee to ignore results as desired, or to build specific UWPs as desired. They were never meant to represent "real" astronomy or "average" worlds -- clearly! As the text says, the process is a "prod to the imagination." It is there to produce edge results, strange results, and results that demand justification and rationalization. In this way they produce unique, specific, entertaining worlds for the PCs to encounter.

But if the Referee wants more logic, consistency, or homogeny in his subsector, reworking the tables or simply crafting UWPs makes perfect sense.

An example from IMTU-

I'm using RTT Worldgen which is a somewhat different critter then LBB2/Scouts/whatever world systems. Since I am setting it for first century of exploration, most of the marginal planets are uninhabited and pop 4 or less.


Nonetheless I got a really strange result, an oxygen atmo world on a planet off an extremely low luminosity red. These are all new planets and not terraformed, having been discovered only a few decades earlier, so no 'this was done 1000 years ago' stuff.

How the hell did that happen?

Well, what I came up with was an adaptation of the plant life to use the faint energy at 1000 times Terran efficiency.

This make the planet INCREDIBLY dangerous, as just turning on a flashlight means risking being overgrown, and a ship that lands with landing lights could find itself hemmed in and unable to leave within an hour. Nothing compared to the danger of ANY plant or spore getting inside the ship, turning on the lights and having an instant alien kudzu problem.

With the genetic engineering focus of MTU however, danger is opportunity, one can grow entire crops and forests in days. So there is exploitation and inhabitation of the planet, and trade to be done, but it is very much an Amber Zone/watch it mister sort of environment, with Andromeda Strain levels of decontamination to get onto or off the planet's facilities.

Prometheus, as in yes the Alpha Centauri one, is incredibly exotic as is it's eden planet companion Pronoia.

If anything says 'you are in space and not some Star Trek/Firefly backlot stage planet' it's a world operating on radically different cultural and environmental norms.

Make em feel the spaceyness.

 

[kilemall]

read leviathan. a trade expedition to planets that have a few thousand primitive peoples? "colonies" with a few hundred? a merchant ship arriving in-system would be sorely challenged even to find these tiny pockets of humanity on the face of a planet, let alone trade anything with them, let alone trade anything worth the cost of a starship, let alone make a profit - yet there they are, sent by some unspecified body for some inarticulable reason for some unachievable purpose. the writers elevated a d&d game to a traveller environment - and left it just hanging there by itself with no background. they had to.

Um.

I imagine that's because they hadn't settled on the OTU yet before they released it, doesn't mean my point is invalid, that economic necessity for content drove OTU creation.

The other direction they could have gone was 'Milieu Sourcebook', a one-stop book per scifi environment such as Vance's stuff, Dune, Foundation, etc. work.

However, I suspect they shied away from that business model rather then deal with lawyers, copyright and estates, their own generated universe would come free of such distractions and costs.

 

[creativehum]

I imagine that's because they hadn't settled on the OTU yet before they released it, doesn't mean my point is invalid, that economic necessity for content drove OTU creation.

I think the two of you are speaking of two different things:

You are talking about the publishing treadmill needed to keep games afloat. You are accurate in your assessment.

flykiller is talking about what books or products are useful -- or harmful -- when it comes time to actually play. He is saying trying to build a single, consistent setting for something like Traveller is a fool's errand. He is accurate in his assessment.

My contention is that the original Traveller Box of Little Black Books 1-3 were all you needed to play endlessly. This is bad news for the publisher, but that's the nature of a good RPG.

Other products, such as Book 4 and Book 5, can expand the toolkit available to the Referee and Players, but are not required. Certain Supplements, like 1001 Characters and Animal Encounters can certainly make a Referee's life useful, and add value because they can be actively used in play.

But as for the Third Imperium... it is certainly not required for play. And will ultimately never be consistent and will never satisfy each person's standards or tastes.

Hence, the point of this thread: to leave behind any concerns about the OTU and look simply at the tools in the first three books. Examine and talk about how we play the game using them.

 

[kilemall]

Came back to the game when some of my 80s gaming friends demanded I ref things like the old days, and within a week resolved to kick the Imperium to the curb.

Great ideas to be cherry picked out of all that material, but never looked back on that, and thank the Lords of Space I will never have to take canon timeline/event/personality/tech arguments seriously.

 

[creativehum]

Communication Routes vs. Space Lanes

I realized I listed Space Lanes but not Communication Routes in the list of Rules as Tools in the first post, but never explained why.

Here's my thinking:

When I create the Space Lanes per the 1977 rules, I am building a "terrain" in the subsector. Some worlds are easier to travel between even if the PCs don't have a ship. They are not the "hinterlands." You can show a map of the subsector to the players and they can immediately "get" that some worlds are "civilization" and other worlds are off the beaten path. It is similar, I think, to a fantasy RPG map, showing a town and the wilderness beyond it. The tension sets up expectations to going "out there."

But going "out there" will be complicated. If the PCs want to go out there they'll have to buy passage, or get crew positions, or charter one of the ships traveling irregularly out to those worlds. And once they get out there getting back to civilization might be a complication in and of itself as the wait for a ship heading back where they came from.

And even if the PCs have a ship there are complications. The way the game's various tables are set up, to leave the Space Lanes means to increase the odds of piracy. Moreover, to leave the Space Lanes means you leave behind A and B Class Starports, which means leaving behind refined fuel, which means increasing the odds of misjump the longer the crew travels without getting back to a high end port.

Her we see how the rules of Basic Traveller interlock in interesting ways.

The value of these rules is that they create an environment that provides choices for the players. Meaningful choices. Choice they can weigh -- about resources, money, time, risk. And choices are the sweet-spot for RPG play.

Now, Communication Routes. What do they give us in terms rules and procedures to create player facing environments, adventures, and choices?

Nothing.

Okay. That's not fair. Communication Routes give us the ubiquitous "steal/intercept/destroy/alter the Xboat at the Jump Point" adventure.

But other than that, there is no value to the to the Referee or the players.

What Communication Routes do is build out the fictional setting. They tell us that there's a system in place for efficiently communicating across a vast empire.

And...?

Do the PCs often receive communiques from the imperial core? Are they often sending messages off the games's subsector map and waiting for a reply? In what way, precisely, does a world being on the Communication Route influence player decisions as opposed to being on a world that doesn't? (I know reasons can be created for specific situations in a campaign. I'm talking now about the rules themselves, at their face value, providing value, as above.)

And look what they do! Communication Routes pull focus from the subsector in which play is supposed to occur! The gazes of the players can't help but wonder, "What's that way? Is that where the real action is?"

Well, no. The real action is in the subsector of play. So the question is, what value, mechanically and as a rule, do Communication Routes provide? Yes, they can be added as part of a setting. But what do they add as a game element?

And the answer is nothing. They were added in the 1981 edition because GDW was building ouy their setting and probably made sense to roll in assumptions about the setting into the rules. But the Communication Routes (along with other Third Imperium details that got added over tine) were "nutrition-free" when it came to actual RPG play. The setting became broader and broader, taking a top=down macro view that would make sense for a board game about conflict between interstellar polities. But in terms of PCs having adventures in RPG play at the edge of a remote centralized government (which is Basic Traveller's default)... not so much.

 

[salochin999]

creativehum

I always assumed that the circumstances of history/culture/SF premise of sort could easily provide justification for specific worlds. ... (snip) ...

This might be hand-wavey to you...

No I agree with that generally and it's one of the things I like about Traveller - that it forces you to come up with solutions for odd rolls.

However I found doing it for a whole sub-sector started to strain belief because there were so many- which forced me to think of a bigger hand-wave that could apply more widely (at least in an OTU setting) i.e. artificial habitats became normal.

Anyway, i find it a useful idea so someone else may.

.

Since it occurred to me I think the question of atmosphere is quite central to the Traveller feel - most sci fi is breathable sci fi (e.g. Defiance, Firefly, Star Wars etc) whereas Traveller is often non-breathable - it's one of the things that make it feel more hard sciencey.

 

[salochin999]

perhaps genetic alteration.

That's what got me - going through a whole sub-sector there were so many planets with bad atmos + high pop or good atmos + low pop I'd run out of unique ideas and was about to just fill the rest up with modified humans and be done with it.

Whereas now I have a whole new class of space characters: space tinkers carrying spare parts for and doing repairs on artifical habitats.

 

[creativehum]

Since it occurred to me I think the question of atmosphere is quite central to the Traveller feel - most sci fi is breathable sci fi (e.g. Defiance, Firefly, Star Wars etc) whereas Traveller is often non-breathable - it's one of the things that make it feel more hard sciencey.

Keep in mind, all of your references are TV and Film that are post-Traveller. (Star Wars was released only 60 days before Traveller was released at Origins, and Miller himself has said he first saw the movie while the games at the printer.

The sources for Traveller are printed short stories and novels from the 50s and 60s. And if you look at the covers there are plenty of space suits (and domed cities!)

My point in bringing this up is not to say you are wrong in the kind of setting you wanly to build. You should build whatever you want! Only that we should be careful: we build patterns and connections based on our (necessarily) limited experiences. But if we want to get a sense of the original tone and feel we have to put ourselves in the shoes of Miller--who had served in the Army during the Viet Nam war until 1972 and then heading off to college. Given his age, what would he have been reading? Given his experiences, how would he see the world?

As for the fiction in these books and short stories, I've been reading some of them lately (Tubbs, Poul, Bester) I don't find them to be "hard" at all. They are more like adventure romances with enough (and just enough) of a concern for science and a hard nosed sensibility to seem grounded. That is, they play a good game of being something more than adventure romances... But really they are not.

I don't say any of this to slight the books. I love them.

My point is that despite Classic Traveller being tagged "hard" SF at some point, it probably isn't. That doesn't mean that people who want to make it Hard SF shouldn't have a go at it. Only that they'll always be wrestling with all the odd bits in the rules that seem to make no sense. Like the Main a World generation system, for example, which clearly doesn't mimic astrophysics or astronomy, but is there to help the Referee generate a few dozen cool, exotic, and unique worlds for PCs to have adventures on. Like the adventures of the heroes featured in the paperbacks and pulps of decades ago.

Moreover, I think the game of Traveller I end up running will have a touch of nostalgia to it... Not in a self-aware or goofy way, but in any the sense of making adventure tales with just enough logic and science that the problem solving will feel earned and the worlds will feel.