Toward a Philosophy of Traveller

[Frankymole]

This is a way round the problem - and whether or not it's a problem is an individual thing - of how many ships a pop 8, TL12 world ought to be able to build and support. If it's actually 250,000 TL12 Imperials and 6 billion TL 4 natives then problem solved.

I agree with this philosophy of the Referee using the UWP random generation system. It is a tool "to prod the imagination," (to quote Book 3), not a straight jacket. In Basic Traveller there was no mention of the UWP being generated by the Scout Service. It was an artifact of gaming, there to inspire the Referee to create cool and unexpected ideas, settings, and situations. In my view, the Referee who is using the World Creation system as some sort of codified bit of textbook analysis is missing the point. One jumbles the numbers up, dreams, and concocts a vision of a world that turns one on. The actual numbers can be interpreted in many ways, each slightly different for each given world, to make the most compelling, fun planet one can.

The Planet-Building article by the Keith brothers in JTAS #10 used the population figure of Craw to represent a human "lost colony" and the large population of aboriginal desert-nomadic sophonts (required to support the industrial revolution they posited) weren't included in the figure... So population covered by the figure can be a flexible concept.

 

[Frankymole]

That's right. I think that any high-population world with access to interstellar ships will spread their civilization to their neighbors.

True, but where economically sensible (or for a defence buffer zone?). You wouldn't set up power grids on a mudball that couldn't pay for it, just as high tech companies probably wouldn't set up gleaming electronics hubs in Amazonian hut villages...

 

[rancke]

True, but where economically sensible (or for a defence buffer zone?). You wouldn't set up power grids on a mudball that couldn't pay for it, just as high tech companies probably wouldn't set up gleaming electronics hubs in Amazonian hut villages...

I'm thinking of 'civilization' as in 'organized society'. A tax collector, a small garrison, a governor that frowns on vigilante justice, the occasional visit from a navy patrol. Defense treaties and protectorates. That sort of thing.


Hans

 

[Ishmael]

I'm thinking of 'civilization' as in 'organized society'. A tax collector, a small garrison, a governor that frowns on vigilante justice, the occasional visit from a navy patrol. Defense treaties and protectorates. That sort of thing.


Hans

cultural imperialism?
"white man's burden"?

I feel that these are NOT part of the original philosophy of Traveller although they appear to have made it into the Third Imperium.

 

[rancke]

cultural imperialism?
"white man's burden"?

Maybe. Maybe something else. In any case, the natural result of a more powerful civilization lying adjacent to a less powerful society.

I feel that these are NOT part of the original philosophy of Traveller...

I suspect that the original philosophy of Traveller was not really a perfect visualization of an all-encompassing meticulously crafted role-playing system.

...although they appear to have made it into the Third Imperium.

I have been courteously requested to refrain from talking about the OTU in this thread, and I'm trying to comply with that request to the limit of human endurance.


Hans

 

[robject]

Something I've Never Asked Before

How rich is the Traveller ecology? How many fundamentally different settings are there?



ASSUME:

• Travellers travel within the limits of jumpspace, high fuel usage (includes wilderness refueling), and gravitics.
• Rewards are material, and Newtonian physics tends to be followed.
• Careers, ship designs, subsector design et al are as written (a la LBB 1-2-3)
• People are people, aging and doomed in four-year chunks.
• Interstellar society is socially stratified (high, mid, and low passage; SOC).

Here are the controls, I think:

(1) What's the TL? (5 options)
- Primitive (<TL7)
- Space-only (TL7-8)?
- Slow (TL9)?
- Typical?
- Fantastic (TL21+)?

(2) How many worlds? (6 options)
One? A Subsector? A Sector? 16 Sectors? 4000 Sectors? More?
If > one, then:

(3) The size of empire. None? Pocket only? Gigantic? (3 options)
(4) How many empires. Many? One? None? (3 options)
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[salochin999]

I did a mix of the pre-modifying and adjusting after the fact, by the way.

I chose to use a Frontier Table for Starport Types.
All Population results of tens of billions were automatic re-rolls. (I don't want worlds that heavy with people. Billions will be an extraordinary pop in this subsector.

I did bump one A-class starport down to a B. I already had two A-class starports and didn't want a third.

That's the sensible way to do it. I'd do it that way when I'm not being OCD

 

[salochin999]

How rich is the Traveller ecology? How many fundamentally different settings are there?...

I think it depends a lot on two base assumptions:

1) is trade like modern earth i.e. every system generates trade proportional to wealth (population * TL) with a large part of trade being the shipping of raw materials to the high TL systems.

or

is it more like age of sail earth in that the higher TL a system is the more self-sufficient it is in most items within its own system and trade is mostly in exotic goods and luxuries: the equivalent of spice, sugar, coffee etc.

One reason this is important is if the high pop. high TL worlds are very self-sufficient then they have less motive to care about the backwater worlds.

The second reason is the first case would create a denser more interconnected setting while in the second case all the important stuff is on the prime worlds and the routes in between them creating a more skeletal setting with lots of unimportant worlds in between the important ones

and

2) small fleet or big fleet i.e. can the high pop. high TL worlds produce fleets big enough to conquer other worlds.

#

Those two assumptions between them create four base combinations of incentive to expand (low trade vs high trade) and ability to expand (small fleet vs large fleet) which imo effects everything else that comes after.

The four options being

1) low trade + small fleet ( low incentive + low ability)
2) high trade + small fleet (high incentive + low ability)
3) low trade + large fleet (low incentive + high ability)
4) high trade + large fleet (high incentive + high ability)

LBB 1-3 doesn't imply any specific option imo but I'd say "Mercenary" does imply high trade / incentive and "High Guard" implies large fleet so with those two added I'd say the OTU is pretty much solidly option (4).

However if you treat books 4 and 5 as optional then you have all four options. Mercenary I think implies high incentive but could work with both small and large fleet. (It almost implies small fleet in a way) and High Guard although it implies large fleet could work with both high and low trade settings.

so I'd say

LBB 1-3 -> options 1-4
+Mercenary -> option 2 or 4
+High Guard -> option 3 or 4

so I think it was really Mercenary and High guard which pushed the setting in a specific direction

however even with the assumptions set to option (4): high trade + large fleet, there are still numerous sub-options:

1) each / most alpha systems are independent.

I think this is quite plausible given that offensive jump-capable fleets are potentially a lot less powerful than defensive in-system fleets and planetary defenses. Especially given the importance of fuel I could see systems building up massive defenses around each refueling point making any attack on an alpha system very difficult.

2) voluntary federation e.g. Star Trek, e.g. member planets only have in-system fleets and communally fund a relatively small federation fleet with marines as red shirts rather than infantry units (so it's not a threat to the members).

3) empire:
- overtly coercive - Darth Vader
- covertly coercive - spies everywhere
- loose - lots of local autonomy
etc

#

going back to the base four options

option 1 (low trade + small fleet) creates the classic Dumarest setting

option 2 (high trade + small fleet) is semi-Dumarest but if there was high trade but no large fleets you might want a reason why (e.g. some kind of trade federation that controls jump tech)

option 3 (low trade + large fleet) implies there's no commercial reason for an alpha system to conquer other systems even though they could have the fleets to do so (although historically there have been plenty of other reasons for expansion: ideology, religion, glory, loot, megalomania etc).

option 4 (high trade + large fleet) implies both a strong incentive to expand and the potential ability to do so.

#

And that's all before you

1) introduce history i.e. take any of the above settings but at a stage of their development where it's just beginning or breaking up

or

2) have optional world generation DMs to create particular kinds of alternate sub-sectors.

#

so basically a lot but (imo) the options can be tightly constrained early on by a couple of important assumptions.

 

[aramis]

The problem with your analysis, Salochin, is that the world gen is very clearly a best fit to your low-trade/low-incentive. And that's borne out by the adventures and sectors where the TL's are ALL OVER THE PLACE.

 

[Frankymole]

I'm thinking of 'civilization' as in 'organized society'. A tax collector, a small garrison, a governor that frowns on vigilante justice, the occasional visit from a navy patrol. Defense treaties and protectorates. That sort of thing.

Ah, that's fine then. It could be at a lower TL than the prevailing tech on the richer worlds / fleets around about in the local subsector, and neighbouring worlds, or even the local starport.

 

[salochin999]

The problem with your analysis, Salochin, is that the world gen is very clearly a best fit to your low-trade/low-incentive. And that's borne out by the adventures and sectors where the TL's are ALL OVER THE PLACE.

Well the analysis in a nutshell is there are two hidden assumptions underlying the rest
- density of trade
- potential fleet sizes
and these assumptions effect a lot of what comes after.

If you look at the various iterations of Traveller I'd say those assumptions change back and forth and that's partly what leads to confusion. GURPS for example is a full-on "dense trade" model, LBB1-3 (as you say) seems to imply more of a "Silk Road" trade model.

(Although as mentioned "Mercenary" semi implies corporations fighting over the backwater worlds which implies a denser trade model.)

My point is simply: explicitly bring those two assumptions to the front and decide them in advance.

1) silk road trade or dense trade
2) small fleet or large fleet

The four combinations provided by those assumptions lead down four different "setting" paths which have various sub-paths below that.

#

edit:

The small fleet vs large fleet decision is effectively a decision over how easy it is for one world to conquer another world. In a small fleet setting it would always be difficult and lead to a more Dumarest type setting. However even in a large fleet setting if you make the defense much stronger than attack then it's easy to imagine a pocket empire type setting where each prime system has a sphere of influence among the nearby minor systems.

So maybe a secondary decision is
2a) fleet attack > prime system defense vs prime system defense > fleet attack

 

[rancke]

If you look at the various iterations of Traveller I'd say those assumptions change back and forth and that's partly what leads to confusion. GURPS for example is a full-on "dense trade" model, LBB1-3 (as you say) seems to imply more of a "Silk Road" trade model.

GURPS is (arguably) the densest trade model we have, but that's not very dense. And LBB1-3 doesn't say anyting at all about regular trade; it's all about tramp trading. Now, if we look at some of the subsequently published setting material, especially the infamous description of Al Morai, we might deduce that the original writers saw all trade as tramp trade. But we can't use setting material to deduce original intent, can we?

(Also, the trade model described for Al Morai is about as sensible as firing bales of credit notes into the sun. Al Morai jumps every 14 days and uses J4 ships to cross one-, two-, and three-parsec gaps. If Al Morai represents the original intent of the original writers then the original writers didn't realize the ramifications of their original ship-building rules.)


Hans

 

[creativehum]

The problem with your analysis, Salochin, is that the world gen is very clearly a best fit to your low-trade/low-incentive. And that's borne out by the adventures and sectors where the TL's are ALL OVER THE PLACE.

The TLs being all over the place are also in the World Generation system.

Add in the limitations on advanced starports. And the fact that refined fuel is limited. And the limitations on the kinds of ships presented in Books 1-3.

In all of this it seems to me is the implied setting of the RPG play (not the whole of the interstellar society in any given setting that is "off screen" but the setting of play itself). In the core Traveller philosophy, the setting of play is the place where interstellar civilization hasn't smoothed out the stars yet, where the expected refinements to make space travel easy haven't been implemented yet.

Travellers are the people going to a place most people don't go to. They are making do in their tramp freighter, off the beaten paths (which are located off the subsector map), looking for the big score that they think they'll find by looking where other people aren't looking.

 

[salochin999]

GURPS is (arguably) the densest trade model we have, but that's not very dense. And LBB1-3 doesn't say anyting at all about regular trade; it's all about tramp trading. Now, if we look at some of the subsequently published setting material, especially the infamous description of Al Morai, we might deduce that the original writers saw all trade as tramp trade. But we can't use setting material to deduce original intent, can we?

(Also, the trade model described for Al Morai is about as sensible as firing bales of credit notes into the sun. Al Morai jumps every 14 days and uses J4 ships to cross one-, two-, and three-parsec gaps. If Al Morai represents the original intent of the original writers then the original writers didn't realize the ramifications of their original ship-building rules.)


Hans

I didn't see it myself but I think the trade route table that was apparently in the 1977 version implied the Silk Road model whereas other setting material later implied the opposite however personally I wouldn't want to set either model in stone as even if one or the other was (an unconscious) part of the original design philosophy I think having two options (or a sliding scale) increases the number of potential setting types.

I think what has happened over the years is different developers have gone into the OTU setting with these choices made subconsciously and implicit and if those decisions are made conscious and explicit that could help.

 

[salochin999]

The TLs being all over the place are also in the World Generation system.

Add in the limitations on advanced starports. And the fact that refined fuel is limited. And the limitations on the kinds of ships presented in Books 1-3.

In all of this it seems to me is the implied setting of the RPG play (not the whole of the interstellar society in any given setting that is "off screen" but the setting of play itself). In the core Traveller philosophy, the setting of play is the place where interstellar civilization hasn't smoothed out the stars yet, where the expected refinements to make space travel easy haven't been implemented yet.

Travellers are the people going to a place most people don't go to. They are making do in their tramp freighter, off the beaten paths (which are located off the subsector map), looking for the big score that they think they'll find by looking where other people aren't looking.

I think that's more or less it. Even if the main part of the setting was dense trade / large fleet the bit of the universe the players are in can be silk road / small fleet if you want.

Also although I now think the original philosophy was silk road / small fleet (but not explicitly enough to avoid future problems) after thinking about it I think the game can be adjusted to whichever combo people prefer and that could be a strength.

For example if a GM wanted a silk road / small fleet setting but thinks high pop. high tech worlds should be able to produce large fleets then
- make navigation a rare psionic talent
- place the setting just after a long night
- make jump tech a secret so some high tech worlds are high tech in everything except jump tech
- make jump drives require a rare component
- make system defense much more powerful than attack so there's no point in a large offensive fleet and 99% of naval expenditure is the equivalent of harbor defense

each of those rules applied to the same random sub-sector creates a different setting.

 

[rancke]

I didn't see it myself but I think the trade route table that was apparently in the 1977 version implied the Silk Road model whereas other setting material later implied the opposite...

The point is that the business model embodied in the trade tables does not fit a company that has a steady stream of passengers and freight lined up. For instance, given the business opportunities needed to keep Al Morai in the black, it's possible to come up with a business model that will provide it with a much bigger profit. This has nothing to do with interpretation; it is inherent in the traffic rules. For instance, if you know that you're going to need umpteen tons of LHyd per year on a world with a Class C starport or less, and the alternative is to lose a ship every 36 times it jumps from that world on the average, I can assure you that paying for LHyd to be transported from the nearest Class A or B starport is going to be cheaper.

Also, the tramp trade model doesn't really work either. The point of the Silk Route trade (and the India and China trade that replaced it) was that it was profitable enough to pay for the losses during transport. If you're going to suffer a misjump every 36 jumps, the profits would need to pay for replacing your ships every 18 months.


Hans

 

[salochin999]

The point is that the business model embodied in the trade tables does not fit a company that has a steady stream of passengers and freight lined up.

Hans

You're right, it doesn't fit the trade assumptions made in later setting material.

My point is, on the issue of the trade model, instead of going back to a single model based on the original design philosophy (which is one option) maybe make the different settings options explicit up front and then a) you make the potential range of settings much wider and b) you can use *all* the setting material that's ever been produced in campaigns that fit the assumptions made in that material.

#

For example before rolling up a sub-sector choose (or roll)

Trade Model
--------------
2-5: tramp trade*
6-8: silk road**
9-12: dense trade***

*systems self-sufficient, main trade is spare parts for imported tech in exchange for whatever the system produces a surplus of
** mixture of tramp trade between minor systems and dense trade between major systems
*** like modern earth trade, trade volume proportional to population size and wealth

Political Model
----------------
2-4: City-States
5-6: Pocket Empires
7-8: Imperium
9-12: Federation (voluntary association)

Fleet Model
-------------
2-7: small fleets
8-12: large fleets

etc

 

[robject]

LBB1-3 doesn't say anyting at all about regular trade; it's all about tramp trading.
...

(...If Al Morai represents the original intent of the original writers then the original writers didn't realize the ramifications of their original ship-building rules.)

I think these points are both reasonable. Book 3 is speculation. Al Morai was probably rather hastily described (a casual read shows all sorts of hasty errors). It was clearly intended to be a sector-wide corporation, but it is unlikely to only consist of the ships noted. And, it certainly isn't using speculative trade rules. Something else is operating which players don't have access to.

 

[robject]

this sort of thread attracts people aren't particularly enamored with the OTU. The desire for something else is what prompts the start and participation in thread.

...

The Third Imperium, god bless it, has the feel of a faux First World 20th century Western landscape... which made things easy, I believe, for people to grasp quickly. But that was never the feel I got when I read the original three books for the kind of setting it asked me to dream up. And the kind of setting I want was in those first three books.

There is a practical element to this.

There are over a dozen possible different chapters to the OTU, which do not involve the Third Imperium. Ideally, each of those can be derived from, or be consistent with, Traveller's rules.

If I get an approximation of that core philosophy, for example in those five points (travel, mortal, limits, diversity, social, I think) then I have a good basis on which to think about those other milieux.

 

[creativehum]

There is a practical element to this.

There are over a dozen possible different chapters to the OTU, which do not involve the Third Imperium. Ideally, each of those can be derived from, or be consistent with, Traveller's rules.

If I get an approximation of that core philosophy, for example in those five points (travel, mortal, limits, diversity, social, I think) then I have a good basis on which to think about those other milieux.

Absolutely.