CT Only: TRAVELLER: Out of the Box

[infojunky]

Oh Look it's a Jump5 map, which is one of the less common map formats.

 

[by_the_sword]

Hello Creativehum. I just wanted to say how much I admired your project. I really like the symmetry of your subsector map. It looks more organic amd not something meant to fit onto a 5x8" booklet page.

I noticed that you are dipping into MegaTraveller books and I just wanted to point out that the Hard Times campaign setting book, offers different types of starship design and a wealth of suggestions for handling worlds that are struggling with a loss of Tech Level. The "poor world" scenarios might be useful to you, since you are setting your campaign in a frontier-like environment.

Also, will you be using ships from other modules/sources?

Will you have established alien races? Or will you leave them undiscovered for now? If you have them at all...

 

[creativehum]

Hello Creativehum. I just wanted to say how much I admired your project. I really like the symmetry of your subsector map. It looks more organic amd not something meant to fit onto a 5x8" booklet page.

I noticed that you are dipping into MegaTraveller books and I just wanted to point out that the Hard Times campaign setting book, offers different types of starship design and a wealth of suggestions for handling worlds that are struggling with a loss of Tech Level. The "poor world" scenarios might be useful to you, since you are setting your campaign in a frontier-like environment.

Also, will you be using ships from other modules/sources?

Will you have established alien races? Or will you leave them undiscovered for now? If you have them at all...

Hello!

Quick note: The subsector map posted earlier isn't my subsector map. nathanhibb created it while playing around with starport odds. So, if you want to compliment anyone, compliment him.

As for MegaTraveller, that was a coincidence. I had already decided how I was going to tweak the Starport Table, was flipping through MegaTraveller because I remembered that they had variations on the World Creation rolls, and saw I had come up with what was already there. I will be mostly working with Books 1-3 and tweaking them. As for Hard Times, I'll take a look! But in my own view, Books 1-3 already were built to handle frontier environments. (This is why things like tech and trade break down when one applies them toward the government's center. The rules weren't written to handle properly civilized areas.)

I might be using ships for other sources, but frankly I'm limited in options as I want to stick to the Book 2 ships -- and most designs immediately adopted High Guard designs. (And became very big! Remember, my setting is capped at TL 11. So the ships top out at 2000 tons.)

As for aliens, yes, I think I'll have some. And yes, I think I'll wait for the PCs to encounter them. At this time I have no plans for aliens with interstellar ships or civilization.

 

[nathanbibb]

Quick note: The subsector map posted earlier isn't my subsector map. nathanhibb created it while playing around with starport odds. So, if you want to compliment anyone, compliment him.

I'll post something later in a separate thread about subsector shape - I have some opinions here and I'd like to hear what others have done.

 

[mike wightman]

Just thought I would post this to show that what you are doing to starport class is perfectly acceptable under the LBB3 rules as written

Just as the distribution of stars can be altered (as indicated in world occurrence), the referee is also free to create other starport distributions.

 

[nathanbibb]

The more I learn about CT the more I like it

I wonder if it would be better to apply DMs to the starport table rather than create a new one? Might be more consistent with the other rules.

 

[salochin999]

As I move forward, the only other table I know I'll be changing is Population. I the Throw is a 2D6-2, with a ten producing tens of billions. But that's much more than I want. So, 8-9 will probably be hundreds of millions, and 10 will be billions. But I'm still mulling that.

Yeah, if it's a frontier zone tens of billions or even billions mess up the feel of it.

The way I'd picture it is a home world surrounded by concentric circles of space so colonies in the inner layer would be the oldest and biggest while more recent colonies in the more distant layers would be much more recent, something like:

- home world - pop 10
- first circle of colonies - max pop 9
- second circle of colonies - max pop 8
- third circle of colonies - max pop 7
- fourth circle of colonies - max pop 6
etc

#

One thought for this is to have a different population roll for "frontier" sub sectors for example

2d6-4
DM+1 for B star port
DM+2 for A star port

or

roll as usual but

if pop > 7 on a world with an A star port
or
pop > 6 on any other world
then alien species

i.e. if you roll pop 8 for a world and your desired colonist limit is pop 6 then you could make it a million or so colonists and a billion sentient stone age frog critters who live in the swamps that make up most of the planet.

 

[creativehum]

Just thought I would post this to show that what you are doing to starport class is perfectly acceptable under the LBB3 rules as written

Oh, absolutely. And let us not forget that in general the game is, according to the last page of Book 3, "Traveller is necessarily a framework describing the barest of essentials for an infinite universe..." The text says, again and again, that the Referee and Players should be using the rules to make the game and setting they want.

The more I learn about CT the more I like it

Me too! I picked the game back up for a local Retro-Game Day last summer, poked around, and said, "Hey, this is really cool."

I wonder if it would be better to apply DMs to the starport table rather than create a new one? Might be more consistent with the other rules.

I thought about this. But if I just apply a -DM to the table I'll end up crunching the lower end and end up with extra zero-pop worlds, which isn't what I want.

I'm also thinking of expanding the the middle section of the table like so...

POPULATION
2D-2
0 No inhabitants.
1 Tens of inhabitants.
2 Hundreds of inhabitants.
3 Thousands of inhabitants.
4 Tens of thousands.
5 Hundreds of thousands.
6 Hundreds of thousands.
7 Millions of inhabitants.
8 Millions of inhabitants.
9 Tens of millions.
A Hundreds of millions.

This, of course, kills off the neatness of each value equalling a certain number of 0s... but that ins't my main concern. (You'll note that I also dump the billions as a possibility. Not sure about this yet. My brain is stuck on two work-work projects, so I haven't been able to turn my attention to this yet!)

The way I'd picture it is a home world surrounded by concentric circles of space so colonies in the inner layer would be the oldest and biggest while more recent colonies in the more distant layers would be much more recent, something like...

Keep in mind two things:

In this setting, those homeworlds are a few subsectors back. That's where I thin the planets with billions of people are living. (I'm seeing the whole expansion of Alandia being about a sector in size, with the subesctor I'm building just past those boundaries.)

In this setting, some of these worlds "discovered" by the people of Alandia already have populations on them. They lacked Jump capability, have been cut off from Interstellar travel for at least 1,000 to 2,000 years, have their own cultures and societies. So the pops in most cases aren't arriving from off world, but were already there, and other negotiated with, or conquered, or exploited one way or another by the Alandia Trading Companies, Free Traders, colonists, and others. What I'm building is the feel of colonialism out of Europe across the globe in the Age of Sails.

So, I think I want to keep the pops in general below a billion for a variety of reasons this far out.

 

[aramis]

You can skew the results more easily with 3dk2 or even 4dk2.

If you want a low-pop bias: 3d keep the lowest 2.
A flatter distribution: 3d keep highest and lowest.
A high pop bias: 3d keep highest two
A mid pop bias: 4d keep center two.

All of these preserve the full range, but shift the center bulge.
Data run to follow

 

[aramis]

Several variations - note that the 4d6 ones are in permil, not percent... essentially, 10ths of a percent.

X N(X) % 2 1 0 3 6 2 4 13 6 5 24 11 6 37 17 7 54 25 8 37 17 9 24 11 10 13 6 11 6 2 12 1 0 [tc=3]3d6 Keep H+L[/tc]	X N(X) % 2 1 0 3 3 1 4 7 3 5 12 5 6 19 8 7 27 12 8 34 15 9 36 16 10 34 15 11 27 12 12 16 7 [tc=3]3d6 Keep 2H[/tc]	X N(X) % 2 16 7 3 27 12 4 34 15 5 36 16 6 34 15 7 27 12 8 19 8 9 12 5 10 7 3 11 3 1 12 1 0 [tc=3]3d6 Keep 2L[/tc][tr]
X N(X) ‰ 2 1 0 3 14 10 4 51 39 5 124 95 6 245 189 7 426 328 8 245 189 9 124 95 10 51 39 11 14 10 12 1 0 [tc=3]4d6 Keep H+L[/tc][tr]	X N(X) ‰ 2 21 16 3 54 41 4 111 85 5 156 120 6 201 155 7 210 162 8 201 155 9 156 120 10 111 85 11 54 41 12 21 16 [tc=3]4d6 keep center 2[/tc]	X N(X) ‰ 2 1 0 3 4 3 4 15 11 5 32 24 6 65 50 7 108 83 8 171 131 9 224 172 10 261 201 11 244 188 12 171 131 [tc=3]4d6 keep 2h[/tc]
X N(X) ‰ 2 171 131 3 244 188 4 261 201 5 224 172 6 171 131 7 108 83 8 65 50 9 32 24 10 15 11 11 4 3 12 1 0 [tc=3]4d6 keep 2L[/tc]	X N(X) ‰ 2 1 0 3 10 7 4 27 20 5 68 52 6 125 96 7 222 171 8 273 210 9 260 200 10 183 141 11 106 81 12 21 16 [tc=3]4d6 keep H + 2nd lowest[/tc]	X N(X) ‰ 2 21 16 3 106 81 4 183 141 5 260 200 6 273 210 7 222 171 8 125 96 9 68 52 10 27 20 11 10 7 12 1 0 [tc=3]4d6 keep Lowest + 2nd Highest[/tc]

 

[creativehum]

Aramis, thanks for all those tables!

 

[creativehum]

Interlude: How People Looked at Traveller in 1977 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]

Interlude: How People Looked at Traveller in 1977 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.

 

[Condottiere]

The thing about creating your own setting is that it requires a little imagination but usually a lot of time to invest, whereas with a default one, you can take it as given and/or adjust it as you go along to suit current and/or expected circumstances, on a ad hoc or premeditated basis.

 

[creativehum]

The thing about creating your own setting is that it requires a little imagination but usually a lot of time to invest, whereas with a default one, you can take it as given and/or adjust it as you go along to suit current and/or expected circumstances, on a ad hoc or premeditated basis.

There is no doubt that creating one's own setting takes time. And, ultimately, I want people doing things the way they want and the way that will let them have fun. If that means playing in the Third Imperium… Awesome!

However, three things:

1) I'm still not sure that digging through lost settings are and getting a handle on it is actually that much more time saving than just making it up oneself. (See: discussions on the site about how the Third Imperium actually works. Is the Third Imperium really a setting that one can "take as a given"? In my view, no.)

2) If the default setting actually "clicks" with the referee, they probably will save time to use it. However, I have found that working with a setting that doesn't click with me requires so much work to restructure it into what I want that I would really be better off (and faster) working from scratch rather than constantly working against material that doesn't make sense to my own sensibilities. (The Third Imperium is a setting that really doesn't work for me all and works against everything I find compelling in the core rules of Little Black Books 1-3.)

3) I truly believe the beginning was one's own core principles of the setting means that as one grows out to play one will have a definitive and intuitive grasp of what matters and how the setting works as opposed to always reaching back to material generated by somebody else and wondering if one is doing the setting "right." There is no right way to run an interstellar government in the far future. There is in fact no reason to think such a thing is possible. So at the core one is probably best served by asking the questions, "What turns me on about setting a game in the stars of the settled for future? What can't I wait to share with my friends? Even if it takes time is the active invention for invention's sake worth it since there is no other reason to be involved in this hobby?"

All this comes down to a vital and fourth point:

How much information does one actually need to begin a game if the focus is actual RPG play? I discussed this in an earlier post in this thread. I think it is an issue very much worth thinking about.

 

[Condottiere]

There's Tolkien's Leaf By Niggle concept, where you start with one small area and story, and it slowly develops into a world and a mythology.

 

[mike wightman]

Thank you for posting those - lots of insightful stuff.

 

[creativehum]

There's Tolkien's Leaf By Niggle concept, where you start with one small area and story, and it slowly develops into a world and a mythology.

Without doubt.

We advise, however, that a campaign be begun slowly, following the steps outlined herein, so as to avoid becoming too bogged down with unfamiliar details at first. That way your campaign will build naturally, at the pace best suited to the referee and players, smoothing the way for all concerned. New details can be added and old "laws" altered so as to provide continually new and different situations. In addition, the players themselves will interact in such a way as to make the campaign variable and unique, and this is quite desirable.
Dungeons & Dragons, Volume 1
Men & Magic

Let's remember that in Traveller the game was designed with in-fiction limitations on travel. Between low jump drives available to the players start, and a jobs offered by patrons, the referee does not even have to develop an entire subsector if he starts his PCs in a cluster of several J1 worlds.

I have come to believe that the scenario/location is the best way to relate the setting to the players. The basic unit, if you will. It is the most efficient, immediate, and visceral way to communicate the tone, feel, culture, society of a setting. If the players are engaged with solving problems, attaining the goals, and staying alive, then who-the-whatsit sitting on the Imperial throne 60 light years away really doesn't matter at all. What matters is what the PCs can interact with in play. Now, if who was sitting on the Imperial throne has a direct and immediate (and by that I mean a direct and immediate interaction with the PCs in play) then awesome! But outside of that one has to weigh carefully how much setting detail really matters to actual RPG play.

A framework for a setting is great. A sketch of details. But focusing too much on what the players can't deal with through their PCs is, I think, a mistake.

The PCs beginning in one system, dealing with one world, offered jobs by patrons, dealing with random encounters, and more, will allow the Referee to invoke a great deal of detail just in that series of scenarios and locations. This is not done by railroading or trapping the players. If interesting things are available in that one system the players will be engaged. And random encounters are the opposite of any kind of railroading. And if the encounter tables are built properly they will say bucketloads about the setting.

The environment, the kinds of scenarios available through patrons, and the random encounters will define the setting for the players as they interact with it actively. At least one full session, if not more, can be milked from one world or scenario. And if the next scenario/location is seen as the next unit of play then again, one does not have to develop the entire universe but only enough to create an environment engaging to play in.

 

[Condottiere]

I got dropped into the village of Hommlet.

An unfortunate comment by the DM made me believe there be dragones in the dungeon.

There's also how the party gets together, which would include the default local tavern, or in our case, Mos Eisley Cantina.

 

[creativehum]

Or the group has stakes in a ship together.
Or they served together and that special ops or joint service missions together.
Or they each been contracted to work as a group by a patron and are meeting for the first time.
Or they are all loyal to a certain noble, political institution, or mercantile operation, and will work on behalf of this entity.
And more...

One of the things I LOVE about Traveller, its character generation system, and it's implied setting is that there are a bazillion ways to gather a group that never felt as arbitrary as the methods used in the typical fantasy setting.