To expand my explanation above, another potential "creep" in later Traveller was (possibly) "Military Creep"...
Again, I loved this post.
To add on...
Note that in Marc Miller's 1982 essay "Planetary Government in Traveller" found in High Passage #5, he writes:
To understand this, it is important to remember just what purpose the government factor is meant to serve. Traveller players and characters are rarely involved with governments on the international and interplanetary level. That is to say, they do not deal with kings or presidents or heads of state; they deal with individual members of broad government mechanisms, they deal with office holders and employees whose attitudes and actions are shaped by the type of government they serve. As a result, travellers are rarely interested in the upper reaches of government; they want to know what they can expect from the governmental structure at their own level. For example, if a group of travellers were to journey across the United States from coast to coast, they would be interested in the degree of responsiveness they could expect from local governments, in how easy the local court clerk would respond to information requests, or in the degree of difficulty that could be expected in obtaining certain licenses. As they moved through Nebraska, the fact that that state has a unicameral legislature would be of little or no importance.
Emphasis added.
And in this Q&A with Joe Fugate of DGP
that took place on this site in 2004, he said this:
Q: In retrospect, do you think the DGP products might have covered the OTU in a bit too much detail – leaving less for the imagination?
A Yes.
I think less detail probably would have been better. I think it would have been better to focus on a few star systems per adventure and detail them, and leave the Imperium star system positions, etc, somewhat more vague for the most part.
Provide a detailed sector once in a blue moon.
Personally, I think Traveller is designed backwards in this regard, a topic we often discussed at DGP.
Wargames are by nature, map oriented, and tend to be more sweeping in scale. Rarely do you see wargames that get down to hand-to-hand combat level. It’s most often battalions or divisions, sometimes down to companies and platoons.
But role playing games are about individual characters and what matters to them. Thats one big reason why fantasy gaming is so popular. Fantasy gaming doesn’t focus on detailing half of the known universe. Just what matters to a few characters.
So Traveller was designed with this star-spanning map mentality, not character-centric. But that’s all backwards. As a role-playing game, it should be designed from the character out. The farther you get from the character, the less detail you should be concerned with.
It’s not surprising that Traveller would have this orientation, since GDW was first a wargamming design company, and a huge-scale wargamming design company at that. Look at their Europa game series. Massive in scale and scope.
While the wargammer in me really identifies with this orientation in Traveller, I don’t think it is condusive to popular opinion in the RPG market and has somewhat “doomed” Traveller to remain a niche game.
And I’m not sure there’s much you can do about this perception now. What’s done is done. For a science-fiction role playing game to be more popular, it needs to be character-centric through and through, with rich world detail and and motivation that keeps you there for a while so you get to know it and it’s people. The galaxy spanning star charts and constant system hopping part should remain very much in the background, because that’s not role-playing, that’s wargamming.
Notice that he is discussing "creep" in the Traveller setting, exactly as Golan is.
Regardless of the merits of any given board game as a board game, once you tie board games into an RPG like
Traveller, you must, by definition, start broadening the concerns of the setting far beyond the typical concerns of an RPG.
An RPG works at the scale of the PC -- what the PC sees, hears, experiences, deals with. The concerns are the concerns of what the PCs are concerned about, with enough influence coming into play from "off screen" to keep the lives interesting. (Some will immediately read the preceding sentence as if I'm saying such off screen influences should be allowed to be chaotic, indifferent to logic or precedent. I'm not. Sit back down.)
In the 1977 edition of the game, the text states,
"Initially, one or two sub-sectors should be quite enough for years of adventure (each sub-sector has, on the average, 40 worlds)..."
This is most likely true! A group of adventures in a Jump 1 ship of weekly play is going to take a while to burn through 80 worlds. Assuming only one week per world, that's still a year and a half of play. Introduce any worlds on trade routes that are worth visiting more than once (and shouldn't some of them be that interesting?), build up relationships with NPCs and local politics, and several worlds will be worth weeks of play unto themselves. And, of course, some adventures will take more than one week to play out upon a planet.
And so, yes... one or two subsectors would be enough to keep a regularly gaming group going on a weekly basis for quit a while. That is a scale that make sense for RPG play... and easy enough to expand when needed with the addition of another subsector.
But what happens when the setting needs to split focus with the concerns of Board Games?
A series of board game about interstellar war will need many fronts to keep the games interesting. They will need large scale fleets to make the game engaging for players. It will help to have many polities of one kind or another to develop different themes.
The scale will expand. Boardgames will produce maps showing the full scale of the political situation. Suddenly there will be a need for justifying those large fleets, paying for them, and so on. A history is required, revealing shifting borders, past conflicts, and prizes worthy of strategic effort.
The focus shifts (or, as Golan puts it, "creeps.")
We're no longer trying to build content to engage a group of men and women in a Far Trader hustling under gun fire to secure goods for a patron at the edges of civilization. The early issues of the JTAS ("Starship: Annic Nova"; "Rescue on Ruie"; "Victoria"; "The Ship in the Lake"; "Asteroid Mining"; "Planetoid P-4638") focus on this kind of content, feeding a Referee information and inspiration for his own PC focused campaigns.
But in JTAS Issue #4, we get "Emperors of the Third Imperium" -- four pages of content devoted to a quick overview and history of the Third Imperium and the men and women who ruled it, all but two of them having died before the PCs were even born.
"It's needed background!" some might say. And certainly for some, depending on the kind of game they are running, it might be wonderful color to add.
But let's look back at Miller's quote from above: In his estimation the PCs will rarely be dealing with the upper reaches of planetary government. Given that, how removed is the Emperor? Especially
dead emperors going back centuries.
Again, this kind of content makes perfect sense once the scale and the requirement for the scale expand to the needs of interestallar conflicts and naval engagements. But it begins, as Golan notes, to distort the content and the concerns of the published material, shifting it from RPG/PC focus (Golan's post enumerates the elements of this focus), toward the concerns of
Trillion Credit Squadron and
Striker.
Not that there's anything wrong with this. If this is what people want, awesome!
But not everyone does want this. And that's where the shift happens. And why people harken back to Proto-Traveller
and the kind of play it promised: A focus on individuals (the PCs and the NPCs), small arms conflicts, small ship conflicts, a focus on adventures that a small band with military skills can handle, and so on.
All those elements of politics and star spanning conflicts can certainly come into play in a Proto-Traveller game. But they enter the game at the scale that they influence and affect the PCs. They come into play at the specific and human level of the adventurers.
