Traveller's direction; history and future
- Thread starter Blue Ghost
- Start date
Touché!
Oh, and that made me laugh...a lot.
Na, you have always had a better knowledge of Canon. I know when I am whooped.Now, now, Craig, surely you mean as good a canonista as me.
Hans
Oh, and that made me laugh...a lot.
a simple d&d mediaeval town and nearby dungeon could be done in a day, mostly. a single tech 12 starport - characters, legal/laws, culture, physical - would take at least a week to outline sketch. a tech 12 city - characters, legal/laws, culture, physical - would take a month. an entire planet - characters, legal/laws, culture, physical, history, interplanetary relationships - could take years to fully prep. an entire multi-system empire would be the work of a lifetime.
it's simply easier to leverage other peoples' work.
I totally don't agree with this. I'm one of those other kind of referees.
I think I'm with Shonner on this. All you need are the pertinent areas that the characters will visit, not the whole planet or solar system, much less anything beyond where the players are likely to visit.
yeah, if they stay there. mine never do.
I don't mean draw up everything in detail. that is impossible. I mean just the broad general outlines, so you have some idea of how to react and what to say besides "uh, well, just a minute ...." when the players decide to go outside your plans.
what are the local corporations? how do you say hello? do you talk to the women or will that get you killed? what are the local religions, if any? is that pet tame? is weather a factor? is the local populace hostile to foreigners? any local diseases that concern you?
yeah, you can ignore most of that, but then after a while your adventures all start looking like airports - can't really tell which one you're in unless you read the sign.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
There are happy mediums, but even those can sometimes be a challenge to find.
One of the reasons an over-arching structure like the Imperium is handy is that there are often regional answers to those local questions. "Who runs the general store in this backwater?" "Some guy operates an LSP-Sears franchise. He has some stuff, but the catalog terminal against one wall tells you he has a three-to-five week delivery time on off-world stuff."
And if they want to know the guy's name, you flip open a phonebook.
Doing too much of this in advance runs the risk of the proprietor, the store, and its branding all ending up as notes you forget you wrote up a month later.
Yeah, there's a lot to be said for making stuff up on the fly. Notes for good GMing comes down to setting and event, and maybe important NPCs, but not much beyond that.
I did just as John had written for one gaming session. I jotted down copious notes, but when it came time to run the adventure I had forgotten everything except for the fact that there was an attack on a Marava class merchant.
I did just as John had written for one gaming session. I jotted down copious notes, but when it came time to run the adventure I had forgotten everything except for the fact that there was an attack on a Marava class merchant.
You could set up a basic "rumour table" with a randomly determined fact about the place if the characters attempt to find out something about the town other than what is in your adventure plans (along with the potential chance that it is innaccurate).
Enoff
SOC-13
I thought I first bought Traveller when it came out in '78 but I believe I might have a year later. I think it was seeing the adventures and JTAS issues along on the shelves that intrigued me that here was a whole D&D sci-fi world to explore. So Traveller and the OTU are inseparable to me. I had gotten into other things when the Shattered Imperium and Virus came out, I thought those had ruined everything but I can see their value now. With that said I am pretty focused on the CT universe and the Fifth Frontier War and think of those futures as possibilities but not how it will be necessarily.
I think I'm with Shonner and Blue Ghost on this. And I'll go one further: you only need to sketch out the situations and important (to you) NPCs, and let the players solve the problems and create new ones. For everything else, rely on every space pulp trope you like. Mos Eisley Spaceport (now with 14% more scum and villainy!) Niska's orbital Skyplex, or Persephone Down. Deep Space Nine. Heck, you could make "The Love Boat" work if you had to -- it worked, sort of, for The Fifth Element, and the Hitchhiker's Guide.
ok, here's the $64 problem with this approach. the "pertinent areas" are all interconnected and the assumption/consequence chain is endless. for example, your players meet "a naval officer". well ... why is this guy an officer? is it a family connection, or something else? does he have hobbies? is he popular or unpopular - with the enlisted or with command? he's from "a remote naval base". well ... is the base commander competent or is he there because he's incompetent? how's morale, and are the rest of the personnel taking advantage of any situation? and just what is the naval culture at this particular base anyway - is it regimental with its own history and culture and ships, or is it cookie-cutter "imperial" (whatever that is)? and just why is this officer not at his naval base? what is he doing, why, and who needs to be paid?
or try this. I casually toss out that the players are passing a commercial cargo ship belonging to the company one of the players worked for during chargen, and one of them just announces out of the blue that he comm links an old friend of ten years and starts having a conversation with her. perfectly legitimate. ok ... what is this company? what are their specialties, what do they normally ship, what are their routes? who is this person, what obligations would she feel or not feel? hey ... maybe this guy owes her a debt! (he makes things up, I make things up, yes?)
my point is that making up all of this entirely from scratch is a big job, but having other people's work (such as "the imperium") to provide a base for the necessary innumerable general assumption/consequence chains is very helpful, and having a large body of more specific pre-worked assumption/consequence chains worked out in advance is even more helpful.
elsewhere I drew up a cultural traits table for pre-game prep generation of various cultures. roll five or six times, note any special traits. here is a small sample.
d6d6, 2d6
11
clothing
2 extreme aversion to any exposed skin or mandatory dressing up according to occasion
3-4 rigorous clothing etiquette
5-9 unremarkable
10-11 little clothing or very relaxed
12 mandatory nudity
12
pets
2 no animals in any human space at any time
3-4 zoos only
5-9 unremarkable
10-11 extreme popularity of companion animals
12 animal companion mandatory
13
property
2 no private property of any kind
3-4 personal portable possessions only
5-9 standard mix of private/public property
10-11 almost everything privately owned, little public property
12 absolute feudalism, everything and everyone has personal owner
etc
d6d6, 2d6
11
clothing
2 extreme aversion to any exposed skin or mandatory dressing up according to occasion
3-4 rigorous clothing etiquette
5-9 unremarkable
10-11 little clothing or very relaxed
12 mandatory nudity
12
pets
2 no animals in any human space at any time
3-4 zoos only
5-9 unremarkable
10-11 extreme popularity of companion animals
12 animal companion mandatory
13
property
2 no private property of any kind
3-4 personal portable possessions only
5-9 standard mix of private/public property
10-11 almost everything privately owned, little public property
12 absolute feudalism, everything and everyone has personal owner
etc
salochin999
SOC-13
That's the way I like to do it nowadays - i used to write reams of background which never got used - don't specify too much at the beginning instead create some random method or rules of thumb and then if the players want to move away from whatever adventure you created then map it as they go.
None of that matters unless it particularly matters.
I don't know jack squat about a naval officer I just met in summer charlie (office working) uniform other than his phenotype, rank, whether he's sub, surface, space, or aviator, and maybe his name. If he's in summer alpha or beta, I know a whole lot more about what kind of officer he might be - because of being able to read the fruit salad.
Unless there's a story reason (like PC's wanting to blackmail him), none of that matters a bit.
You're looking for details in the wrong places.
What I need to know about an NPC isn't the why, just the what: What can he do? What does he have? What does it cost to bribe him?
When the PC's ask if he's got skeletons they can find, then, and only then, do I need to decide that. (Usually, blackmailable background is going to correlate to age... Maybe 1/6 chance per term (or fraction)... roll as many dice as his terms, look for 1's. The more 1's, the bigger the issue.
If, however, I need a corrupt officer for story reasons, he's corrupt. Period. Then figure out what kind of corrupt, and if the PC's can find it.
Proper use of randomness can make the massive prep far less essential.
Judicious use of "Say yes" can also do so.
The massive depth of the setting is not best described as a crutch nor a noose - it's a corset. Sure, it cuts the breathing room, but it makes it look hot and supports the spine nicely...
I can't recall if it was in this thread or another I said it, but my idea of the minimum level of information players in SF game is entitled to is that of The Traveller Adventure and Sworld Worlds. With selected parts (like the home base) worked out in greater detail. And that takes a lot of work to come up with.
Having a reasonably detailed setting is also one of the two best ways to come up with adventures: think about the setting and come up with plots to fit. (The other way is to think of a plot and come up with a setting for it
).
Hans
Having a reasonably detailed setting is also one of the two best ways to come up with adventures: think about the setting and come up with plots to fit. (The other way is to think of a plot and come up with a setting for it
).Hans
the why is .90 of the what. if all you care about is the immediately relevant "what" then I can see the concern to limit detail and pre-planning. but the "why" not only requires pre-planning but also guides it and makes it possible, and also makes in-game response possible.
ah ... I see. you control your games. in my games the players are in control. certainly they tend to follow my lead, but they decide what they do, not me. and this means that my characters/settings/worlds cannot be mere one-game-session props, but must be their own real people/cultures/civilizations, as real as I can make them.
Stan Shinn answered questions like this for me, for the rest of my gaming days:
Is he an important NPC to you? Then you've written a three sentence backstory about him. Otherwise, he just has a name, and maybe the players can suggest things about him further.
The next one is better, though.
Let the player expand on the theme, and he'll hand you plot hooks left and right. And you get to decide which ones to follow.
Is he an important NPC to you? Then you've written a three sentence backstory about him. Otherwise, he just has a name, and maybe the players can suggest things about him further.
The next one is better, though.
This is where the player is obligated to tell us about his old friend. Let him tell that story. And also, let him explain when the two characters parted, and under what circumstances. Did they part as good friends, or was there a division in interests at some point? A girl, for example, could imply a jilted lover. Or perhaps she was offended at his willingness to embezzle funds from the company?
Let the player expand on the theme, and he'll hand you plot hooks left and right. And you get to decide which ones to follow.
Since the players set the tone and solve the problems, let them help set the stage as well. They can help enormously. Between you and them, the tone can be kept at whatever level it's supposed to be at.
That's fine if your player happens to be the creative type. But what if he isn't? How should he know the company's specialities, what they normally ship, its routes? And what do you do if he comes up with stuff that just doesn't fit with your ideas about the setting? Do you shoot him down or do you retcon your own ideas? No, the company is not a major passenger line servicing Forboldn, because Forboldn doesn't have enough passenger traffic to support a major passenger line; there's one small regular ship visiting Forboldn every 60 days and otherwise it's free traders.
There's a level of information below which it's fine to let players make up their own stuff (subject to referee veto, of course ("No, your friend is not a native of Algine"). But there's equally a level of information above which players should ask the referee for the name of "a major passenger line servicing the important worlds in the subsector where my friend works".
Of course, if the referee (or the setting writer) hasn't worked out the major freight and passenger lines of the subsector, he's free to tell the player to make something up.
Hans
what in fact I prefer. ref and players working together. but this only succeeds if the ref has a significant background in mind already, and simultaneously this constrains the players.
for example one of the players was an ex-con. to increase this player's involvement I decided on the fly that the naval officer in question was a drug addict, and told the player the clues his character picked up on. this led to major issues in the game, but/and it ran very well. but this only worked because 1) I already had some idea of who and what this officer was and 2) I already had some idea of the conditions of his service and deployment of his assigned unit another world away, and 3) why this officer was where he was. it never would have worked otherwise.
then he simply fits into what I have - and if I've done my job then I already in fact have something (which, in this case, I did, and quite a bit). I've had several players do very very well at this, running characters with minimal player lead but simply responding in-character.
