Traveller's direction; history and future

[whulorigan]

Another way is to say that the already established systems are all in a plane, and thus the jump distances are what they are. Unrealistic, but simple.

Any idea how you would do it?.

That is more or less the "fudge factor" that I would use for Jumps from one canonical world to another canonical world. I would assign canonical worlds a Z+/- value, but if a Jump is from one world in the T5SS to another T5SS world, I would ignore the +/- (mainly because I do not want to recalculate all of the trade routes and X-Boat routes). But if it is between two non-canonical worlds, or between a canonical (T5SS) world and a non-canonical world, I would use the proper diagonal distance (rounding fractions up).

I would let the "discrepancy" simply be an artifact of Jump Space (for simplicity).

 

[DickNervous]

I started playing Traveller back in the early 80's when I was in high school with a group of friends who also played D&D and Top Secret. About my junior year in college I started running out of time to play pen & paper RPGs for a number of reasons. I still played RPGs, just on the computer instead.

The past year or so I have gotten back to my roots as it were. Playing board games, card games, and yes, pen and paper RPGs. It started with D&D and now I am putting together my own Traveller campaign that will be starting up in the next few weeks at my local game shop. As you can imagine I have had a LOT of catching up to do with the Traveller world. Last time I played there wasn't even MegaTraveller, let alone all the other versions.

When asked to explain what makes Traveller different from games like D&D or Pathfinder to new people I tell them that there are a few key things.

1. Unlike other "traditional" RPGs, you don't start off as a "young adult" with little or no experience looking to make a name for yourself where you go out into the world and get experience and "magically" get new skills, feats, spells, abilities, whatever. Instead you pick a career, gain experience and skills, *then* head out into the galaxy to survive and thrive. If you want to "improve" yourself, you need to find the technology that can do it and buy it.

2. You can die during character creation, and it makes perfect sense.

3. You can have entire campaigns where there is no combat. Just politics or trade, or exploration. And it won't feel like something is missing.

4. While there is a MASSIVE amount of history, background, and details about the galaxy you can use for a setting, you don't have to. You can create your own sectors, planets, aliens, etc.

In a nutshell Traveller lays the groundwork for everything from a "canned" campaign in an established and highly detailed setting to anything you can dream of. The options are limited only by your immagination.

That, my friends, is what makes Traveller (in all it's forms) such an amazing game and why we are still playing it and talking about it 30+ years after those first booklets were printed out.

 

[whulorigan]

I started playing Traveller back in the early 80's when I was in high school with a group of friends who also played D&D and Top Secret. About my junior year in college I started running out of time to play pen & paper RPGs for a number of reasons. I still played RPGs, just on the computer instead.

The past year or so I have gotten back to my roots as it were. Playing board games, card games, and yes, pen and paper RPGs. It started with D&D and now I am putting together my own Traveller campaign that will be starting up in the next few weeks at my local game shop. As you can imagine I have had a LOT of catching up to do with the Traveller world. Last time I played there wasn't even MegaTraveller, let alone all the other versions.

When asked to explain what makes Traveller different from games like D&D or Pathfinder to new people I tell them that there are a few key things.

1. Unlike other "traditional" RPGs, you don't start off as a "young adult" with little or no experience looking to make a name for yourself where you go out into the world and get experience and "magically" get new skills, feats, spells, abilities, whatever. Instead you pick a career, gain experience and skills, *then* head out into the galaxy to survive and thrive. If you want to "improve" yourself, you need to find the technology that can do it and buy it.

2. You can die during character creation, and it makes perfect sense.

3. You can have entire campaigns where there is no combat. Just politics or trade, or exploration. And it won't feel like something is missing.

4. While there is a MASSIVE amount of history, background, and details about the galaxy you can use for a setting, you don't have to. You can create your own sectors, planets, aliens, etc.

In a nutshell Traveller lays the groundwork for everything from a "canned" campaign in an established and highly detailed setting to anything you can dream of. The options are limited only by your immagination.

That, my friends, is what makes Traveller (in all it's forms) such an amazing game and why we are still playing it and talking about it 30+ years after those first booklets were printed out.

Well said.

(And welcome aboard ).

 

[Blue Ghost]

Aramis; well, that's unfortunate about SFB/PD-Traveller. I imagine it was inevitable, but the temperament of the core creative forces, I think, leaves much to be desired.

Responses to people who replied to me; I did not know that Mongoose had TL20 (and below) addressed. That's pretty interesting, and I think is the blood that the game needed ages ago.

Avery stated in his interview some ten years back that people wanted background material, so that's what GDW offered them. I can only speak for myself, but even though the marketing data probably showed that, I think what us consumers wanted were new experiences for the game.

That is to say had GDW gotten the Trek license, instead of Keith / FASA, then I could have easily seen a "Traveller; Star Trek" supplement selling just as well, if perhaps not better, than say "Book 4 Mercenary".

That's not just the classic Star Trek fan in me talking either. I really do believe that such a supplement would have not only been good for the Star Trek franchise to appease Trek RPers, but the added tech base would have helped add to the whole zeitgeist of Traveller, and helped poor authors like me really write without the current canonical limits imposed on the system.

Things like Rebellion and Virus, like you guys have said, were attempts to create new frontiers, or add frontier-ism to Traveller, but wound up being canon that people either liked or dismissed with disdain. And like someone else said when the game was still evolving in the 80s the Imperium was more "defacto background if you otherwise one" to game with.

And this was the thing that got me, with all of the huge vast expanse that is the third Imperium and its neighbors, the supermajority of adventures happened either in the Marches, or in surrounding territories. And, on top of that, were limited by a limited understanding of our current tech progression; example, out here in the Bay Area, when I was a boy, I was playing with computers at the Lawrence Hall of Science in the 1970s, and when computers hit the classrooms in the late 70s and early 80s it was easy to see that this was the machine in its infancy, and that they would not become "impressive" or really good at their job until the tech could be compressed and made more feasible like the average Samsung of today. Which is what happened.

Trust me, I'm making a point here; circa 1990 or 89 my friends and I laughed at some fan Star Trek "tech manual" publications touting that the NCC 1701-A had a few terabytes of information capable of being stored. We knew what was coming down the road. Well, here we are in 2015 and terabyte terminology is routinely tossed about. Yet, if we go back to the Traveller books, that would have seemed like magic tech.

I don't fault the authors too much because they didn't live out here exposed to current tech trends (of course now everyone can keep up). What I do fault some authors with is the ability to push aside convention of what they think of as hard science verse "hard capability" of a species to create devices. And I think that hampered Traveller's development.

Another example; Star Trek the Next Generation. I hate this show. I still hate it. Classic Trek had warp speed battles, but some "fan" noted that nothing can "travel faster than the speed of light", and so the creative forces kowtowed to that observation, and literally rewrote the imagined physics of how Trek ships engaged one another (among other things). It's a slap in the face to creativity itself. Forget the merits of FTL travel, and the merits of whether it's possible in our physical reality, and think about what a great gaming tool it is to have FTL travel in Traveller, otherwise there might not be Traveller as we know it. FTL combat is another matter, but again, not addressing a tech, a story device, or some other potential challenge to established canon only cuts off and otherwise eschews potential good gaming experience.

It's why I said earlier that even though it didn't happen, I was curious why there was never "Traveller; STar Trek" or "Traveller; Star Wars" or more plainly and vanilla flavored, "Traveller; Tech Level 20" or "Traveller; Tech Level 35" or something.

If the setting is helping to define the game, then pushing story canon is the way to go, but it seems to me that Traveller might have been better off reaching for story canon by simply letting stories evolve of their own accord as opposed to stories evolving from the hard rules.

Just my take.

 

[Frankymole]

What would that do for jump distance? If everything is up or down 0-10 PC from each other, traversing the diagonal is going to be longer than the flat-plane-assumption distance.

One way is to simply say that jump distances are actually X% longer than it says on the tin, but that the relative distances between already established systems is still the same (e.g. in flatland, star systems Albert and Bobert are 2 PC from each other and thus can exchange far traders. In 3D-land, Albert is a parsec above the plane, and Bobert 1 PC below, so they are really 2.8 PC apart, but that's okay, because a J2 drive actually jumps 3 PC.)

Another way is to say that the already established systems are all in a plane, and thus the jump distances are what they are. Unrealistic, but simple.

Any idea how you would do it?



Clearly.

White Dwarf did a one-page article on 3D mapping in the 1980s, with ten-parsec-thick subsectors. There's also, inter alia, this thread entitled "The Solomani Sphere - in 3D?": http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/showthread.php?t=8014

ETA: where the heck did the ten years go since I started that thread?

 

[Frankymole]

And this search brings up a few more threads:

http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Di...searchinfo=1&photoplog_searchquery=3D+mapping

The one titled "Big Imperium, or Traveller in 3D" looks highly relevant to this thread's discussion.

 

[salochin999]

I'm not sure how plausible this is but might one way to create a "five year mission to explore..." be to have a system J6 (or whatever) up or down from the OTU plane that was obscured by some kind of nebula (or whatever) which suddenly becomes visible for some reason and a further J4 (or whatever) up or down from that system is a whole sector that was never explored by the Ancients and not seeded.

That could be an idea for a misjump also - not lost in space but lost above or below space in an unexplored sector trying to find a way home.

 

[DickNervous]

I'm not sure how plausible this is but might one way to create a "five year mission to explore..." be to have a system J6 (or whatever) up or down from the OTU plane that was obscured by some kind of nebula (or whatever) which suddenly becomes visible for some reason and a further J4 (or whatever) up or down from that system is a whole sector that was never explored by the Ancients and not seeded.

That could be an idea for a misjump also - not lost in space but lost above or below space in an unexplored sector trying to find a way home.

There are a number of ways you can "find" an uncharted sector to base a campaign on, some of which I know have been done:

1. Simply just create a sector and "attach" it to the edge of known space. Viola! Uncharted sector to explore.

2. Horribly failed jump.

3. Wormhole.

4. "Hey, whats on the other side of a black hole?" "I dunno, let's find out!"

5. Test new drive tech like, oh, an Infinite Improbability Drive, and end up "somewhere".

6. Discovery of new jump drive technology that allows for 2 jumps (then drive needs to be replaced) of up to 10 parsecs. This opens up new territory on the edges of known space.

7. And if you don't like any of those, then just pick a region of "known" space and re-roll the planets so now they are unknown.

The thing you need to remember is that the "rules" for *any* RPG are just guidelines, a framework. The only reason to stick to them 100% is if you want to have "your universe" interact with "my universe". Then we both need to play by the same rules, but even those don't need to be the ones published by GDW, Mongoose, FFE, or whoever.

 

[mike wightman]

I have seen explanations that jump space is a one parsec thick flat plane in our universe that means you have to jump in that plane.

Systems do indeed exist above and below, but you would have to use STL drives to get there and back.

Misjumps could end up with you being above or below our jump plane (does a jump drive work if you end up in a system not connected to the jump plane?).

There could be regions of space where adjacent jump planes meet allowing transit from one plane to the other.

Beyond Imperial TL there could be jump gates or jump engines allowing access to the other planes - lots of possibilities.

Or you could just ditch the flat universe and design subsectors in 3d for YTU

 

[wbyrd]

Traveller is something rare today. At it's heart it is a Generation One role playing game. At it's core was the idea of a small band of misfits and veterans off to make a living in space. Their cunning plans to get rich routinely interrupted by events they want nothing to do with.

That idea, has survived through five incarnations and kept a core of payers loyal for decades. Iuf you look at the corpses of games littering the field, it's impressive that Traveller has survived at all.

Now it is showing it's age a bit. The canon world needs some updating to keep in step with the massive changes in technology that occurred in the past 30 years. Back in the early 80s the computers, electronics, and robots of Traveller were way beyond what I thought possible. Now...well not they look "quaint"


Personally I think a bit of catch up in some of the trappings would be useful, However keeping the jump drive as it is would be no problem. Jump lag, and slow communications, force players to consider there moves/routes, and introduces a bit of uncertainty. It also makes it possible to keep one jump ahead of (or behind) the opposition.

faster than light communication, and fast jumps would alter the feel of the setting. Worlds would no longer be largely isolated, islands in the sea of space, they'd be the next town down the road.

of course that's my personal opinion...that and a few dollars will get you a cup of coffee.

 

[aramis]

A
That is to say had GDW gotten the Trek license, instead of Keith / FASA, then I could have easily seen a "Traveller; Star Trek" supplement selling just as well, if perhaps not better, than say "Book 4 Mercenary".

The Kieth Brothers were not FASA. They had their own label: Gamelords.

 

[Frankymole]

There are a number of ways you can "find" an uncharted sector to base a campaign on, some of which I know have been done:

1. Simply just create a sector and "attach" it to the edge of known space. Viola! Uncharted sector to explore.

2. Horribly failed jump.

3. Wormhole.

4. "Hey, whats on the other side of a black hole?" "I dunno, let's find out!"

Fighting Fantasy Gamebook #4 "Starship Traveller"! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Traveller

 

[Frankymole]

Now it is showing it's age a bit. The canon world needs some updating to keep in step with the massive changes in technology that occurred in the past 30 years. Back in the early 80s the computers, electronics, and robots of Traveller were way beyond what I thought possible. Now...well not they look "quaint"

Possibly, but people underestimate the infrastructure required to make things work. Like Satnav, say - GPS is turn-offable at the whim of the military of one country, and certainly wouldn't be available to Travellers in wilderness systems, unless they're able to instigate a massive satellite building programme. Similar, iPhones/cellphones/internet just aren't going to work outside "civilisation".

The "age of sail" analogy still has to apply, with as you say comms limited to speed of travel and the "island universes" of civilisation clusters. Space is big, tech is small.

 

[mike wightman]

There will soon be at least 3 GPS systems, the USA version, the EU version and the Russian system. Then there are the Chinese and Indian systems.

By TL9 a ship could easily carry a few communication satellites for use in a backwater system that lacks its own infrastructure. The commo tech on the satellite needn't cost all that much - it's more a case of how much it costs to get it into orbit (trivial by TL9).

There are already African nations that have no landline based phone or internet, instead they use mobile masts and Wi-Fi.

By TL9 an awful lot of the technological infrastructure you say is limiting will be trivially simple to build.

I do agree that somwhere you need a TL9+ world to build this stuff, but commo, GPS, surveillance satellite net tech should be the first thing a scout/courier places in orbit around a new world to be explored.

Or they could use grav platform based tech high up to give a local commo footprint (google google's plans for airship based commo/GPS/Wi-Fi).

 

[salochin999]

I have seen explanations that jump space is a one parsec thick flat plane in our universe that means you have to jump in that plane.

Systems do indeed exist above and below, but you would have to use STL drives to get there and back.

Misjumps could end up with you being above or below our jump plane (does a jump drive work if you end up in a system not connected to the jump plane?).

There could be regions of space where adjacent jump planes meet allowing transit from one plane to the other.

Beyond Imperial TL there could be jump gates or jump engines allowing access to the other planes - lots of possibilities.

Or you could just ditch the flat universe and design subsectors in 3d for YTU

That's a neat explanation - jump drives working along planes and switching planes requires either being at the intersections or misjumps.

 

[wbyrd]

Possibly, but people underestimate the infrastructure required to make things work. Like Satnav, say - GPS is turn-offable at the whim of the military of one country, and certainly wouldn't be available to Travellers in wilderness systems, unless they're able to instigate a massive satellite building programme. Similar, iPhones/cellphones/internet just aren't going to work outside "civilisation".

The "age of sail" analogy still has to apply, with as you say comms limited to speed of travel and the "island universes" of civilisation clusters. Space is big, tech is small.

I undersand the complexity of the support network even a small system requires..lBut the bulk of the expense and difficulty we encounter is the fact that wee have onloy had many advanced luxuries of a technical sort for 30 or so years. Heck I'm old enough to remember bag phones, and the day when a 300 baud modem were cutting edge...actually when I sat down at my first computer there wasn't a terrabyte of storage on the planet much less setting on my desk next to me.( yeah I'm that old...pass me my geritol, and get off my lawn )

Satellites are relatively cheap compared to proper spacecraft. And they can be produced, shipped and deployed by any world capable of building small craft. The same ship that delivers a dozen or so GPS sats and a dozen or so comm sats could deploy them with minimal cost and effort.

The real cost of a satellite network isn't the individual satellites. It's getting them into the proper orbit. a factory mass producing satellites would reduce the per unit cost to a level around the same cost as a grav car.

Anyone with few megacredits to spare could afford to deploy a very nice network of survey, communication, and navigation satellites...the central supply catalog has survey satellites available on the open market for 1oo K credits,and nav-sats available for 35 K.

It might even be profitable for a private company to have dedicated ships to deploy, and maintain, sat systems for smaller worlds. A single 100 ton scout courier could launch a swarm of small sats in short order, then pop off to the next system to repair a faulty nav sat.

"Hey frank..that Nova 2190 sat array over C-sigma is out again fly over and fix it....and if they are fiddling with it themselves again...charge them an extra service fee this time..geesh fraking locals ."

It's conceivable that even a small world..a few tens of thousands could have very modern conveniences in the core settlement including cell phones, sat phones, local internet etc... I mean lets face it some third world countries with 1920s sewer systems have internet...Should I mention that a certain small isolated,m and backwards nation just managed a cyber attack when most the county doesn't have reliable utilities..

Long story short that's one area I feel Traveller may need to be updated in. The ease of use, and availability, of what we consider common tech is not carried over to a civilization several thousand years down the road.

Now that's not hard to patch, it just needs a bit of work and maybe some whizzy words tossed in to the world description. Maybe some cost adjustments to certain devices, and additional capabilities added to others.

It would be time consuming, and a pain in the neck to rewrite a lot of gadgets, and gizmos, but would not require a major overhaul of the universe, or the political structure of the Setting. Simply some "set dressing" which is often half the fun of a game.

 

[salochin999]

Long story short that's one area I feel Traveller may need to be updated in. The ease of use, and availability, of what we consider common tech is not carried over to a civilization several thousand years down the road.

One thing to bear in mind with that is there have been multiple collapse events along the way (and many wars) so a lot of those TL7 backwater planets might be covered in the ruins of the TL12 society they had many thousands years earlier or the still irradiated ruins of the society they had before the big war with a neighboring system a thousand years earlier.

Looked at that way the current alpha planets in the OTU are the *survivors* of past chaos rather than the front runners in a smooth, orderly progression.

I agree with your general point though and combined with the "gone backwards" point leads me to generally assume TL is a mixture i.e. a TL7 planet might be mostly TL7 but with a bare bones skeleton of space-related TL12 put there by the Imperium (a few orbital comms satellites etc) plus elements of the planetary government or other power structure having imported tech so the president and bodyguards might have gravs even if most of the population are using horses.

 

[rancke]

I agree with your general point and combined with the "gone backwards" point leads me to generally assume TL is a mixture i.e. a TL7 planet might be mostly TL7 but with a space-related TL12 skeleton put there by the Imperium (orbital comms satellites etc) plus elements of the planetary government or other power structure having imported tech so the president and bodyguards might have gravs even if most of the population are using horses.

My take is that the mid-tech worlds don't earn a lot of interstellar credits and what they do earn is mostly spent on imports for the military and the planetary elite. So you can find grav vehicles on a TL7 world, but only in the hands of the rich and the powerful (or on loan to their minions).


Hans

 

[salochin999]

My take is that the mid-tech worlds don't earn a lot of interstellar credits and what they do earn is mostly spend on imports for the military and the planetary elite. So you can find grav vehicles on a TL7 world, but only in the hands of the rich and the powerful (or on loan to their minions).


Hans

Yes which seems quite plausible if you take on board the idea of advanced systems not needing to import raw materials as much as advanced nations do on earth. Once you take that away a low tech world doesn't have much to sell - although probably enough to buy luxuries for the rich / powerful.

 

[aramis]

Looking at TL 6/7 worlds in specific...

These worlds are too low to contribute tech to the Imperium.

They're too low to build ships of note

Based upon the tech paradigms in MT/TNE/GT, their people require extensive retraining to work even TL12 ships... so they're not a significant labor pool for the Imperial Military, and they're a rough go for merchant crews... but once retrained, probably won't go back until retirement.

They can provide base level service industry labor - janitors, domestics, stevedores, waitstaff, Script-following tech support, sex-workers, and nannies. The demand, however, is going to be reduced (for all but sex-workers) by the need to train them to a minimum standard of ability to function in the high tech environment.

They can provide agricultural goods, if there's a market interested in getting them.

They can provide life support "recharges" (food, water, lubricants, cleansers, seal replacements, air scrubbers, linens), refined fuel, and traffic control, so they can have a reasonable class C starport on local tech alone.

They can provide a cheap alternative recording industry. Note that Bollywood is starting to fill this role, as are several Mexican studios; the BBC and CTV recording systems provided a good bit of content to the US, undercutting the US market prices, due to their low budget operations. Just fine for historical dramas and other low/no FX efforts.

Raw Materials can bring a pretty penny, too.

But, in general, these worlds are likely to be nearly self-sufficient if they can be. Since they have so little to provide, they damned near have to be.