CT Only: What One Thing Would You Change About Classic Traveller?

[Spinward Flow]

verse the culturally unified samurai cats. That, and at the time we didn't know much about the Aslan.

I've done a little cursory diving into the wiki pages for the Aslan and ... hoo boy ... does it seem like the clans are a proverbial mosh pit, politically speaking. Pretty much EVERY clan has at least 1 other clan as an enemy. The only thing that unifies them towards a common purpose/goal are external threats ... the rest of the time they're squabbling with each other over living space, access to resources, etc.

The culture is also inherently expansionist starting at the biological level ... 3 females for every 1 male and the males have an instinctive compulsion to hold and own LAND. Technically speaking, asteroids and planetoids (with habitats) can count as "land" to the Aslan, but only planets offer the kind of living space worthy of the highest ranking Noble Males.

So the imperatives built into the Aslan are quite impressive, in their own way.
Thinking of them as "samurai cats" might be a bit too simplistic and overly reductive. They have a LOT of potential as a playable non-human species, I'm thinking.

 

[mike wightman]

People read about the Aslan, especially the fanon, and think Kzinti, Samurai Pizza Cats and Kilrathi. The truth is they are not cat people, have no Samurai tradition and are probably better modelled by reading CJ Cherry's novels that include the Hani.

Here is the wikidepia article detailing the Hani:

The Chanur novels - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[mike wightman]

And another one thing to change - reduce the size of the setting so that the various Alien races become relevant. There is only so much credibility stretching to have a wandering Hiver Federation embassy vessel touring the Spinward Marches - and while at it do not completey surrounf the Third Imperium, give a few avenues for exploration.

 

[Blue Ghost]

I've done a little cursory diving into the wiki pages for the Aslan and ... hoo boy ... does it seem like the clans are a proverbial mosh pit, politically speaking. Pretty much EVERY clan has at least 1 other clan as an enemy. The only thing that unifies them towards a common purpose/goal are external threats ... the rest of the time they're squabbling with each other over living space, access to resources, etc.

The culture is also inherently expansionist starting at the biological level ... 3 females for every 1 male and the males have an instinctive compulsion to hold and own LAND. Technically speaking, asteroids and planetoids (with habitats) can count as "land" to the Aslan, but only planets offer the kind of living space worthy of the highest ranking Noble Males.

So the imperatives built into the Aslan are quite impressive, in their own way.
Thinking of them as "samurai cats" might be a bit too simplistic and overly reductive. They have a LOT of potential as a playable non-human species, I'm thinking.

Possibly, but I'm thinking that's how they were conceived. They come across as a space faring medieval Japan, only they superficially resemble lions.

Eh, there really isn't one thing that I would change. I have a whole list of things I would change, but I've already listed them on other threads.

Back in the few years before middle school and up through high school, there was more than just your usual sense of wonder about the world, For me the cover art and the novel cover art for the genre really helped accentuate and spark interest in the game. I never liked Keith's sketches, but I always liked Dietrick's stuff. So, more Dietrick, and less or no Keith art.

So, straighten out the rules and tweak the art.

 

[gchuck]

Get rid of the combat matrices and replace them with an armour as damage reduction system - see AHL, Striker, MT, T4 all of which have easily adaptable systems, although I go with T4 for my CT+

And now for something that isn't a change as such - replace the missing section from 77 CT that explains that skill throws are not set in tablets of stone and that the referee should make stuff up.

Combat! The SLOWEST part of the game!

 

[whulorigan]

. . . do not completely surround the Third Imperium, give a few avenues for exploration.

THIS. And all you would really need to do is move one or two of the exisiting major polities farther "off-shore" (so to speak) by several sectors, or tweak some of their borders, so that they do not directly abut the Third Imperium's borders.

 

[Gray Lensman]

Not really a tweak and I didn't try to read the whole thread but I would like to see a version "fixed" with all the compliled errata.

 

[mike wightman]

Some of the errata makes CT worse - looking at you skills capped by Int+Edu rule.

 

[Blue Ghost]

And now for something that isn't a change as such - replace the missing section from 77 CT that explains that skill throws are not set in tablets of stone and that the referee should make stuff up.

I believe this was also in The Big Black Book, and it annoyed us to no end, especially me since I ran a slim majority of the sessions.

I can't tell you how many times I said "Roll under your dex, with your skill as a negative DM..." or roll under or over some attribute depending on the situation. In all honesty I should have put Traveller down and moved onto the James Bond RPG or something else. But, like I say, it was the artistry of the genre and how Traveller hooked back into the general vibe of the genre as it stood in the 70s and 80s.

I don't know what else to say about it. To me this and the armor mechanic were key issues. It's my personal opinion that this was part of a "let's see what the players come up with" kind of thinking. It almost angers me.

 

[Spinward Flow]

and while at it do not completey surround the Third Imperium, give a few avenues for exploration.

THIS. And all you would really need to do is move one or two of the exisiting major polities farther "off-shore" (so to speak) by several sectors, or tweak some of their borders, so that they do not directly abut the Third Imperium's borders.

Actually, the easiest way to do that would be to presumably "rewind the clock" back to earlier times before the currently known polities expanded to completely fill up their share of the map. Go back far enough and the Solomani are bigger than they are in 1105 (and not just because of the Rule of Man era), while other groups are also smaller (because they haven't expanded out quite so far yet.

Downside to that direction is that some regions of space got settled MULTIPLE CENTURIES ago according to the OTU timelines, so you might have to go back an Imperium (or two) before 1105 to reach an era where the different major races have more frontier around each of them.

But I do agree that it seems kind of silly to have an IISS Exploration arm for a region of Charted Space within Jump-2 Scout/Courier range completely, totally and utterly explored already. The irony is that LBB A4 Leviathan actually had as a major feature of the adventure the hook of "To Boldly Go To Trade Where No One Has Traded Before" going on in it (with a starship that was more backup systems than cargo hold in a supposed merchant ship). So the exploration of the map was a part of the adventure in the Egyrn and Pax Rulin subsectors of the Trojan Reaches (which was aster incognita at the time that LBB A4 was written).

 

[aramis]

Reducing the size of the setting and leaving unexplored space around the primary setting polity are directly at odds with each other, since empires have always expanded to the lower of neighbor's border or 6 months travel round trip...
If you have a smaller setting, you need some barrier to prevent the neighbors from grabbing all the borders. And if you have such a boundary, it impedes exploration.

 

[whartung]

I don't understand why the existence (or not) of a polity inhibits exploration. If you hand wave away bureaucracy (i.e. "oh, sorry, you need permits to explore the wilderness areas"), what does it matter? Why do you have to be on the fringe of lawlessness to do...anything?

And you don't have to wave off the bureaucracy. It's just, most of the time, either make work or a felony with consequences. And that can be "not fun". I can see why it's no fun to explore some ruins on a distant world, and bring them back only to have someone from the Antiquities Bureau showing up demand proof of permits or seizing your finds.

Nor is a mercenary campaign very fun if, afterwards, you're being hunted for War Crimes (deserved or not). But, there's a lot of room for all of that even in a "civilized" society to where that level of society does not have to be imposed to burden the adventure.

We have a LOT of unexplored land on this planet alone. Areas still unmapped in detail. Expand that to a star faring society where smaller communities only inhabit a fraction of a strange world and there's endless opportunities.

 

[aramis]

And yet, @whartung, we have only one small not quite uninhabitable continent of unclaimed land, and constant squabbles over the rest.

Plus lots of claims on the ocean.

Reducing it to basest levels: Unless the neighbors are far enough apart that they're already hit the control limit, they're going to flow around your polity until they do. Assuming they even recognize your polity and its sovereignty. If they are at the distance, they will be generating client states around the edges which will flow around your borders. An open unexplored border is an incredibly unstable situation. It boiled over in North America from both edges (Russians and Spaniards in the west, English, French, Dutch, and Spanish from the East.

And, almost two millenia before that, Rome expanded across the local tribes of Celts, first in northwestern Italy, then Gaul, then into Spain and England.

The Chin expanded to the limits of communication, and even beyond... imposing a set of cultural norms that created the client stats which still exist today, tho' not all as client states since the 1400's CE. And the Mongols reunited that empire, and then rampaged west, establishing client states, many of which we still recognize as nations, some of which are even polities to this day.

THe Inca extended as far as they could... The Aztech were still expanding when Smallpox killed more than half. The Cherokee, Navajo, Sioux, and other such groups expanded to meet each other's borders... and when a slihtly higher tech empire landed, after the smallpox and other plagues, wiped over the remaining indigenous, creating client states that many of the users of the board still live in... which are no longer clients, but still states (political) exist, and they even spawned clients (such as Deseret and Tejas)... and then swallowed them back up.

Unexplored terrain doesn't remain such for long.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Unexplored terrain doesn't remain such for long.

Not if there's a means of transport to get there and navigation skills/tools for getting back.

 

[Condottiere]

1. Depends on how porous space and borders are in Chartered Space.

2. Aslan are leologically lions; culturally, you could play them as clannish Samurai Cats, which might be a natural development as competition for land and waifus heat up.

 

[infojunky]

People read about the Aslan, especially the fanon, and think Kzinti, Samurai Pizza Cats and Kilrathi. The truth is they are not cat people, have no Samurai tradition and are probably better modelled by reading CJ Cherry's novels that include the Hani.

Damn it, you stole my answer.

I really like the handling of gender relations in the latter books. It gives Males who aren’t Alphas a out.

Also a idea is that the closer to habitable the more effort is to clam it. Meaning there worlds out there that are claimed by clan maybe. And the more tractable males might be sent there as they can figure out to live in technica environment. I.e. starting the game with both Independence and Tolerance.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Way back when I first cracked one of the LBBs on the display rack, the thing that came across to me as I read the text was that the game was a suggested framework or set of tools to create your own setting, and it gave you elements of what was to become the OTU as a quick and dirty optional backdrop should you need it.

The whole thing read like a recipe off the back of a box of rice or cereal or something; i.e. "You can use this...you may want to use that...whatever you use to get across space, whatever you call it, you use the Jump Drive mechanic rules..." and so forth.

If I were to get back into it, and I'm not going to, I would like to see that kind of framework come back. Someone brought up Leviathan, and that's about as Generic proto-Traveller gaming next to Adventure Zero. The Imperium was not set in stone, you and the group were mapping your own subsector, you generated worlds as you blazed a trail for new trade routes, and the ship itself looked like something out of the Terran Trade Authority, or something that was out of some science fiction setting other than the game's then Proto-Setting.

As more LBBs were published and the game took on a kind of coherence for the official setting, it lost some of its generic sweetness. Suddenly you were in the outer-space version of Greyhawk as opposed to just interstellar space that could reference someplace called "The Imperium" should you need it.

The early generic kind of frame work, for me at least, really helped encourage people to get involved with it. When more and more concrete aspects to the OTU came about ... a lot of that magic was lost, and it's my opinion that that lost a lot of people because they possibly felt that they couldn't homebrew The Martian Chronicles, homebrew Star Trek, homebrew Space 1999, and so forth.

For the millionth time I do understand the game's intent a lot better now, I'm not really thrilled about gaming the scifi genre, but I still think you need to service the player base with rules and a background that are a little more grounded and open.

As I bought more supplements for other games, notably Car Wars and SFB, on a personal basis there was a kind of explorative element to those games, and addons that people published. Traveller had that feeling early on, but lost it more and more with each new LBB that shed more light on the Imperium. And then it got to the point where the Imperium itself was geographically surrounded by other states, and that sense of being able to explore "unexplored" space.

And I bring up the Terran Trade Authority, but there was more art than just the TTA books. There was a whole community of scifi and fantasy artists at that time that Traveller hooked into. So you could see some of the abstract book covers at the book store, and that might give you an idea to create a scenario or session for your group.

I appreciate the Imperium, I've had a good time reading about it, it's neighbors and everything else, but during some of my later years it almost became a chore of conjuring adventures or scenarios. Imagine you're in a D&D campaign, and suddenly TSR only publishes Greyhawk adventures or things set in Greyhawk, and you can't use anything else. That's how it felt when the Imperium was set in concrete. And I think ultimately that's why we left it.

With SFB, Car Wars, Ogre, ... Champions or any other game, you had options because the game was the framework. Even SFB, even though it had the Star Trek as a default setting, the original Star Trek setting was wide and open enough that you could game in it without feeling restricted.

I know I get verbose when I post on this game, but I think this is kind of a key issue. Like I've said I don't do the game anymore, and I've wondered why I had an almost love-hate relationship with it at times. If it wasn't the lack of a task system, then it was the no-armor mechanic for personal combat. If it wasn't that, then it was the restriction on starship design. If it wasn't that, then it was the openess of the game's setting giving yield to the OTU. And when MT came around the armor verse hit mechanic didn't make up for the fact that the game suddenly became all about background material, a massive civil war that I couldn't wrap my head around, the murder of a head of state that we hardly ever referenced during the LBB era, and on top of that, in spite of the Rebellion sourcebook, there were hardly any official adventures published.

It went from being an open ended game with a lot of suggestions, to something that required lots of errata and addendum, and was predominantly about the OTU. That's my observation, and it feels pretty good to get that monkey off my back. I hope I haven't offended anyone here, but those are my thoughts. I really struggled with why I wasn't able to get inspired to write for the system like I wanted to when Hunter offered the opportunity, and at the same time still wanted to add to it.

Anyway, there you go.

 

[Spinward Flow]

As more LBBs were published and the game took on a kind of coherence for the official setting, it lost some of its generic sweetness. Suddenly you were in the outer-space version of Greyhawk as opposed to just interstellar space that could reference someplace called "The Imperium" should you need it.

I see what you're getting at.
It's basically a case of "room for homebrew" where the rules enable almost anything and the setting is optional ... rather than the setting being the primary focus with the rules confined to operating within that setting almost exclusively.

It's one of the hazards of game design, knowing that there have to be limits (somewhere) ... whether that be the edge of a map, the limitations of tech levels (and everything those imply in a sci-fi genre) or even the ease of acquisition/loss of "loot" (see: Monty Haul campaign).

Due to the space limitations of LBB 1-3, there simply wasn't room to detail an official game setting in tremendous detail (like you can do now with online tools such as Campfire Blaze that can keep track of EVERYTHING in a setting for you, as a writer). That very lack of room to "definitively define" much of an official setting yielded a kind of No Man's Sky version of Traveller in the early days. Even LBB A1 The Kinunir was limited to only the Regina subsector for a map. Then LBB S3 Spinward Marches came along and we got to see the sector that the Regina subsector was set in ... and after that, the rest is history ... all the way up to online tools such as Traveller Map and the Traveller Wiki sites.

There's a very different ... sense ... of possibilities when you start small but have room to explore and grow and build using that small start as a foundation. A kind of small fish in a small pond that leads to a bigger lake of unexplored possibilities ... rather than being a grain of sand on a beach made up of seemingly countless sand grains. In a very real sense, what amounts to "archipelago campaigns" in which there are known (small) clusters to navigate between and within tend to offer the richest possible settings because each region is "small enough" for a Referee to manage (and keep track of) while also leaving "room" for the archipelago to grow and expand outwards somewhat organically in a spirit of exploration into aster incognita.

 

[Fovean]

If you’re inclined to stay in the OTU, I’ve always felt the year 400 (ish) would be an interesting time to play in. The Imperium exists but it is small and “way over there,” tons of little pocket empires coming out of the Long Night, dead worlds to be explored, reconnections with others to be discovered… using a preferred rule set in this era could bring back some of “here be dragons” flavor.

 

[mike wightman]

Better yet use the Long Night as a setting, the PCs being from a 'pocket empire' with the Imperium being a centuries gone tale - lots of new worlds, ruins (old Imperium, alien, Ancient you name it)...

you don't even have to specify which Long Night or which Imperium