Which version of Traveller for a high school gaming club?

[Spenser TR]

I put this to a few of you privately, but now I’d like to get wider input. Let’s posit a hypothetical high school, a faculty member there who’s played RPGs before, but never any version of Traveller. Somehow the game has come to her attention, and she thinks it’d be great to run for the students in her club. She’s long since gotten administration approval for the club and she has students chomping at the bit to play this scoff game they’ve heard about.

Some assumptions in our case:

- They can print out materials with impunity
- There’s some budget for “materials,” but not a lot. Students are expected to shoulder some of the individual costs
- The teacher/facilitator running the club has plenty of RPG experience, just not with Traveller
- None of the students has any more than a passing familiarity with Traveller, but might very well know about other scifi games
- The club meets once a week after school for 3-4 hours, at school
- The club can keep in touch via online resources - email, a wiki, a simple site the teacher has set up for the club
- They’re looking for campaign-style play; while they might do a few one-offs to shake down, they’ll move to regular characters and recurring campaign elements at some point
- “Canon” is not a concern of theirs
- Setting hasn’t been determined, but sandbox, Third Imperium, and anything else appropriate is on the table.

THE QUESTION: which version of Traveller would be “best” for the club?

I’m not sure what “best” looks like, exactly. I feel it’s probably some confluence of lower cost, easily-understood materials ( although I’m not sure this is really true; maybe kids in the club would like to dig in ), and maybe online support in the form of forums or sites where a Referee with questions could look things up... but I'm open to this evolving.

 

[Spenser TR]

...and of course I'm interested in "why" and having a general discussion about what might go into an answer, if there is one to be had.

 

[Spinward Scout]

Mongoose Traveller v1 is the version you can get the most "in-print" books for right now. I also like the task system for it.

 

[Whipsnade]

Cepheus Engine. It's free, adaptable, and "lite".

The club can print out all the copies they want. It can easily be adapted to most of the materials written for other versions. The students can learn it quickly to begin playing immediately.

As the club gets more familiar and comfortable with the rules, more detailed parts of other versions can be easily "grafted" on.

Look at Star Without Number to easily create a subsector-sized sandbox too.

 

[Fovean]

Yes MgT v1 is a great game but I find the v2 rules to be a great improvement. It also simplifies a few things (animals, some aspects of combat, etc) without hurting playability. I also like the power rules for ships and vehicles and the full-color books/pdfs will likely be much more eye-catching to teens.

Also v1 materials can be used with very little difficulty if for instance someone was interested in Agent, or Cybernetics or what have you.

 

[Quint]

Cepheus Engine. It's free, adaptable, and "lite".

And you can get in an editable version as well. That's what I've done, simply so I can tweak it and be able to hand "the rulebook" to my players.

D.

 

[Whipsnade]

And you can get in an editable version as well.

Another point in it's favor.

 

[flykiller]

which version of Traveller would be “best” for the club?

mgt2, no question. I've started up a new group, and every single last one of them 1) never heard of traveller before (except most of them remembered "that game where you can die in chargen?") and 2) they all looked up "the latest version" trying to get ready and drew up mgt2 characters to bring in. one of them is even insisting he likes the mgt2 version of combat and wants me to run it. so, mgt2.

 

[Enoki]

CT without a doubt. In a high school group making it up as you go is the best thing you can do. Don't teach kids to be lawyers... Their parents will be very disappointed if you do!

 

[Timerover51]

Personally, I would recommend The Traveller Book version of Classic. It comes in one book, and it does have some expanded career options: Aircraft, Vehicle, and Watercraft (a subset of vehicle).

 

[Nathan Brazil]

For a high school group, I would have to go with

"Other - Cepheus Engine" because it is free and more complete than the Mongoose SRD. Print to your hearts desire It, in turn can lead to

"Other - Mongoose Traveller Development Pack" Though it is older and incomplete for chargen, it had Mercenary, High Guard and Vehicle Handbook components. Those were also free.

From there the "budget" can be spent on campaign supplements and other minutiae like deckplans, counters and the like.

 

[rhialto]

Some assumptions in our case:

- They can print out materials with impunity
- There’s some budget for “materials,” but not a lot. Students are expected to shoulder some of the individual costs
- The teacher/facilitator running the club has plenty of RPG experience, just not with Traveller
- They’re looking for campaign-style play; while they might do a few one-offs to shake down, they’ll move to regular characters and recurring campaign elements at some point
- “Canon” is not a concern of theirs
- Setting hasn’t been determined, but sandbox, Third Imperium, and anything else appropriate is on the table.

THE QUESTION: which version of Traveller would be “best” for the club?

I’m not sure what “best” looks like, exactly. I feel it’s probably some confluence of lower cost, easily-understood materials ( although I’m not sure this is really true; maybe kids in the club would like to dig in ), and maybe online support in the form of forums or sites where a Referee with questions could look things up... but I'm open to this evolving.

I voted CT, and here are some resources for the kids and ref:
CT Character Generator
Random Subsector Generator

Some amount of ref fiat will need to be done, but don't worry about that initially: if CT turns out to be too annoyingly lumpy or vague, there's always a version of it (Cepheus Engine is a good 2nd choice) with the edges rubbed down.

 

[mike wightman]

Buy the CT cd rom and download Cepheus for a more up to date engine.

 

[Spenser TR]

Of course the reasoning in regards to the Cepheus Engine makes complete sense; I couldn’t dispute any of that. But let me now add this to the discussion: If in addition to helping teachers with gaming clubs make a great choice, I also wanted to help introduce Traveller to young people, if that was a goal, would that change the minds of any of the CE advocates?

I specifically want to help encourage young people who love RPGs to explore Traveller, to give them the opportunity to see what the game is about in hopes of not only providing them with a great experience but also sowing the seeds of lifelong fandom. When we think about what tabletop RPG gaming can give, it’s quite a list:

- open up and explore creative thinking
- the chance to empathize, to role-play in many different situation
- develop problem-solving skills in a non-threatening way
- much opportunity to refine social interactions
- encourage attention to detail
- as a Referee, the chance to teach and demonstrate gender equality, and enjoyment of game situations other than combat.

Traveller has additional upsides - leaning about astronomy and physics, orbital mechanics, a bit of math, it gives an introduction to the idea of “tech levels” and how different societies might get along, and so on.

I think CE could do everything on my list above, but if an additional goal of mine was to help encourage a lifelong love of Traveller, does that change the CE answer?

 

[mike wightman]

For creative thinking consider giving the students homework:
roll a system and flesh out the details the UWP provides
design the animal encounter tables for a particular environment hex
roll three characters and describe their back stories and how they came to know each other.

The referee can take any or all this and weave it into the samdbox

 

[Whipsnade]

But let me now add this to the discussion: If in addition to helping teachers with gaming clubs make a great choice, I also wanted to help introduce Traveller to young people, if that was a goal, would that change the minds of any of the CE advocates?

Not in the slightest.

Like CT before it and deliberately so, CE allows you to easily "bolt on" bits from other versions and even other games. For example, take the absolutely superb Scout Vicky game Sabredog and his daughter played.

He and his daughter would roll up animals using the CT rules. She would take the basics the system produced like biome, size, weaponry, and the like to more fully describe the animal created. She'd write up a detailed description and draw a picture of the animal.

Can you think of a better way to draw together disparate strands like ecology, biology, zoology, climatology, and the like? Rolling on the animal tables becomes a holistic life sciences lesson.

When we think about what tabletop RPG gaming can give, it’s quite a list...

It is quite a list, especially the social aspects. CE with a few prior service and life event tables from various versions has the players using characters which are already linked to one another. Two students who wouldn't normally interact are suddenly working with each other because their characters are friends.

Traveller has additional upsides - leaning about astronomy and physics, orbital mechanics, a bit of math, it gives an introduction to the idea of “tech levels” and how different societies might get along, and so on.

History, geography, oceanography, astronomy, sociology, political science, the list is endless.

Imagine your student playing scouts aboard a Donosev surveying an entire inhabited system for the first time. They identify and classify the star, they identify and classify all the planets, they survey a "Jupiter" and all it's wild variety of moons, they survey various planetoids, they survey a "Venus", a "Mars", a "Pluto".

Then they move on to the inhabited world.

Atmosphere, hydrosphere, tectonic plates, mountains, rivers, different terrain types, different biomes, different plants and animals. The people, their cultures, their cities, their ways of life, their history, their governments, their technologies.

I remember an urban planning lesson in middle school. We were given a topo map and told to draw a city of a certain size on it. Imagine your students doing something similar. Why is there a city there? How did it grow? How does it work? What does it look like?

A school year wouldn't be long enough to scratch the surface.

I think CE could do everything on my list above, but if an additional goal of mine was to help encourage a lifelong love of Traveller, does that change the CE answer?

Yes, very much so because, as I've noted above, you can easily add only those things that you specifically want for a certain lesson while just as easily ignoring the rest.

I'm very envious Spenser.

 

[Spenser TR]

In one of my revisions of my posts in this thread I must have edited out that I am not a teacher, and I'm not describing my own situation. On the island almost all of my social circles are comprised of teachers, but Kauai is an interesting place gaming-wise. Culturally not the easiest place to start RPG groups.

That being said, I am profoundly interested in introducing young people to RPGs in general, as well as working to help bring Traveller to new generations. School hobby groups would seem to be one way of doing this - the ideas of providing materials that would make it easier for such groups to form were there a desire, or to help existing groups adopt Traveller, seem to flow naturally when we talk about this.

Whipsnade, for all the reasons you eloquently brought out, this seems like effort worth making.

 

[Timerover51]

Of course the reasoning in regards to the Cepheus Engine makes complete sense; I couldn’t dispute any of that. But let me now add this to the discussion: If in addition to helping teachers with gaming clubs make a great choice, I also wanted to help introduce Traveller to young people, if that was a goal, would that change the minds of any of the CE advocates?

I specifically want to help encourage young people who love RPGs to explore Traveller, to give them the opportunity to see what the game is about in hopes of not only providing them with a great experience but also sowing the seeds of lifelong fandom. When we think about what tabletop RPG gaming can give, it’s quite a list:

- open up and explore creative thinking
- the chance to empathize, to role-play in many different situation
- develop problem-solving skills in a non-threatening way
- much opportunity to refine social interactions
- encourage attention to detail
- as a Referee, the chance to teach and demonstrate gender equality, and enjoyment of game situations other than combat.

Traveller has additional upsides - leaning about astronomy and physics, orbital mechanics, a bit of math, it gives an introduction to the idea of “tech levels” and how different societies might get along, and so on.

I think CE could do everything on my list above, but if an additional goal of mine was to help encourage a lifelong love of Traveller, does that change the CE answer?

Greetings, Spenser. I have been running a three week long gaming class for 14 years, this summer will be the 15th. I have also set up gaming clubs for schools. The two role-playing games for schools that I would choose would be the original edition of Space: 1889, to give the students a historical-type of game, and Traveller, using The Traveller Book version, to keep the materials in a single volume. All of the later versions of Traveller have an already existing constraining universe to work with, especially MegaTraveller and The New Era. My focus on introducing students, from 6th Grade to High School, to an RPG is to get them to use their creativity and imagination in producing adventures for the game. The Classic Version allows for that, without all of the complexity of design sequences in MegaTraveller. T4 has too much of an unfinished feel about it to use with someone new to RPG, and T5 is a bit overwhelming and again the unfinished feel. The simplicity and straightforwardness of Classic will allow the students full reign on their imaginations.

I would recommend that you check out some of the classic science fiction available online at Project Gutenberg as well to give the students some possible ideas. My preference is Andre Norton and H. Beam Piper, but there is a wide range there. A story like Andre Norton's The Time Traders would be an interesting starting tale, or The Galactic Derelict.

 

[rhialto]

Of course the reasoning in regards to the Cepheus Engine makes complete sense; I couldn’t dispute any of that. But let me now add this to the discussion: If in addition to helping teachers with gaming clubs make a great choice, I also wanted to help introduce Traveller to young people, if that was a goal, would that change the minds of any of the CE advocates?

Since CE was my 2nd recommendation, no: I still think CT would be a great intro to CE, but I think either is a fine choice (though CT is simpler, if more uneven). I think a DTRPG POD Traveller Book would be a decent alternative, but personally favor the CT LBB's available here: hard to beat $12 for all three core books.

 

[aramis]

Count me in the Cephus Crowd.

It's closer to CT, and avoids some of the nastiness that is mongoose's "simplification" of skills (which is not, and is a bloat)...

Give the choices of Traveller rules... my preference for play with newbs is

• Mega
• CT w/DGP task System
• Cephus
• TNE
• MGT (either edition)

Note the lack of T4, T5, T20...

If I have a bunch of Pathfinder or D20 players, T20 is the choice.

But for a group of HS kids - without an old hand to run it for them - Cephus is a clear winner by virtue of having simplified MGT's SRD down, and of being free.