Traveller stuff I got from eBay this week.

The PCs in my Classic Traveller campaign have all gained two skill levels over the course of several year of play, and are all currently “studying” for two more.

Originally I simply accelerated the process in the Classic Traveller books for character improvement, but after a few years of real time play, without years and years passing in-game, I simply told them to make those skills they were studying permanent and to add two more to the “studying” list.

We start every game from the exact in-game date we left off, and as of right now 412 game days have passed - just a little over one imperial year.

I need to rewrite the improvement guidelines on my campaign blog.

Really, the players don’t seem to care that much. The game has been a lot of fun and they don’t seem so focused on advancement as you find in games where you level up or whatever. One thing I love about Traveller is that it isn’t a power fantasy in that way. Still, I think it’s good for the PCs to gain some skills over time. It’s not like they’re going to become super human or it’s going to break the game.

We often to talk about Traveller skills being “big”, that they often include subskills.

In my campaign, for example, one of the PCs has the skill Forward Observer-1. Now this is a battlefield skill, obviously, and would be used to call in coordinates for air strikes, artillary, or even bombardment/attack from orbit. BUT – it would likely also mean the character is good at sneaking around a battlefield and not being seen. Essentially it is stealth on the battlefield. A forward observer who is easy to see would not be alive and useful very long. So I allow the PC in my game to use the Forward Observer skill to stealth around battlefield-like environments.

If a player can make a logical argument why a skill applies to a situation, and it doesn’t break the game or render a more specific skill superfluous, I’ll allow it to at least some extent.

I think most players would be bummed to roll up “Steward” skill, but I think that skill is more than cooking and entertaining. A good ship steward would go all over a ship, be familiar with what everyone on a ship does, see what’s going on, and really know the nooks and crannies of a ship. They’d be great at knowing where to hide, even on a ship they’ve not been on before, where particular kinds of items would be likely to be kept, etc. It’s only a useless skill of the Ref never puts the PC in a situation where it can be useful.

Omer Golan-Joel has the great old article about skills in Classic Traveller. I love it.

Keeping with Omer’s assertion that a level of 1 is good enough to get a job with a skill, consider Streetwise-1. It has to be more than simply finding underworld contacts or talking your way out of being stabbed. It means your streetwise nature is enough to make a living. You are good at it. Streetwise 2 or 3 ? Hell, you can probably pick pockets, etc. One of our PCs was a retired Merchant with Streetwise skill. I made the ruling that HIS streetwise was more related to business dealings - how to handle himself when bargaining, knowing if he’s being cheated, etc. (I have the player the choice and he thought this was cool.)

I don’t think this theory would apply to every skill. There are a few where it makes no sense. Like Bribery. You will probably not make a living at bribery. I think it is probably just a discrete skill, though I’d still listen to an argument about some clever application of the skill.

I posted Ref’s Notes to the campaign blog for our Classic Traveller campaign.

As I stated in that post, I’m exploring the idea of converting to the Cepheus Engine SRD. There would be a few advantages to it.

I saw yesterday that Mongoose has published their first new book for Classic Traveller, Book 9: Pirates. I have to admit that while I don’t have a bad relationship with Mongoose as a Traveller podcaster (I don’t really have any relationship at all with them), I have not found myself drawn to their products or even the Mongoose Traveller community. It seems somehow separate from the rest of the Traveller/Cepheus Engine world. There are reasons for that which I’ll not go into. I guess I just feel a much stronger connection to all the CE publishers and Classic Traveller. However, they now own the entire Traveller IP, so they own Classic as well.

Anyway, I watched this video from Page121 about the new Pirates book, and learned that longtime Traveller guy and actual local Traveller friend Rob Eaglestone is one of the writers. Now, Rob has done some really good work on his own. I was happy to see a full-on oldschool Traveller player involved in this, so I have pre-ordered the book, and I have the PDF now.

It’s really cool. What I really like is that Marc Miller wrote a forward to it. That is cool. Apparently the physical copy will be in a size very close to the original Traveller books, which I also like.

Anyway, I like that Mongoose isn’t just sitting on the Classic Traveller IP and doing nothing. As a Traveller/CE/2d6 podcaster I own a lot of their 2nd Edition stuff. I feel like I need to be familiar with it, even if I don’t use it. It’s all very nice. The books are all beautiful, the layout is great. Still, I prefer the concise and compact format of the Classic Traveller books. That’s why I LOVE the Traveller Facsimile Edition. No matter how nice a set of rulebooks is, I hate lugging them around. Yes, of course you can get them on your tablet or laptop, but I also like having the physical book at the table.

I’m rambling now. Summary – Pirate book is cool. Rob Eaglestone does great work. Marc Miller is cool. Small books are cool. Mongoose producing new stuff for Classic and having a true fan and expert on it like Rob as a writer is cool.

A confession. When I’m creating non-player characters for my Traveller game I don’t even roll a dice. I just decide what their characteristics and skills are. I suspect almost everyone probably does this. If I need a non-player character on the spot I grab the 1001 Characters supplement or Citizens of the Imperium. I will however also roll up non-player characters to have on standby, and really develop their personalities a little bit beforehand in a simple paragraph, because I like the chaos that the dice imbue into the character.

Successful Classic Traveller Tuesday Night! Spent two hours prepping for our next session. It’s going well. It feels really good to be deep back into the campaign. God I love this game. It’s just the best game ever.

Reposting from March 11, 2017

Well, thanks again to the Ebays, I now have the Traveller boxed set from 1979, as well as the High Guard, Citizens of the Imperium, Mercenary, and Spinward Marches supplements.

Of course the first thing I dug into was book 1, Characters and Combat.

The books are in amazingly good shape considering they are 38 years old.

It’s pretty weird going back into such an old gaming system. After many years of playing games that use point systems to create the character you want to play, Traveller seems like quite the throwback. The character generation process is a game in-itself — the PC can die before he/she gets out of generation! Then there’s situations like rolling up a character with a Strength of 12 (on a 1-12 scale), Dexterity of 12, and an Endurance of 4. It’s hard to make sense out of those sorts of stats, but you know, it can be done, and at age 52 (rather than 15), I can see the fun of doing it. How about, a big fat guy who is really strong, and has great hand eye coordination, but is just TOO HEAVY. That works! And it might make the character kind of interesting as well.

Then there’s the skills. This isn’t like GURPS where there are dozens of skills and you decide how good your character will be at them. There are fewers skills, but they tend to be a bit broader in focus. Medic. Pilot. Engineer. Gun Combat (pick a particular gun). Jack of All Trades (I’ve always loved this one). So you don’t have the really detailed differences in PC stats that you might seen in GURPS or the Hero System. It’s more on the player to create an interesting backstory and give the PC some personality.

Looking at all the books together, it’s pretty clear why our games back in 1979-1981 always involved going to a planet, buying new guns, killing a lot of people, running to another planet, and repeat. We were young, immature, and really didn’t know that much about science fiction, and frankly we didn’t really do that much real roleplaying. The boxed set give you such a flexible framework within which to build a game that we just didn’t know what to do with it.

Finally (for now), I have to admit that the lack of a very workable improvement system for characters still kind of puts me off a bit. On the bright side, it encourages good storytelling and roleplaying. However, it does kind of suck to go through a lot of games and your character doesn’t really improve. A PC has to age four years, during which he/she studies like a maniac, to learn new skills or improve at old ones. I’m sure some of the newer versions of Traveller probably address this issue. I could see using the GURPS version of Traveller, and using the old books as source material and inspiration.

I’m thinking that after our next GURPS CyberTex game I may have my players roll up some old Traveller characters and see what we can do with this.

Reposting from something I wrote in March 2017

I had the bug the other night, so I ordered an old boxed set of the Classic Traveller core books, plus some supplement, off of ebay. Looking forward to getting them and maybe running a game.

This is a repost of something I wrote several years ago as I was returning to Traveller, the greatest RPG even created.

As I think back over my early days of gaming and GMing, the memories are flooding back. When I started in 1979, there weren’t hundreds of RPGs. Most of the time my friends and I played D&D, but one guy had the game Traveller, so we played that too. Eventually we all bought the game.

Traveller was great because it was about space, and was really flexible. The basic set came in a box and had 3 little black books of rules. They sold a lot of supplements. I don’t think there was a single illustration in the core set. Something about the books made you feel smart.

The game mechanics had rules for spaceship combat, interstellar commerce, and other cool stuff, but at 15 we mostly just blew stuff up. Get in the spaceship, go to a planet, get drunk, find a weapons dealer, buy some plasma rifles, and start killing. When the Law got on our asses we’d hop in our ship, the Hellfire, and take off, usually destroying more people and ships on the way out of the system. Mass murder and mayhem on a glorious scale.

It helped that our GM 1)just wanted his friends to be happy and 2)didn’t seem to have actually read any of the rules beyond character generation. His answer to any question of skill was “roll two dice”. We had no idea what we were rolling for, and neither most likely did he, but we all had fun and that’s all that mattered. Clearly, we never got bogged down in game mechanics…heh heh.

Our GM got into gaming really early. Every Wednesday night he went to this huge gaming meetup at Richland Junior College, here in Dallas. He was friends with lots of older gamers. One of them was a computer programmer. He gave our GM this gigantic hex map, with planets dotting it. Each planet had a number, and there was a computer printout on which the characteristics of each planet were given — randomly generated by a program this guy had written. Pretty cool. We were in awe.

As we got older, and better game systems were released, we tended to gravitate toward the new stuff. Hero Games’ Champions was a prime example. Flexible, great combat system, etc. Game Designer’s Workshop, the authors of Traveller, have continued to release new editions of the game, but we never played them. We stuck to the original when we wanted hot space action. There was something really cool about that little box, with the 3 original books, and maybe having a couple of the supplemental books and a bunch of dice crammed in there. It was stripped down roleplaying. It was all on you and the GM.