RPGA

[Jeff M. Hopper]

As I understand it, there will be no more Living Force games due to various reasons but the RPGA is still interested in having a "Living" science fiction game available. What are the chances of getting a Living Traveller series going? Is anyone considering this?

 

[kafka47]

I am not sure whether this would work given the large disparity between the different ways people play Traveller. We might all subscribe to several key concepts as outlined in the original LBBs (even if your favorite game uses a different ruleset, it comes back to those pesky books) but from there is no agreement. A Living Traveller would constain those who already feel constained by the Imperial Campaign.

I am all in favour of creating rules free/storytelling devices/supplements but the coordination of such an enterprise would be beyond most of us. Look even at my minor stab it - the Adventure that I am running here on the board. It only attracts a handful of participants. Now, I don't know how many people lurk (and I would be interested) but to expand that to a series of tabletop games...I just don't think there is the market.

Living Force works because there are many non RPGers who happen to like Star Wars and it gets them a chance to play out their power ambitions. Plus, it taps into a much richer mythology - both the traditional essence of myths that the story is based upon and modern archetypes that Lucas brought to life.

Contrast it with Living Greyhawk, which seems to be doing more harm to the Greyhawk old timers simply because it is not Gygaxian enough. And, Gary when I met him in Sept. made it perfectly clear that he is no way interested in what has become Greyhawk, save to write a Gord story or two.

Traveller, I believe, has the potential to climb that high but it merely just made it to the first base camp and cannot even see the summit of that particular mountain.

 

[GKar]

I'm not really sure what you mean by "not Gygaxian enough". I play Living Greyhawk (granted somewhat in isolation here in Australia) and it seems to be going from strength to strength with more players every year. Even old timers like myself seem happy with it.

I'd love to see Traveller added but agree that it might pose a problem. Living Force has been slowly declining here for some time and I don't know anyone else who plays Traveller so it may not work. The only other problem is that the T20 character creation system is very random, something hard to use in a Living game.

 

[kafka47]

Well, from Gary's own mouth...the Greyhawk that is right there on the market is not his baby anymore.

Trolling around the different boards, it seems to have morphed in the long years without direction. There were some promising things that the Oerth Journal did but the Living Greyhawk magazine and the supplement that came later in Dragon was more the product of James Ward's contributions rather than the original Greyhawk.

Gary for all his eccentricities (and my God he had many) weaved some interesting adventures plus a few good yarns in the first two Gord books. Plus, there is the whole issue of the revision that never came that would have brought more in from Len Lakoka and Gary's contributions such as the Savant. 3e just feels different and because there is a rule and roll for just about everything it lacks the fun of a Gygaxian fantasy. Now, I don't want to turn this into a pulpit for bringing back some sort of ole Greyhawk. But there seemed to be a time when there was a flowering of Greyhawk prior to Gary's departure & then a resurgence after some of the work of Sargent & Moore then it decended into something else.

What you write about Living Greyhawk heartens me that we might yet see a return to the good old days of Greyhawk aplenty.

 

[Takei]

Living Force is coming to a close because the previously agreed five year campaign limit is coming up.

As much as I'd like to see a Living Traveller, I'm fairly sure it won't happen under the RPGA banner as it's not a WotC game. Much more likely IMHO would be a revival of Living Verge (the Alternity campaign) as it would require players to buy D20 Modern, Future and probably a specific campaign book. It would also be under Wizard's direct control instead of having to go through an approvals process like Force has.

 

[Shadowdancer]

As I understand it, there are some fan-based and fan-supported, non-RPGA "Living", Living games and campaigns out there being run at various cons. If Living Traveller was not officially adopted by the RPGA, it could still be done.

The problem, as already posted, is coming up with a ruleset. The fact that different people play different versions and interpretations of Traveller shouldn't be a hindrance. Most D&D players play different interpretations of Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, as the previous posts on this thread suggest. People participating in the Living campaign would just have to understand that, for the campaign, everyone has to go along with the interpretation set down in the ruleset.

Finding someone or a group of someones to create that ruleset -- that's the biggest obstacle.

I would like to see the rules of the now-defunct Living Dragonstar campaign the RPGA used to run in order to see how they handled things such as characters getting together in different parts of the universe. I could see a real problem if, say, a Living Traveller player went to a con and participated in an adventure set in the Spinward Marches, then the next month went to a con and wanted to play the same character in an adventure set in the Linkworlds Cluster over in Ley Sector.

You would probably have to keep everything limited to one sector, or quadrant, or even a subsector. But still, you could run into problems keeping everyone's characters believably sychronized.

Although, now that I think about it, Living Greyhawk does a pretty good job of it. At the start of each of our years, it is another year in Greyhawk. Each charcter has 52 time units to use each year. Each adventure costs a certain number of time units. Other activities, such as Crafting items, use time units. You can't spend more than 52 time units in a (real) calendar year. Yet during that year, your character can go all over Greyhawk.

Hmmm. This might be doable after all. If we had a ruleset.

 

[Takei]

I know this was looked at as far back as 2001. In fact a search of the boards shows a couple of threads that myself and the good Mr Johnson were posting in It might be an interesting excercise to thrash out some character generation rules based on T20. I had some roughed out but seem to have lost them in the various pc crashes and upgrades