The trick was never coming up with an explanation for one really unlikely world (like no air at TL 1). The problem was explaining why there were so darn many bizzare combinations.
I am about to type something. I'm not disagreeing with you.
Here is my question:
Given the context of the kind of RPG play original
Traveller was designed to support, in which the Players love encountering, exploring, and puzzle solving new environments, how can it be a "problem" to have "so darn many bizarre combinations"?
Keep in mind two things:
1) I am speaking of a specific kind of RPG play. It is RPG play from the 1970s. A kind of play some would call OSR today. Eero Tuovinen, in this post from 2007, calls it
Challenge-Based Adventuring, which I think is a perfect description for the kind of play original
Traveller was built to engender.
In another post Eero speaks defines Challenge-Based Adventuring as:
"tackling a compelling fantasy world, recognizing opportunity for adventure, identifying challenges involved, and then figuring out how these challenges may be resolved. The payoff is the satisfaction of success or the bitter pathos of defeat brought about by the combination of clever decision-making and resolving the fictional events with flair.
It's a real dynamic process in the sense that nobody's fudging, nobody's planning the outcome, everything's happening as just as real an interaction as in any boardgame, except that we have an infinite variety of moves available in all their subtle nuances thanks to the game being set in a shared imagined space instead of on a gameboard."
If you...
- Switch out "fantasy world" for "exotic worlds;"
- keep in mind the methods of puzzling solving in Traveller (the skill list is compact for a reason: to let the Players do the bulk of the work, instead of skill rolls against a character sheet solving the group's problems);
- and respect the danger and risk of death built into the game system...
And you Eero's description becomes a perfect description of original
Traveller play.
The point of having so many bizarre combinations is because it's
fun to explore, encounter, and survive the worlds grown from them.
An example from D&D based rules: In my current
Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign, we have played through several
published scenarios from LotFP across a fantastical 17th century Europe torn apart my religious war:
- A Stranger Storm
- Death Frost Doom
- The God That Crawls
- Scenic Dunnsmouth
... as well as several scenarios I have created to stitch everything together. It is all one campaign. But the details of the scenarios are all outlandish and fantastical (and often horrific) in utterly different ways.
They will be soon on their way to a dark fantasy Southeast Asia, and I have another half-dozen scenarios on tap as well. Each unique and strange from the other. (Though, again, I am sticking a thread through them all.)
The Players are eating it up. They come because they do not know what they will get. They come and have a great time because each scenario has its own unique challenges and rules to discover, puzzle out, and solve. They set their own goals, and then decide how far they'll go to get them. It's going gangbusters because this style of play is very effective.
2) Here is a passage I quoted from
The Stars My Destination from
my post about the science-fiction that inspired Marc Miller when he wrote
Traveller:
BETWEEN MARS AND JUPITER is spread the broad belt of the asteroids. Of the thousands, known and unknown, most unique to the Freak Century was the Sargasso Asteroid, a tiny planet manufactured of natural rock and wreckage salvaged by its inhabitants in the course of two hundred years.
They were savages, the only savages of the twenty-fourth century; descendants of a research team of scientists that had been lost and marooned in the asteroid belt two centuries before when their ship had failed. By the time their descendants were rediscovered they had built up a world and a culture of their own, and preferred to remain in space, salvaging and spoiling, and practicing a barbaric travesty of the scientific method they remembered from their forebears. They called themselves The Scientific People. The world promptly forgot them.
The Stars My Destination (1956)
(First Serialized in Galaxy Magazine)
Alfred Bester
One might think that environment is too ridiculous to be believed. But it is only one such environment in The Stars My Destination. Moreover,
Traveller was built to have one environment like this after another. Because it is fun.
Now, here's a thing:
Not every RPG is designed to do this. Not every RPG should do this. This isn't the right kind of play style. Nor is it the only thing
Traveller can or should do. (For example, some games I love are:
Sorcerer, Pendragon, Primetime Adventures, Burning Wheel, and
HeroQuest in Glorantha. None of these work the way original Dungeons and Dragons and original Traveller were designed to work.)
My thesis has been, and remains, that the original
Traveller brilliantly did what it was designed to do. Some people might not like what it was designed to do. But that doesn't change the fact that it was an utter success at it.
That said, I know I had to wrap my head around all this. My LotFP, besides being a blast in its own right, is also a training exercise for the
Traveller game i want to run. I had to scrub away habits and training from other, later RPGs and RPG techniques. But having seen the success of my LotFP game in action, I'm looking forward to the pulp-SF gaming that Traveller set out to create.
As for all the bizarre combinations, as I always say, I see them as a feature, not a bug.
