What area would you like to see T5 set in.

[Whipsnade]

Seen from the other side of the fence, some of this appears to me to be a false dilemma. T5 uses examples from the 1105 era to explain how some things are done, because most Traveller players are familiar with 1105.

Let me be more clear.

The T5 rules books should contain examples of how the rules are used and those examples should be from both the Classic Era and other settings/milieus.

Examples the Classic Era should be included for familiarity and other reasons. Examples from other settings should be included to hammer home the fact that other settings/ milieus are supported and that the rules are not 1105 specific.

Putting it another way:

The T5 core rules books should contain NO PURELY SETTING OR MILIEU FOCUSED MATERIALS.

Examples of rule use for various settings and milieus? Yes. Material in the rules that is purely setting and milieu focused? No.

Settings and milieus should be introduced in their own books or booklets so that T5 can avoid the mistake that hampered Traveller from LBB:4 Mercenary on through TNE.

Read James Maliszewski's "Grognardia" blog. Nearly every time Traveller is discussed someone comments that the OTU eventually metastasized until it overshadowed the rules. Snarling the official setting and rules together was a mistake that T5 should not repeat.

Wide scope, 1105 examples.

"Wide scope, 1105 and at least one non-1105 example" would be much better.

But that doesn't mean we need only have Classic 1105 Milieu examples. I'd like to see a small Ziru Sirka warship. Hmmmm...

Exactly.

I'll be fading back into the woodwork now...

 

[Blue Ghost]

I'm breaking a promise I made to myself, but this is a fundamental question involving a game I dearly love...

T5 should have no setting. The biggest mistake GDW made with Traveller was increasingly snaring the rules they wrote for the game around the OTU setting.

Instead of a setting, what T5 needs is an example. You're supposed to be able to use the rules to create any number of settings, right? Well then an example of how you create a setting from the rules should be part of T5 should be part of the materials.

SJGames has done this with their various core GURPS releases for years now. You open Magic 3e or 4e, for example, and you're shown how selected parts of those rules are used to create specific settings.

T5 should follow that example. Show people how the rules can be used to create the Classic Era Marches, the IW period, the TNE period, or any other setting. Show people an example and let them create their own settings.

Dude, you're posting again.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

T5 can avoid the mistake that hampered Traveller from LBB:4 Mercenary on through TNE.

Ah, yes, Bk4 is famously the point where everyone stopped buying Traveller stuff and went off to play Star Frontiers...

T5 should include a setting because not everyone has the time or inclination to create their own. Nobody is forcing you to use it if you don't want to.

 

[aramis]

Ah, yes, Bk4 is famously the point where everyone stopped buying Traveller stuff and went off to play Star Frontiers...

T5 should include a setting because not everyone has the time or inclination to create their own. Nobody is forcing you to use it if you don't want to.

I agree in principal; Ill note that any milieux specific rules changes should be FROM the baseline included milieux.

As in, if it includes 1100-1115 (Classic, 5FW, and post-classic/pre-Rebellion), the rules as written should work for that milieux without ANY mods. Then, all other milieux get modified from there.

TNE had many failings - including that the rules for worlds being classic generation and then modifications to classic generated data would have been fine for a supplement, but were really a pain for a core rulebook; the modifications should have been rolled into the system generation. Likewise, TNE CharGen was really not tweaked to support the TNE setting, either; it worked great for Classic and Regency, but not for the RC, due to the very "recent" revival of technology. And that would be a single small table fix: "maximum terms by career for 1200," saying that if you are in career X, your character may have no more than Y terms from start of that career.

 

[Whipsnade]

Ah, yes, Bk4 is famously the point where everyone stopped buying Traveller stuff and went off to play Star Frontiers...

No. LBB:4 is where everyone began having to pick apart the setting from the rules and it got worse with every subsequent release. Read the third paragraph of Aramis' post before this one if you don't want to believe me.

T5 should include a setting because not everyone has the time or inclination to create their own.

That's not what I wrote and my use of the GURPS Magic 4e/Rome Arcana example illustrated my point.

T5 should have it's own setting and that setting in a separate book or section. The setting should not be embedded in the verbiage of the rules. Examples, yes. Setting, no.

Nobody is forcing you to use it if you don't want to.

True, but if you blindly follow Traveller's previous methodology you'll be forcing me to pick apart the setting from the rules.

All I'm doing is reminding the group of a criticism regarding Traveller which has existed for decades. Keep the rules and the official setting separate. There needn't even be separate books, separate sections within the same book will do the trick.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Ah, yes, Bk4 is famously the point where everyone stopped buying Traveller stuff and went off to play Star Frontiers...

T5 should include a setting because not everyone has the time or inclination to create their own. Nobody is forcing you to use it if you don't want to.

I've been around Traveller since nearly the beginning (okay, since 1980 or 79, not quite the beginning, but you get the idea), and the game seemed to be in full swing when Snapshot, Book 4, High Guard and all the rest were around.

I only noted it petering out when the much elusive Bk7 Robots hit the shelves. But I think that was more of a case of the market being over-saturated with adventure RPGs and War Sims (James Bond RPG, GURPs, SFB's Commander's Edition, Gamma World, and a host of others) than Traveller losing its legs.

 

[rancke]

I've been around Traveller since nearly the beginning (okay, since 1980 or 79, not quite the beginning, but you get the idea), and the game seemed to be in full swing when Snapshot, Book 4, High Guard and all the rest were around.

I only noted it petering out when the much elusive Bk7 Robots hit the shelves. But I think that was more of a case of the market being over-saturated with adventure RPGs and War Sims (James Bond RPG, GURPs, SFB's Commander's Edition, Gamma World, and a host of others) than Traveller losing its legs.

I think Andrew was being ironic. Mixing rules and setting didn't destroy Traveller (Indeed, I'm of the opinion that the existence of the OTU is what has been the red thread through all the Traveller versions, MGT Babylon 5 and MGT Judge Dredd and MGT Whatever to the contrary notwithstanding, but I kmow others think otherwise).

But Bill is right too. Mercenary and everything that followed would have been even better if it had distinguished between generic rules and setting-specific rules. I can't begin to estimate how many words I would have been spared typing if High Guard had made the generic ten officer ranks standard for small, one-world space navies and included provisions for more ranks for subsector, sector, domain, and miltiple domain star nations. (Not to mention if the noble ranks from Book 1 had remained planetary nobles and Imperial nobles had been piled on top of them. )


Hans

 

[Blue Ghost]

I think Andrew was being ironic. Mixing rules and setting didn't destroy Traveller (Indeed, I'm of the opinion that the existence of the OTU is what has been the red thread through all the Traveller versions, MGT Babylon 5 and MGT Judge Dredd and MGT Whatever to the contrary notwithstanding, but I kmow others think otherwise).

But Bill is right too. Mercenary and everything that followed would have been even better if it had distinguished between generic rules and setting-specific rules. I can't begin to estimate how many words I would have been spared typing if High Guard had made the generic ten officer ranks standard for small, one-world space navies and included provisions for more ranks for subsector, sector, domain, and miltiple domain star nations. (Not to mention if the noble ranks from Book 1 had remained planetary nobles and Imperial nobles had been piled on top of them. )


Hans

*shrug*

I guess. I never got the sense that people were put out by the "okay, in this book, you're going to follow these special rules" verse the "adventures aside, here're the rules for Device-X and Equipment-Y when on World-Z". As an example, the infamous LASER pistol that needed a LASER Carbine Powerpack to operate it. I mean, what was the point of a LASER pistol if it didn't have portability, right? The basic rules sort of off-handedly talked about the possibility of a LASER pistol, but Mission on Mithril defined one. Well, okay, I mean Traveller is an RPG, right? And as such rules are fungible. Our solution (read that as "my solution") was to allow the user to have a ten-shot power pack pack that fit in the weapon itself just like a regular pistol magazine. Problem solved (if there ever was one).

I can see the perspective, but I'm not entirely sure that people were turned off by Traveller via the various rules, so much as there was more attractive material out on the market with lots of really cool graphics, which Traveller never had to begin with.

To me Traveller played up (no pun intended) to those with real die hard sci-fi imaginations. Ergo the graphics didn't play much into the game sessions, which meant that games with slicker packaging and more eye catching graphics tore at the market for traditional RPG/War-sim gaming.

Gygax saw the writing on the wall with D&D. The third-grade quality art that graced the original covers, to me at least, speaks of the Roger Coreman equivalent of a low-budget production for the gaming world. Move on in the years and the covers and interior art get sleeker and sexier. Traveller, like Star Fleet Battles and a few others, relied on their steadfast core of players to carry them, and where that hunch played off, they didn't learn the lessons that sage Gygax had to teach; make the damn thing look better to compete with the new kids on the block.

To me that's why Traveller never fully exploded as a full fledged sci-fi property (well, that, and it "borrowed" an awful lot from other franchises). Me, I happened to have liked the thing for what it was; a grounded setting that allowed you to invent and otherwise create fantastic settings and situations for you and your friends to have fun in.

Players get older, grow up, get wives, mortgages, kids and the like, while younger generations demand more than black print on white pages for their gaming needs. To me that's pretty much the nub of it all

 

[aramis]

I've been around Traveller since nearly the beginning (okay, since 1980 or 79, not quite the beginning, but you get the idea), and the game seemed to be in full swing when Snapshot, Book 4, High Guard and all the rest were around.

I only noted it petering out when the much elusive Bk7 Robots hit the shelves. But I think that was more of a case of the market being over-saturated with adventure RPGs and War Sims (James Bond RPG, GURPs, SFB's Commander's Edition, Gamma World, and a host of others) than Traveller losing its legs.

Bk 8 Robots (7 is Merchant Prince) was released about the same time Traveller:2300 came out. Which was being hyped by store owners as the next edition of the Traveller rules, rather than a stand-alone game in parallel, and just before the soliciting for MegaTraveller.

Bk 8 was, really, the very last CT book released. It was dead as a game line after that.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Book 8, yes, I stand corrected. And Traveller 2300 didn't help CT, in my opinion. I remember going into the local geek-shop at a mall that doesn't exist anymore, and shaking my head at the host of new games hitting the shelves. I mean, who had time to play them all?

Again, I think it was a case of too much product and ineffective distribution of that product.

 

[aramis]

Book 8, yes, I stand corrected. And Traveller 2300 didn't help CT, in my opinion. I remember going into the local geek-shop at a mall that doesn't exist anymore, and shaking my head at the host of new games hitting the shelves. I mean, who had time to play them all?

Again, I think it was a case of too much product and ineffective distribution of that product.

Indeed. I didn't see book 8 until after I had MT in hand. Older lines tend to be dropped, while new lines tend to have full support.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

No. LBB:4 is where everyone began having to pick apart the setting from the rules and it got worse with every subsequent release.

That was always true; Traveller was never the generic system people claim. Hardwired into it from the start was a feudal interstellar government, a fairly gritty, realistic tech, and a very peculiar FTL drive (but no FTL comms). Try running a Star Trek game with that.

 

[Andrew Boulton]

Bk 8 was, really, the very last CT book released. It was dead as a game line after that.

The Darrian Alien Module came later, then MT arrived soon after.

 

[rancke]

Traveller was never the generic system people claim. Hardwired into it from the start was a feudal interstellar government...

Some sort of nobility was hardwired from the start, but it wasn't interstellar until (I believe) Library Data N-Z. Book 1 nobles were planetary nobles (1st Ed. anyway); there were two more ranks above duke, Prince and King, and both were used for actual rulers of worlds. An emperor could rule several worlds!!

And, of course, the nobility wasn't (necessarily) feudal. The one in the Imperium isn't.


Hans

 

[aramis]

Some sort of nobility was hardwired from the start, but it wasn't interstellar until (I believe) Library Data N-Z. Book 1 nobles were planetary nobles (1st Ed. anyway); there were two more ranks above duke, Prince and King, and both were used for actual rulers of worlds. An emperor could rule several worlds!!

And, of course, the nobility wasn't (necessarily) feudal. The one in the Imperium isn't.


Hans

2nd ed wasn't clear at all about whether they were planetary or interstellar nobles; it left it up in the air. (As, really, so did 1st ed.)

LD N-Z made it clear.

 

[Whipsnade]

That was always true; Traveller was never the generic system people claim.

It's me, remember? The guy who has argued for over a decade that the technological and sociological assumptions within Traveller's rules can only produce a constrained group of settings no matter what those bottom feeding assclowns at Mongoose want us to believe?

In pointing out to me that Traveller was never a generic system you're preaching to the choir here.

Hardwired into it from the start was a feudal interstellar government...

As Wil and Hans have pointed out that the feudal interstellar system was a retcon; the first editions left the issue up to the referee to address.

... a fairly gritty, realistic tech, and a very peculiar FTL drive (but no FTL comms).

The last bit is why some settings, such as Hammer's Slammers, cannot be a Traveller setting no matter what the aforementioned assclowns at Mongoose choose to believe.

Try running a Star Trek game with that.

I wouldn't, but I would, could, and did run a pulp campaign set during the 1930s Chaco War using the First Three LLBs.

All of this is beside the point however.

T5 needs a setting because RPG settings sell better than RPG rules. What T5 doesn't need is a specific setting embedded in the rules. That is the mistake which has plagued Traveller since LBB:4.

The assumptions within the T5 rules will necessarily constrain the number and types of settings which can be crafted using those rules. Any official setting, settings, or milieus should be presented apart from the rules.

While examples from settings or milieus about how to use the rules should be abundant, the rules should be setting agnostic.

Provide T5 with a setting and keep that settings away from the rules.

 

[OjnoTheRed]

I've come at this thread late, having just noticed it.

I'm just starting to review the T5 rules more seriously, picking topics that interested me, and started with How Jump Works.

I was impressed with what I saw. The range of jump tech is expanded to include "magical" jump drives at much higher TL's (17+). The explanations of game effects go into much more detail (without getting bogged down). This seems to me to imply an ability to encompass a much wider range of settings (e.g. an Ancients campaign based around Grandfather in the original Final War as much as 001-1105 Spinward Marches).

I also have a general preference to keep settings separate from rules, but the core rules (specifically FTL drive but no FTL comms) create certain setting constraints. I was very interested to read other's views about how Book 4: Mercenary started constraining the the rules to a setting; I had not thought about it that way.

I think one setting as an example to guide others would be great - and I'm most fond of the 001-1105 Spinward Marches setting, probably for sentimental reasons, but it offers a great frontier area with aliens, humans and potential for conflict and I agree with others even that one sector has barely been explored really by players despite its repeated publication.

But again, it seems to me from my initial delvings into the rules that they will be able to encompass The Fourth and Fifth Frontier wars, the 2nd Imperium and Terran Ascendancy, an Ancients campaign and Year 0 all with equanimity, and loads of other things all us creative GM's will come up with.

 

[Blue Ghost]

For my groups when I used to play, we always accepted that Traveller was published as intended; i.e. the author says it's a generic system, so that's what it is. Having said that, we never incorporated Star Wars, Star Trek, Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, Planet of the Apes, Zardoz, Earth II, Doctor Who, Logan's Run, The Omega Man, The Andromeda Strain ...any 1970s to early 80's early morning Saturday Adventure show aimed at kids (Ark II, Space Academy, Jason of Star Command, Isis, what not...) into any Traveller gaming session. I think I ripped off the helicopter rescue scene (subconsciously) from Superman during a SWAT rescue operation during a Hotel scenario, but, beyond that, all our adventures were pure GDW or kiln fired from our imaginations.

Talking to other players from other groups during middle and high school, I got the sense that it was hit or miss on who incorporated what into what setting, or merely ran a session with a TARDIS or a Superstardestroyer, pick your flavor of the week, adventure. I can only speak for the players locally, but it seemed like some were willing to experiment with the general gist of the rules, while others stuck to the basics; i.e. "This is the Imperium. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My Imperium is my best friend..." kind of mantra.

I think the "do your own favorite sci-fi setting" was one of the back/late hooks for the system, but it was never sold like that. I never saw a banner or anything that said "Play Traveller! Create your own universe! Play in someone else's! (Lucas, Roddenberry, Pal, Allen, et al). And I think that's kind of the crux of the whole matter.

As to how this effects T5, well, I don't really know. I'm out of gaming, save for the occasional online foray, but am still writing for gaming, so I do have a vested interest in this, but I think keeping Traveller as is, with some more background material (and MT quality interior graphics from the MT heyday of the late 80s early 90s) is the way to go. I think WOTC has learned that lesson when they tweaked Gygax's/TSR's creation. Certain game authors/companies, who shall remain nameless, haven't, and then b___h, whine and groan, then subsequently take their temper out on their customer base about how their game system, no matter how superior, isn't doing better, and that they better agree with his politics and not bash certain media personalities, or they'll get a warning. Juvenile stuff. I like to think that the Traveller folks have a higher regard for a product meant to be enjoyed, and are willing to take good measured steps forward to enhance the flavor without alienating their fan base and general public.

Just me

 

[aramis]

See, I NEVER saw anything claiming Traveller was a generic system until people like Bill made that claim in the 1990's.

I can see how some would read Bk 0 page 8, ¶1 that way... but it merely says stuff can be moved into Traveller adventures, not that Traveller is a generic system. GDW hedged their bets... they don't outright claim it as generic, but likewise, do explicitly suggest migrating stuff in from other settings... and supported the line with a pretty strong setting. At least for the day and age in which it was released.

But then again, people were playing a variety of settings with systems that didn't support them well at all back then...

 

[Whipsnade]

See, I NEVER saw anything claiming Traveller was a generic system until people like Bill made that claim in the 1990's.

Wil, when I began pointing out that Traveller was never meant to be a generic system I was simply responding to people promoting Traveller as a generic system so they could sell whatever shoddy setting books they slapped together.

All of this is beside the point however. T5 needs a setting and, unlike every other version of Traveller, that setting should be kept out of the rules.