What do we like about traveller!!!

[Madarin Dude]

Well after hearing all the lamenting about how there are no new players and things that have to be fixed what is it that we like about traveller?
For me it is refueling from gas giants. It just is such great fuel for the imagination. The ship dips down into the swirling luminous clouds of the Jovian atomosphere.

 

[Ben W Bell]

Basically that Traveller is old school, adventurous space adventure that you can do anything with. Ancient lost civilisations, drifting spaceships from centuries past, war, peace, trade, piracy, mystery, glorious cities at the pinnacle of mans technology and men at the lowest possible level of technology. You can do practically anything you want with Traveller.

 

[signless]

The Scout service. Asteroid mining. Mis-jumps. Gaussrifles. The modular cutter. Blades.
Above all else...the "Variant" Traveller players I've met over the years. No other science-fiction game in history can lay claim to having encouraged that kind of vision in the past...

 

[aramis]

The MT rules. Scalability of Personal/vehicular Comabt. Unified Design Sequence. Research Rules.

merchants, pirates, nobles, and intrigue, plus War WAR WAR! Aliens detailed enough to truly make an anthopoligy major have a fun time with them.

 

[FlightCommanderSolitude]

Two words: laser carbine.

Seriously, when I started playing Traveller, my friends and I were like 12 years old (circa early 80s). We could immediately grasp the goal of the typical dungeon adventure: kill things, take their treasure. And it was good.

But we frankly had a difficult time putting together our own Traveller adventures. Traveller seemed to be a game about "adult situations" which we had only a tenuous grasp on; stuff that you'd hear Walter Kronkite talking about on the news. Hostage crises; diplomatic detente; wobbling third-world governments; looming civil wars, etc.

At the time, that just didn't sound fun. Even if it did, we had difficulty grasping the issues involved. So we gravitated to published Traveller adventures that had a bit more "pulse", like Divine Intervention - it was like Top Secret with grav belts!

Now that I'm rather older, I can look back at Classic Traveller with a new eye, and I really like what I see. The material is subtle and complex, designed with a certain economy that fuels the imagination instead of satiating or dulling it like so many new products do.

I also like the spare quality the rules have; if I play D&D3E today I have to pitch three quarters of it, I just don't have time for all of that nonsense. I'm certain I'm in a fading, geezer-like minority, but that's fine.

 

[RainOfSteel]

What do I like?

The 3rd Imperium, of course! The OTU could lose all it jump drives, meson guns, air rafts, and Z-Rapid Pulse Fusion Guns, and without the 3rd Imperium, it's just not the same.

The Scouts.

Thousands of million ton naval starships conducting titantic space battles against one another.

The Ancients (before their secrets were revealed).

The great distances between the stars imposed by the limited speed of the Jump Drive.

The huge size of it all.

The best starship design sequences in the history of gaming, none have ever been as good (although some came close), indeed, most other games didn't even bother to try. Ahhh, the gearheadedness of it.

 

[Malenfant]

I like the concept of the worldbuilding system and the ship design systems. Honestly, that's pretty much all I've ever used the game for.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
I like the concept of the worldbuilding system and the ship design systems. Honestly, that's pretty much all I've ever used the game for.

You wouldn't be alone. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, Traveller world building products were often pointed to as sources for world construction for newbie SF writers (despite whatever errors they contained, they were, at the time, pretty much all that was out there).

 

[kafka47]

I would have to agree with everything that Ben said above but just add one cavat that Traveller can take place in any environment and that flexibility of going to overcome natural obstacles has always been a mainstream of my Traveller games.

I like that I can voyage to the bottom of alien seas. Trek across desert worlds. Feel hopeless despair as the air runs out in the utter cold vaccum of space. Or take a parasail and break into a crimelord's compound that doubles as the local Noble's estate. For me Traveller is about endless adventure and look forward toward to the T20 adventures that will confirm just that.

 

[daryen]

Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
The 3rd Imperium, of course! The OTU could lose all it jump drives, meson guns, air rafts, and Z-Rapid Pulse Fusion Guns, and without the 3rd Imperium, it's just not the same.

How ironic. For me, if you take away the jump drives, meson guns, air rafts, you don't have Traveller.

However, the Third Imperium is just the default setting. It would be Traveller regardless of whether the 3I is there, or not.

Oh well, to each his own.

 

[Madarin Dude]

I also like that traveller is not based on a film or book or comic. this is a trend I don't like that much in games and perfer that if you want to play something like a particular film or book you adapt it to one of the gamesystems you like. I also like that gun combat is deadly. Nothing more annoying than eptying a clip into someone and it doesn't even slow them down.

 

[clementk]

Akeed bartenders and newsstand owners, Beree anywhere near small yip dogs and other small rodentia, Dryone/Chirpers, Hivers, Minor Humans or at least the concept of, Vilani

Authenticists and the whole Authenticism Movement; it’s just too much fun and sure explains all the “historical” things IMTU (Graceplanet, Camelot World, bad jpop surviving against all reason, that colony of Hapsburg Vargr…)

The Church of [the] Stellar Divinity, Travellers

client states, J-space, pocket empires, world-building

low berth lottery, slow drug, etc. (hey ok so I like E.C. Tubb), that the shotgun is the great equalizer, snub revolvers, that swords are still used in the Far Future

the fact that I can take the QLI reprint of CT Books 1-3 with me almost anywhere; I’ve been tempted to run games in waiting rooms for example

that CT and its direct derivatives map almost 1:1 with BESM / Tri-Stat dX ^_^

Casey

 

[Michael Taylor]

What I love about Traveller is High Guard - I have all the formulas in my head and dont even need HG to happily design starships all day while I face the mind-numbing daily yawn-inducing drudgery of trying to organise a bunch of ego-driven graphic designers in an advertising agency.
Oh, and I love traveller for one other major thing: the Leviathan class merchant cruiser - as well as all the other stuff people have listed above (esp grav-belts, comnbat armor, Gauss Rifles, VRF Gauss Guns, air/rafts, the chance to fly one's beat-up old scout courier past a Tigeress without being hassled by phalanxes of heavy fighters)

And the limitless frontiers of outside Imperial space - Vanguard Reaches, Neworld, Thorstone etc etc etc etc etc.

 

[TheEngineer]

- Scouts and all the worldbuilding stuff
- pretty clean future technology
- the missing of pseudo tech-blabla like StarTrek
- 400 t corsairs
- Auto-Rifle autofire danger space pinpoint hits
- Scout brew
- Startown Liberty
- the 2D mapping
- the 2D6 probability distribution
- the task system

 

[Elliot]

Rules:

The MT task system - was it the first fully developed task system? I dont know, but it was the best.

Setting:

The 3I - especially when it begins to collapse
Imperial government and its apparent lack of due process and legal order

TNE - Dumb ass marines in space

Nobles and Marines with cutlasses

Gnarled old merchants having to make the next cred to pay the mortgage and always in search of that stash of parts that makes them a killing
Scouts updating world data and getting into bar fights with locals who dont like their off world ways

The Vilani and bureacratic capitalism(?)

Traveller adventures concerned with striking miners, technologically elevated dictators, Duchesses being bribed for a youthful ⌧ography session, invading a high security lab to prevent vivisection

The Ancients, primordials, empress wave and Traveller's stranger than fact universe

 

[Keklas Rekobah]

Shotguns in space.

Everything else falls under the heading of "Traveller is what you make of it!"

 

[daryen]

Granted it was focused on CT, but we already covered this elsewhere. Here is the almost completely unedited result: 85 Reason CT is Great! (Keklas's post made me think of it, as his comment is #1 on the list.

)

While a couple of them poke fun at the other versions, the vast majority hold for any version of Traveller.

 

[Keklas Rekobah]

"Shotguns in Space" is the one reason that stays on my list through all incarnations of Traveller.

If you want to play a game full of shiny "Zap Guns", then ST:RPG might be worth looking in to.


(... and I got top billing AND the number one answer on that list! Neener, neener, NEEEENERRR!)

 

[jchurchill]

A one word answer would be flexibility ---

the original set gave you a whole system to do just baout any adventure that you wanted. Everything form a tech level 0 fight with clubs to high tech large scale warfare. But CT wasn't just about killing things although there was plenty of that if you really wanted.

 

[aramis]

I love the MT mechanics overall. I Like the OTU from CT and MT; TNE and T4 leave me cold...

I like the OTU, and the Big Imperium, with it's Hands off towards little local wars.

I like the Scout-Marine rivalry.

I like the work of the HIWG.

BTW, Elliot: MT's task system was originally the DGP Task system for CT. It saw print (using 1d10 instead of 2d6) in 2300.

Worldbuilding can be fun, but with the decanonization of DGP materials, WBH is no longer the slam-dunk it once was... But since 1981, There have been alternatives (Space Opera). Several other games have taken a clue from traveller, and done Worldbuilding to similar models. Sadly, Traveller still lacks superjovians.

2300's world gen is THE system for me. Especially since I CAN wind up with close superjovians!