Why don't new people play Traveller?

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
Not everyone is at the peak of their eloquence at all times.

If people aren't clear about what they mean, they shouldn't be surprised if people take it a different way to what was intended.

Technically, as a free-speech advocate, I'm even all for saying you can attack anyone in any manner you chose (as long you you don't go past the EULA for this forum, of course). However, as we look to the top of this very webpage, and see the name of this topic, the adviseability of doing so becomes . . . an interesting question.

What, so we're supposed to be all one big happy family that agrees with what everyone says, or people won't like the game? No community is like that.

Yes, that's true, but it's not going to happen here or anywhere else.

Only because people can't be bothered - there's no reason why they can't be clear. It's the same as conversation in general - if you don't say what you mean, you will be misinterpreted.

I can only say that the same interpretation did not occur to me.

Let's see:

Originally posted by spank:
I've got no problem with the author, it's what he is doing to my setting.

Originally posted by Malenfant:
And with this statement, you lose all credibility. Your setting? What sense of ownership do you think you have here? Are you one of the TNE authors? Did you actually write some of the books? How the heck can you be justified in calling it your setting??

Originally posted by spank:
Because I supported it with my hard earned dollars.

Seems like he had his chance to explain himself there and did. And he expects to have had some say in the direction of the setting, when it's been up for ages for him to read in the playtest section but he first claims he wasn't aware of it (despite the obvious links to it on the main page and in the forums) and then supposedly didn't have time to read it. Well, them's the breaks - I doubt that QLI is going to delay their playtests just so everyone who wants to comment can do so.

If you care about something that much, then generally you'll make the time to deal with it. At first I didn't have enough time to do everything I did on the playtest either, but I rearranged things so that I did.

That's a pretty harsh stance to take given that this is supposed to be one big easy-going community of fellow gamers.

What, are we not allowed to have disagreements now? Besides, it's not like CotI has ever really been like that anyway

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
What, are we not allowed to have disagreements now? Besides, it's not like CotI has ever really been like that anyway

No, it never has.

And Traveller has never been like that, either. Which is why, I had thought, we were having a discussion on this particular topic.

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
Which is why, I had thought, we were having a discussion on this particular topic.

I don't think so... the problem is largely with the game itself, not with the fanbase (though that is a part of it). After all, I doubt that many people look at a shelf and think "OK, I think is game looks good, but do I like the fanbase?" and use that as a determining factor to get it.

I think the fanbase would be more likely to put them off if they get ranted at if they ask the wrong person what they think of the game. Traveller fans don't tend to be very objective about the various versions of the game - you just need to look at Aramis' post earlier to see that, or what people have said about TNE in the past. I think that's a big part of what can people off the game.

 

[al duc]

Originally posted by Casey:
Suggestion: since spank now has the 1248 material / 1248 forum access I suggest folk move that part of the discussion to the 1248 board and/or PM since how 1248 affects existing TNE campaigns in detail doesn't have much to do IMO with examining why Traveller doesn’t get new players.

What, and let everyone else miss all the fun?

 

[spank]

I never said on word about keeping it all the same, or for that matter freezing the timeline at 1201. My complaint here is that where the timeline went in 50 years has nothing to do with The Star Vikings, The RC, The Regency, The Covenant of Suferan, Oasis, Solee, or anything else in the setting.

 

[BetterThanLife]

Welcome My Lord,
I personally didn't like what the Rebellion did to my CT campaign. However after a while I grew to actually appreciate it and the potential for role-playing and adventuring.

Right now you are reading it with preconceived notions. Give it a chance to grow on you. I personally prefer a CT style setting with a bit of upheaval. (IE Border region, War, etc.) But that fits my style of GMing and is the setting I am most used to. On the other hand, like I saw later with MT, I see definite potential with the 1248 setting.

Unlike MT and TNE 1248 is not a radical departure from what went on before. It may not be your first choice but it isn't a radical departure. And we, this time, have the designer's word that it isn't going to be smashed flat by a surprise in the near future.

Of gourse this might just be the problem Traveller is having in attracting new players. Those with a sense of history that have heard of Traveller may be acting the same way. OUt a sense of preconceived notions as to what Traveller is. The people that have never heard of Traveller, without a shelf presence, probably never will.

It is up to two types of people to fix that with things they can do to help.

QLI: Get the game on the shelves, flesh out some good "Starting adventures/campaigns" and Put the Players Handbook out.

The rest of us: Start GMing a game at your local game store, at game conventions, etc. And introduce new people to the game.

Both of these things have one thing in common, Introduce new people to the game.

Originally posted by spank:
I'll make my self good and clear about this. I don't like that the 1248 setting is built on top of the flattened remains of 1201, and backed with a promise not to hammer that campaign flat on down the road.

 

[spank]

The thought had occured to me that this is what CT must have felt. Still two wrongs don't make a right.

 

[BetterThanLife]

Actually it has a bit of something to do with each of those. Now, having never played TNE, I am not intimately familar to all those groups and concepts. But from reading 1248 it does show what was formed out of several of those concepts.

The Regency, was formed in MT, with the express purpose of proving a base for help in puting the Imperium back together in the future. A way out of a second "Long Night."

Remember the Third Imperium was a big place. Charted space was even bigger. The whole thing came crashing down though. It would definitely take more than any one small group to put it all back together again or even a large portion. I mean we are talking about 6 Major empires, all crashing down around everyone's ears during the Collapse.

But again I bring up a simple concept. You may not own the setting but it is YOUR game and campaign. So if you want to play up one group as putting it back together, go ahead. But like I said give it some time to settle instead of dismissing it because you didn't like it before you read it.

Originally posted by spank:
I never said on word about keeping it all the same, or for that matter freezing the timeline at 1201. My complaint here is that where the timeline went in 50 years has nothing to do with The Star Vikings, The RC, The Regency, The Covenant of Suferan, Oasis, Solee, or anything else in the setting.

 

[spank]

I didn't like the outline in the TNE form, and I don't see any difference in the playtest just more detail.

 

[Malenfant]

spank's started a thread on the TNE Playtest board, let's continue that discussion over there shall we? (at least we'd be free to discuss specific elements of the setting there, which we can't do here)


This sort of thing might be scaring off players though - for all that people go on about Traveller being a generic scifi game, people sure do insist that you have to stick to the books a lot. If people outside the game think that any new idea they have will get a response of "oh, but that's not canonical, you can't do that" then they're not exactly going to be enthused about coming up with something new are they.

This feeling that you HAVE to stick to the books or your campaign will somehow magically be invalidated is neither constructive, useful, nor justfied. Most of all, it doesn't help you - the GM. And that also makes no sense when you hear other Traveller fans saying "but it was supposed to be a toolkit to make your own scifi game". Either the game is flexible and generic or it's rigid and specific - it can't be both.

 

[FlightCommanderSolitude]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
Either the game is flexible and generic or it's rigid and specific - it can't be both.

Incorrect. The game is flexible and generic. The official Traveller universe is not, by definition. Even if it was "rebooted" with a new OTU, this would still be the case. Much of the material published for Traveller is not rules, but background or other source material, which is, generally speaking, part of the OTU.

As an analogy, people buy D&D3E, create all sorts of worlds and then play campaigns in them. D&D3E is flexible and generic. People buy Forgotten Realms stuff to play in that campaign world - they absolutely do not expect Forgotten Realms material to be a generic toolkit for building fantasy campaign worlds. If they do, they need a bib.

 

[lightsenshi]

This thread is getting way too long.

If you don't like the way the OTU is going, then either don't use it or make your own background. It's hardly required to play Traveller, after all.

 

[Gaming Glen]

Originally posted by lightsenshi:
If you don't like the way the OTU is going, then either don't use it or make your own background. It's hardly required to play Traveller, after all.

I suppose the Roman citizens didn't like the way their history was going when the first Goths broke into the city.

I like the OTU, but I do use my own TU for most of my campaigns (the few that I have run). What is hard to do is putting aside the OTU for all the information it does have. It has a big expanse of history, aliens and all their support material (i.e., languages, physical description, mental outlook), and a fairly extensive library data as compared to any other sf setting (Star Trek may be the one that has more, though most not in any rpg readily-useable format).

Back to the subject, productS on store shelves would help bring more people into the game. But Traveller needs a catch, something to distinguish it from Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape, SG-1, and B5 RPGs. IMO, Firefly would have been a good thing to point to if it had lasted. As it is, these products are on my store's shelves and are collecting dust. Sf is just not popular to play. If I ran an sfrpg campaign, any setting or game system, I'll have players (I seem to be a popular GM); but, I want to run Traveller, and sell Traveller products (part of the reason for me to GM.. help my store sell things). So, give me things to sell! How about a product called Space Vixens? Use Avalanche Press's style of RPG cover (babe art).

Also, I dislike PDFs and rather have a professionally printed products.


Glen

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by FlightCommanderSolitude:
Incorrect. The game is flexible and generic. The official Traveller universe is not, by definition. Even if it was "rebooted" with a new OTU, this would still be the case. Much of the material published for Traveller is not rules, but background or other source material, which is, generally speaking, part of the OTU.

Well, speaking about T20 here - the problem is that it's not really being presented (yet) as a generic system. The corebook itself has specifics in it - specific alien races, specific technologies, etc. So if you use the corebook to make your own scifi setting, the background you end up with is going to look like the OTU because T20 doesn't provide the means to create your own alien races or new classes, and it doesn't give you all the options for the technologies (eg alternate FTL Drives).

So it seems to me that T20 at least has enough setting-specific parts in the engine to not really deserve to be called a generic scifi game. CT was a little more so, but not by much - it still had its specific technological assumptions.

As an analogy, people buy D&D3E, create all sorts of worlds and then play campaigns in them. D&D3E is flexible and generic.

D&D actually has the same problem that T20 does - using just the three corebooks, it's great for playing fantasy that is like D&D, but isn't really a generic fantasy setting. Although alternatives were later added, IIRC the corebooks don't have rules for alternate magic systems, player races, advancement options, etc.

If anything, d20 Modern is probably the most generic of the d20 systems when it comes to adaptability. You could play pretty much any style of game with that (especially given the chargen system). But I digress.

People buy Forgotten Realms stuff to play in that campaign world - they absolutely do not expect Forgotten Realms material to be a generic toolkit for building fantasy campaign worlds. If they do, they need a bib.

It seems to me that's what Traveller is though. It might, at the very beginning have been touted as a generic system but it rapidly "fossilised" into the OTU - that's what people think of as Traveller now. I remember asking on JTAS (and here, I think) about whether people actually used Traveller to run campaigns that weren't set in anything like the OTU - and I got very few responses. I think people don't use it as a generic system both because it doesn't really work as such for reasons mentioned earlier, and because Traveller is thought by most people to be specifically about the OTU.

 

[TheEngineer]

Perhaps people do not use it as a generic system, because there are just no commercial or non-commercial alternatives to the TU.
At the very beginning (then I was young ) I tried to set up my own universe. It was just too much work and the project died in a couple of months. So I took existing OTU material.
There still are no real alernatives. Everything is OTU - more or less - and thats why I perhaps understand (do I?) Malenfant, that Traveller is kind of trapped in itself and we might need a kind of brainwash to be able to think different..

In contrast to FlightCommander I never had the impression, that Traveller mechanics should be good for anything else but the OTU.
Nevertheless the ruleset is generic in a way, that you can play a lot of different types of adventure and perhaps even genres, but everything under control of the master OTU.
But I hardly know any official ressources dealing with really different and detailed "microsettings", like "Traveller Fantasy", "Traveller Superheros" or "Traveller Tech Horror".

So even if I really like and enjoy the OTU in all of its settings I would regard something "different" as interesting, too.
But it has to be REALLY different, not just another IMTU incarnation.

What kind of "universe" might there be, which is able to attract ?

 

[Shadowdancer]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
There's this crazy attitude that seems to be peculiar to Traveller that if an official book is written on a subject then that somehow renders any work someone has done on their own campaign invalid.

No, this attitude is not peculiar to Traveller. I frequently see it on the various D&D boards I visit. And I would be willing to bet you can find it among the fans of any RPG.

Is there a larger percentage of Traveller players who feel this way than the players of other games? I don't know. But it certainly isn't found only among Traveller players.

 

[Pompe]

Hm. I don't know about this entire thing.

I can think of a lot of different reasons why people don't play Traveller (I myself only really like TNE and 2300AD, that Imperium thing and cat & dog-aliens never quite made it to me), but as I read this thread and the one over on rpg.net I don't know if it is possible to both attract a serious number of new players and keep the old vocal ones happy.

In part it is because of the immense luggage Traveller has collected, but in part it is a presentation issue - do you make things for the people who already know and play the game or for those you wish to start playing it?

What I think might be good is to - as someone mentioned before - to have more of a setting/tone book, i.e, "what is it about".

What I also think is that it might be interesting to separate essentially OTU-only products from rather generic products with some content of OTU applications to draw in people from the sides. As an example, theme books on Guns, Technical Architecture (FF&S-style), Ship Design, World Building, Psionics, Quick Space Adventures or whatever, with various options for Traveller and non-Traveller universes (including the various ones QLI are fielding), but with a chapter or two about how it would work in the OTU and maybe 2320AD, Honor Harrington etc. Or put in such info as sidebars and boxes.

In that way, people who pick up the Big Book of Space Weapons and Warfare as a generic resource might find Traveller and decide to pick up the Solomani Rim War Book and the Big Traveller Setting Book next time, and those who want to run variant Travellers can mix and match easily, and those who run the strictly OTU-compliant version can use what applies to the OTU and keep the other stuff for surprises and other games.

 

[rancke]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
It seems to me that's what Traveller is though. It might, at the very beginning have been touted as a generic system but it rapidly "fossilised" into the OTU - that's what people think of as Traveller now.

Well, that's certainly the way I think of Traveller (and I'd like to add, as an aside, that it is my belief that the existence of the OTU is what has kept Traveller alive for all these years), but when Chris ran a survey a while back, asking people what they thought was the essential part of Traveller, "The Background" came in a lot further down the list than I had expected.


Hans

 

[Ran Targas]

My two cents:

I am slightly overwhelmed by the OTU. To a certain extent it rivals the Expanded Universe of Star Wars fame in complexity and continuity gaps. As such there is a great deal for any prospective GM to process before running any adventure in the OTU, all without the familiarity brought by seeing some of it on screen. Between the official charts and UPP's, the canon personalities and politics, and the official OTU timeline, it's all a bit much to grasp.

I recall one encounter I had at a Con with a Traveller enthusiast overlooking some older materials on a vendor's table. When I mentioned I was also a fan of Traveller, I was immediately accosted with questions in rapid succession about what era, what sector, and what plotline was my favorite.

When I responed that I preferred to play in MTU or other non-canon settings, his attitude changed immediately from fellow gamer to that of an indignant televangelist! To paraphrase, I was an unwashed heathen, uneducated in the true way, and I was damned to obscurity in the gamer minor leagues because I had rejected the holy truth of the OTU. Really put me off the OTU even further.

Personally, I never thought Traveller was defined by the OTU. In fact, I prefer to keep my Traveller as free from canon as possible.

 

[Evo Plurion]

Enough of this! This bickering is pointless. Vader, release --

Sorry - got carried away. Occasional hostile remarks notwithstanding, I enjoy all this discussion about the direction of the OTU, TNE, etc. It puts me in a mood to dust off my "universe" files and continue work on a completely different Traveller setting.

As for why we do not attract as many new gamers to Traveller as we would like, I think it's more a case of gamers' general preferences than a fault of Traveller itself. Fantasy is simply more popular than science fiction. Just look at the shelves of book and videogame stores. Also, D&D and its iterations dominate the RPG shelves so much so that Traveller may appear (when it appears at all) as a fringe game to the casual consumer. I've had quite a difficult time finding T20 and Gateway to Destiny in Toronto which is no small town.

I was soundly thrashed earlier in this thread for saying so, but I still think we're selling our creative abilities short. It's clear from this thread and others that we have many creative types among us. Of course none of us has as much time as he'd like for world-building, but it doesn't mean we need to abandon all hope.

For each of us, many of the best RPG moments come from our own creativity. It may be as simple as how we interpret the OTU in a particular gaming moment, or as elaborate as a completely homemade universe. In either case, we need not dismiss our own abilities and rely solely on those of the designers and publishers. I was a huge fan of CT and MT and was disappointed by the changes introduced by TNE, but, realizing that it was just a game and that I was free to ignore the developers' mistakes , I didn't think much of it and carried on with CT and MT.

Nowadays I'm more interested in developing my own setting but not because I think the official setting is wrong. It's because of the efforts of developers and gamers whose ideas have shaped the OTU that I'm inspired to try it myself.