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Traveller Hero: How to capture the authentic feel of the original?


schir1964

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... And how do you describe the 'authentic feel' of the orignal Traveller game?

 

I'm creating this thread to allow for a continuation of a discussion and prevent further sidetracking of the other thread.

 

Those who were discussing it there feel free to copy your posts over here.

 

- Christopher Mullins

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Based on what other have said, I'll try again and say that Traveller has a 'Hard Core Science Fiction' feel to it.

 

I think this has to do with the realistic mortality of characters in the game.

 

If a character is careless then survival is the exception, not the rule.

Even if a character is careful death is just around the corner waiting for an opportunity. 

 

And the details of certain background elements helps to foster this with Ships designs being restricted by volume, fuel, and life support requirements.

 

- Christopher Mullins

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For me, what feels like "Traveler" is mostly about setting and assumptions of the setting.  

War of some kind somewhere is always a possibility.

90% of characters are ex-military, they are all making a buck (or trying to) flying cargo of some kind, legal or not.  

Technology has a 50's feel to it - bulky or large, raw without aesthetics, requiring massive amounts of power. Pulpish/Steampunkish to me at times. Of course given when it was created, with no concept of iPads, VM servers, etc., it makes sense.

 

Star Trek's Enterprise is stately and comfortable; Traveller's Beowulf is a mass of metal with few amenities, cramped, like the Serenity.

 

 

As far as random versus point, I think building a Lifepath with a Classic Traveller feel, like the Lifepaths (1. Growing Up, 2. Professional Path, and 3. Complications similar to that found in Champion New Millennium and others), if done right, could REALLY bring the Traveller feel to the character. Not a small task given the different paths available, but probably worthwhile.

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Be aware that While I have read all of the posts on the previous post, I wanted to answer how the (Classic, MegaTraveller and Mongoose Traveller)Character Generation gives a particular feel to a character. I admit that I have never served in the armed services, but I have had a long life full of very different experiences. The Randomness of the character gen gives a right feel to me. A character DOES have some control over what they do, but the die rolls sometimes make it impossible. ie A PC Marine Enlisted person might want to get into OCS or another branch, but perhaps they bombed out on the tests. Also, what happens during a 4 year term can be quite random, which IMHO mirrors real life in many ways. Your Marine might find their posting getting in ship to ship boardings, or perhaps they orbitally insert to back up reguar Army ground pounders. Perhaps they join Pilot school and fly Marine fighters. That randomness along with the chance every term of becoming critically wounded (formally a chance to die during character gen), gives the character generation that Traveller feel.

If a player writes down what their character did during their terms (not just the skills), they will find themselves with IMHO a Solid framework that they can build a solid background from. Players working together and with the GM might even find commonalities which can suggest connections with other PC's. Using the character generated a player can use that framework for also choosing skills, Talents and Perks within the Hero System.

 

Traveller is a framework, it was designed to be a universal system. The designers were trying as hard as they could to keep stuff Realistic or at least plausable.

The Imperium (The default Traveller setting), is a sprawling empire of hundreds of inhabited worlds, Alien races that are more than humans with strange foreheads or rubber suits. The technology is based on fairly hard science. FTL is relatively slow (most ships doing 3-7 lightyears a week. Ships are Tramp freighters, or houseboats in feel. It takes weeks to get far enough from a systems gravity wells to actually use FTL. Stuff has to be maintained well or 'Bad stuff" happens. Most Merchant campaigns feel similar to the Firefly TV show. People near the edge of poverty, breaking down, etc. Doing what it takes to survive. Military Campaigns can feel very much like your favorite Military SciFi. Traveller comes down to regular people living their lives in a dangerous universe. Combat can be very deadly (which is why GURPS was such a good fit for Traveller), so people learn to avoid it.

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Technology has a 50's feel to it - bulky or large, raw without aesthetics, requiring massive amounts of power. Pulpish/Steampunkish to me at times. Of course given when it was created, with no concept of iPads, VM servers, etc., it makes sense.

 

Star Trek's Enterprise is stately and comfortable; Traveller's Beowulf is a mass of metal with few amenities, cramped, like the Serenity.

 

That's what I see. Computers exist, but they don't replace people doing things. Nothing is solved by reconfiguring the deflector dish, and damage isn't sending a repair crew to get the shields back from 62% to 100, it's having the head engineer and the party strong guy head down to a damaged bulkhead in vacc suits with really big wrenches, epoxy, soldering irons, and temporary sheeting.

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The Imperium (The default Traveller setting), is a sprawling empire of hundreds of inhabited worlds, Alien races that are more than humans with strange foreheads or rubber suits. The technology is based on fairly hard science. FTL is relatively slow (most ships doing 3-7 lightyears a week. Ships are Tramp freighters, or houseboats in feel. It takes weeks to get far enough from a systems gravity wells to actually use FTL. Stuff has to be maintained well or 'Bad stuff" happens. Most Merchant campaigns feel similar to the Firefly TV show. People near the edge of poverty, breaking down, etc. Doing what it takes to survive. Military Campaigns can feel very much like your favorite Military SciFi. Traveller comes down to regular people living their lives in a dangerous universe. Combat can be very deadly (which is why GURPS was such a good fit for Traveller), so people learn to avoid it.

 

People keep using that term, "Hard Science", and I wonder what it means to them. To me, hard science means more like what it does in the GURPS tech manuals -- conforms to the laws of physics as we know them today. That means reaction thrusters, rotation as simulated gravity, yes fusion power exists but in giant megawatt-sized power plants, lasers exist but power storage constraints limit their usefulness, etc. etc.

 

I do like the slow ftl travel, lots of travel in system, having to buy or mine fuel, etc.

 

To me, the example of a Traveller ship isn't the Serenity, it is the ship from the movie Alien-- a cramped space where the crew usually is surrounded by lots of engineering space (which the Serenity had too little of, despite the rotating main motor that Kaley worked on). The crew ate at a raty looking plastic table that, if it got chipped or melted by acidic alien blood, would stay that way as a reminder from there on out. 

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Since you asked, here's my two centicredits:

  • Keep the technology the same. Everything should be distinguishable from magic (with the possible exception of FTL travel and artificial gravity).
  • Keep the lifepaths around, either as templates or as character archetypes (like the superhero gallery in Champions 6e). They should be usable with some form of random generation system.
  • Detailed tables for randomly generating sectors and systems.
  • The Imperium needs to be described in a little bit of detail. (Was that ever done in classic Traveller?)

There's probably other stuff. Classic Traveller had a characteristic for social status but I don't remember any rules for using it.

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Social status plays a role in obtaining commissions during character creation. Beyond that, well, it probably helps when players need to call in political favors for all the mercantile shenanigans they'll be engaged in once the campaign begins.

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In response to some of the posts:

 

I use the term 'Hard Core Science Fiction' which usually means that technology is based on current knowledge of science with some exceptions where super science might exist. Such exceptions should also be an extension of science and considered plausible/theoretical but not provable. Consider the technology of FTL ships. Not provable with current science but perhaps plausible based on the warp bubble theory.

 

Social Status: Social status was used as a way for a character to have some sort of recognition of power/influence in the universe and also affected a character's amount of starting credits and starting possessions. In MegaTraveller this was utilized even more since the groundwork for existing Noble Families were fleshed out and parts of the universe where different nobility had influence. Granted it could be a two edged sword depending on where your were and in many backwater areas it had little effect whatsoever. So it's effect in game depended on the GM in many ways.

 

- Christopher Mullins

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"Hard science fiction" also has a tendency to discard emerging technologies whose futures are too hard to imagine without getting "fanciful". A good example would be nano-technology.

 

I sort of feel it is a mistake to label Traveller hard sci-fi just because it uses some real-ish math here and there and the technology doesn't stray too close to magic (Jump drives aside). I think of it more as nostalgia sci-fi, where the game has more in common with 18th century naval warfare romances than with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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Traveller's 2 biggest pieces of Rubber Science are the Jump Drive, and AntiGravity.

Most ships use Fusion Torches as movement (though at higher techlevels they get into gravitic Thrusters). Ships movement operates between 0-6 Gravities of thrust, with higher thrust ratings impossible. Most PC ships have at most 2G's of thrust. Which means that it takes days/weeks to ferry a ship out to a point where they can use their FTL(Jump) drives. This is FAR different in feel from Star Wars/Star Trek which have ships that can drop out of FTL hours away (Minutes away) from their Destination. Traveller assumes that ships take a week or so to move far enough away from all gravity sources so the ships can use their Jump drives. Same thing after dropping out of jump space at the destination. There's usually 4 weeks worth of maneuvering fuel aboard most starships it's implied that that amount of fuel is for emergencies.

FTL is slowish )1-6 parsecs a week ships must be 100 diameters away from all gravity sources, which can be a trick in some systems. This causes the ships to need rooms and common areas because people spend so much time on the ship both during the time spent maneuvering before jump, the week in Jump space, and the time spent maneuvering to the ship's destination.

Combat Technology is pretty grounded in 'reality' there IS powered Armor Suits, Fusion guns/Plasma Guns at higher Techlevels. Most PC's will be using Slug throwers (ie weapons that are very similar to Today's Firearms).and wearing Body Armor that is slightly higher tech than our current technology's body armor. This also Grounds the feel of the game into what players know.

How ships feel depend on what they are used for. IMHO Military ships will be very much like the new Battlestar Galactica. Very spartan, lots of metal, very similar in look and feel to today's military vessels. Merchant ships OTOH will be nicer in look inside. They take on passengers so while they won't look like the Titanic inside, the interiors may be very much like the Serenity (Crew Quarters small and spartan, Large Common area with Entertainment (ie large screen TV Equivalent), Passenger staterooms more like the Tam's quarters).

Yes, Traveller's starships are supposed to feel like traveling on a Tramp Steamer around the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are even ships for bored Nobles to go on safari with.

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Traveller reminded me strongly of Star Wars in that it had a very grungy, dieselpunk vibe. (I assume the resemblance is intentional.) Rarely do the PCs get to see, let alone use, gear that is new and clean. Ships, droids, and weapons are all decades old and badly worn, unless they're on a military flagship or a glittering sector capital world.

 

Furthermore the campaign setting is relatively low tech. Computers are present but don't have a huge impact. Jump drives and antigravity are the only really fantastic elements. AIs, cybernetics, and robots are extremely rare. Starship combat is relatively "hard", as ships maneuver using vector mechanics, and weaponry is mostly limited to plausible directed energy weapons and missiles.

 

PCs are definitely at the heroic, not superheroic or even Dark Champions level. No powers unless you're an alien, and low AP even then.

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Been meaning to comment, but keep forgetting. This correlates to some of the posts by others.

 

D&D - Cookie-cutter characters. I'm talking old school D&D (and AD&D); I won't debate the merits of 3E+. All of the characters are basically the same given their class/level.

Champions (Hero) - DIY characters. You can build what you want.

Traveller - "Random" characters. You never knew what you were going to get until you finished character generation

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Well, if you really want the feel of the original Traveller game--roll two six-siders instead of three.

 

 

What?

That's really the reason we don't play Traveller. 2D6 simply isn't enough variation to provide appropriate granularity to success rolls (a +/-1 in difficulty is too big a jump), as far as we are concerned.

 

I guess T5 has more dice to roll under depending on the difficulty of the task. That also seems like a pretty ingranular method.

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Traveller reminded me strongly of Star Wars in that it had a very grungy, dieselpunk vibe. (I assume the resemblance is intentional.) Rarely do the PCs get to see, let alone use, gear that is new and clean. Ships, droids, and weapons are all decades old and badly worn, unless they're on a military flagship or a glittering sector capital world.

 

Furthermore the campaign setting is relatively low tech. Computers are present but don't have a huge impact. Jump drives and antigravity are the only really fantastic elements. AIs, cybernetics, and robots are extremely rare. Starship combat is relatively "hard", as ships maneuver using vector mechanics, and weaponry is mostly limited to plausible directed energy weapons and missiles.

 

PCs are definitely at the heroic, not superheroic or even Dark Champions level. No powers unless you're an alien, and low AP even then.

Based on the way technology is moving now, AIs, cybernetics and robots are likely to be extremely common 300+ years in the future.

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It's hard to say what held/holds Traveller back more, Miller's preoccupation with 18th century maritime romance or an inability to envision a technological (far) future. By now I think we all realize that just about any "rubber science" you can concoct today has a reasonable chance of becoming reality three to four centuries from now (never mind two millenia from now when the Third Imperium takes place). What seemed like absurd space opera in the 70s is our not-so-absurd near future today, so maybe our sci-fi RPGs need to be considerably more open-minded, fanciful even, in their pursuit of a "hard sci fi" pedigree.

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I wouldn't hold the futurist blind spots against Miller. When the game was written there was no internet and no Moore's Law. Computation is the biggest blind spot in SF in general, and that's key to all kinds of critical tech like surveillance, AIs, cybernetics, genetic engineering, autonomous vehicles, and weapons that don't miss.

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I wouldn't hold the futurist blind spots against Miller. When the game was written there was no internet and no Moore's Law. Computation is the biggest blind spot in SF in general, and that's key to all kinds of critical tech like surveillance, AIs, cybernetics, genetic engineering, autonomous vehicles, and weapons that don't miss.

You can find similar tendencies in SF of the period. Even when they were postulating AIs, etc., the "hard science" behind it was still highly influenced by the real-world science.

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Traveller's 2 biggest pieces of Rubber Science are the Jump Drive, and AntiGravity.

 

Most ships use Fusion Torches as movement (though at higher techlevels they get into gravitic Thrusters). Ships movement operates between 0-6 Gravities of thrust, with higher thrust ratings impossible. Most PC ships have at most 2G's of thrust. Which means that it takes days/weeks to ferry a ship out to a point where they can use their FTL(Jump) drives. This is FAR different in feel from Star Wars/Star Trek which have ships that can drop out of FTL hours away (Minutes away) from their Destination. Traveller assumes that ships take a week or so to move far enough away from all gravity sources so the ships can use their Jump drives. Same thing after dropping out of jump space at the destination. There's usually 4 weeks worth of maneuvering fuel aboard most starships it's implied that that amount of fuel is for emergencies.

 

FTL is slowish )1-6 parsecs a week ships must be 100 diameters away from all gravity sources, which can be a trick in some systems. This causes the ships to need rooms and common areas because people spend so much time on the ship both during the time spent maneuvering before jump, the week in Jump space, and the time spent maneuvering to the ship's destination.

 

 

Classic Traveller assumed a maneuver drive where electricity was fed to it, and out came thrust (essentially, a reactionless thruster). In MegaTraveller, it was assumed that vehicles and some small craft (usually around 20 Traveller displacement tons or less) used gravitic propulsion, and were therefore limited to about 10 diameters from a fairly large gravity source (planet or moon). Other small craft and most starships were assumed to use Thruster Plates, which were reactionless thrusters from many Golden Age SF stories with the handwave that they utilized a combination of gravitics and nuclear damper technology. Later rule sets defined their limit at 1000 diameters from a gravity source.

 

TNE decided to be "realistic" and introduced HEPlaR (High Efficiency Plasma Re-combustion), and introduced the concept of G-turns of thrust, which meant that most starships couldn't really do constant acceleration anymore (and it became very hard to do any in-system travel). Thruster Plates were an option in Fire, Fusion & Steel (the construction rules for TNE) for GMs who wanted things the way they were. T4 went back to Thruster Plates, with Fusion drives (and HEPlaR) for ships that had to work outside the 1000 diameter limit in "deep space". GURPS Traveller built their maneuver drives using GURPS Vehicles reactionless thrusters, which, for certain tech values conveniently produce exactly the same amount of thrust per volume as the Traveller ones from MT and TNE.

 

As far as ships having difficulty reaching jump points, that's rarely the case in Traveller. In the Sol system, Terra has an average distance from the Sun of about 149 million kilometers. The 100 diameter point is actually inside that orbit, at around 140 million kilometers. A ship just needs to clear the 100 diameter mark of Terra (about 1.3 million KM), which a Maneuver-1 capable ship can do in 372 minutes (a little over 6 hours, per the Traveller Book chart).

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It's hard to say what held/holds Traveller back more, Miller's preoccupation with 18th century maritime romance or an inability to envision a technological (far) future. By now I think we all realize that just about any "rubber science" you can concoct today has a reasonable chance of becoming reality three to four centuries from now (never mind two millenia from now when the Third Imperium takes place). What seemed like absurd space opera in the 70s is our not-so-absurd near future today, so maybe our sci-fi RPGs need to be considerably more open-minded, fanciful even, in their pursuit of a "hard sci fi" pedigree.

 

I don't realize anything of the kind.  Back in the 70s it actually seemed reasonable that the speed of light was just something that we'd inevitably beat with the boundless potential of SCIENCE!.  These days, I kind of expect that three centuries from now, not only will we not be building an interstellar empire, we won't even be doing all that much with the solar system.  The past 40 years have taught me that reality is actually pretty darn likely to fall short of science fiction.  

 

As for computers and robots, well the obvious problem is that if you automate everything, then there's nothing for the PCs to do.  So making humans obsolete is a bad idea.  

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So making humans obsolete is a bad idea.  

Oh, not necessarily. Check out "Saturn's Childen" and "Neptune's Brood" by Charles Stross, in which humanity's successors are just as much a bunch of obnoxious a**holes as we are. It was mentioned in the former novel that when the human race went extinct, "human" civilization didn't even miss a beat. (Explanation: humans couldn't figure out how to make a true functional artificial intelligence, so they made self-aware robots by copying human neural structures into synthetic forms.)

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Pretty sure that Thruster plates were a MegaTraveller thing as were reactionless drives.

All of the original artwork for ships have nozzles at the rear of the craft (I just checked). The actual technology behind Maneuver drives, and Powerplants are hinted at, but not stated. Again all of the Keith Bros. artwork of the time tends to favor the idea of something coming out of the nozzles of the drives.

I know that the idea of thruster plates came from the GDW staff seeing StarWars. Yes ThrusterPlates were part of Mega Traveller. I know that the TML had a bit to do about "reactionless drives" which is why there was a backpedaling toward fusion torches as in LBB Traveller.

TNE's rules were so borked I never spent much time fooling around with FFS, it also seemed to be a bit over complicated for a RPG. Though looking at the Core rules, it seemed like the Maneuver drives were AntiGravity.

T4 is HEPlaR.

 

Mong Traveller is Gravitic Drive. Though how Maneuver drives work are not in the Core book (Like Classic Trav). They saved that tidbit for the High Guard Book.

T5 is using for it's NAFAL (Not As Fast As Light) drives gravitic Thrusters(didn't find HEPlaR mentioned in the Big Black T5 Book, but who knows it might be hidden someplace that I didn't look)

I looked all of those up. Either it's not defined as in Classic Traveller (outside of JTAS articles that I didn't go though) or Core Rules Mongoose Traveller.

 

So we were both wrong. When we played Classic Traveller, we(the group I played with) assumed Fusion Thrusters at median Imperial Tech Levels (11-13) and Glowplates like StarWars at maximum Imperial Tech Levels (14-15). I remember MegaTraveller using glowplates and that being a big deal, and that later there was controversy over the way they worked.

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There are no rules for reaction mass in Classic Traveller for ships; instead there is a note that when allocating power plant fuel, that it is sufficient for running the ship and powering the maneuver drive for "four weeks cruising" (High Guard p. 27). Thruster plates were explained in DGP's Traveller Digest.

 

MegaTraveller specifically named gravitic drives and thruster plates as what moved the ships.

 

TNE describes HEPlaR in Fire, Fusion, and Steel v.2 on p. 70. This leads to the problem that ships can't really get around in-system due to fuel issues (they actually assume that ships accelerate to the jump point, and then coast to the mainworld on arrival in the next system). Thruster plates are described on p. 73 with the note that

 

 

Maneuver drives in previous editions of Traveller were
explained as related to the same body of theoretical physics
which allowed artificial gravity and damper fields, which is to
say  manipulation of gravitational force and the strong nuclear
force. Artificial gravity was defined as a force which could either
push or pull and which acted on the gravitational field of a
mass. Clearly, this would not be an efficient means of travel
outside of a gravity well, and so a further advance was postu-
lated which allowed the force generated by the drive to push
on the actual thruster plates of the ship itself, propelling  it
through space and achieving a true reactionless drive.

 

T4 tried to split the difference, using HEPlaR starting at TL10, and replacing it with Thruster-Plate Drives at TL12. (p. 92 of the main T4 rules).

 

Mongoose sourced their version of Traveller extensively from CT and MT, which is why theirs is gravitic-based.

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