Classic RPGs: Traveller

I've always had a soft spot for Traveller. It's one of those games I always loved to think about, but never played. It was so hard to put together a group for this one too, elves and dwarves make easier sells than hard sci-fi any day.

So this is the Mongoose rules edition, and I've heard some complaining about this one, but Mongoose has done a great job of putting together a classic Traveller experience. I guess with every edition you'll never make everyone happy and there will always be people that say "the next version" will be the one they will play. Yet when it comes out the cycle repeats again.

I have a rule: play what people can buy or reasonably get their hands on via downloadable PDF.

So the question remains, what makes this game any fun? As I said, it's a hard sell for most groups I have been around, especially younger players who know D&D and Pathfinder (or had some experience with fantasy), if given a choice many players I have been around will say "fantasy - anything" over sci-fi.

Part of it is player empowerment and fantasy fulfillment. In a Pathfinder-style game, there are a number of paths a player can take a character up for incredible power and legendary ability. You start out the game as someone who can do a couple cool things, and you are waiting to get to the incredibly cool stuff. It's like unlocking powers in the Diablo 2 skill tree and building your character. There's that sense of "I can't wait" and "I'm going to build a character who...."

With sci-fi, it's typically not that way. The only game that I saw recently that did character builds was Fantasy Flight's Edge of the Empire Star Wars game, and that game had deep skill and talent trees for cool character builds. Traveller, on the other hand, is almost 'anti character build' with its career system giving you what you need with a random system, and then you are good to go.

So the motivation is not personal power. It really has to be story. Great stories require great storytellers, and those are rare. Especially in the semi-defined world laid out in the Traveller rulebook, where you make your own subsectors and stories, or the all-consuming Third Imperium setting of this game. The Imperium is cool, but it is also really large and overbearing for some of the groups I played with. Some would much rather be playing in one sector with a homeworld and a bunch of unexplored systems with cool alien races, and not have the heavy Imperium zeitgeist floating out there.

It feels like the difference between a game with open oceans and pirates, with unexplored land waiting over the horizon and treasures to be found and something more cosmopolitan. The Third Imperium sometimes feels like a giant roadmap of Europe, of course you're a Traveller, you're traveling between all of the dots on the map, aren't you? Groups I've played with wanted something more like Expllorer, where they are the ones doing the mapping and discovering and cool brave new worlds stuff.

Of course, nothing is stopping you from doing that with Traveller or even the Third Imperium setting, but you will have to go a long way to get to "your part of the map". You still have that overbearing feeling of Imperial zeitgeist though, like the things you are doing matter little in a galaxy so huge and impersonal. It feels anti-heroic to me in a way, and it is something that throwing out the default setting and starting fresh with a small subsector gives you. That is a tough thing to do with Traveller die-hards, since the Third Imperium is so entrenched and powerful to the faithful. It's a cool setting, but I can see how it scares new players away - especially those coming from fantasy who want their heroics to matter.

I still love the game though, and even if I only 'play' it by reading it and imagining the stories I could tell, it's still a part of my sci-fi roleplaying experience. Still a classic to me, and I love all the support and things Mongoose publishes for the setting.