"James the Geek" managed to play a game with Marc Miller, the creator of Traveller, and then interview him (or chat with him, whatever you want to call it) afterwards, and presented this summary of the experience. I can reference the bullet points he makes and compare and contrast them to Traveller.
When Mr. Miller designed Traveller, he intended it to be a generic sci-fi roleplaying game system, in which we could play any science fiction game we wanted. The Third Imperium setting, came later. More on that in a bit.
I don't think that there really is anything that's generic. The system, whether you really want it to or not, (even GURPS) comes so loaded with conceptions on how things work that it is impossible for it to be truly generic. It can, however, be broad, and accommodate a wide variety of settings. But that's not truly generic.
In any case, maybe I'm nitpicking on semantics. But it's important to realize that you can't play, for example, Star Wars very well with Traveller, because there are a lot of assumptions that won't fit, and you'll never feel like you're playing Star Wars. AD ASTRA, on the other hand, was originally designed as a rules-lite alternative to Star Wars d20; but it won't feel very much like Star Wars anymore either because of the Traveller mapping and travel conventions which heavily impact the way travel works in the setting.
Plus, I added wizards, which don't feel like either.
Plus, I added wizards, which don't feel like either.
The rules, or systems, he included are there as an aid for when your imagination fails. He shared the example of world creation. “Think of a world. Now think of another one. And another. After a while you run out of imagination or things get a little boring.” That’s where the world generation system steps in and helps you by creating worlds that you now have to creatively explain. Why would millions of people choose to live on a desert world with a tainted atmosphere, for example? The more I learned about his play style, and his original ideas for the game, the more it became apparent that the systems, while there to aid us, could be completely ignored (and should be) in order to simply play the game.
I've certainly felt this too, and my system, which is kind of a very stripped down version of Traveller mixed with the World Tags of Stars Without Number has prompted my imagination in all kinds of ways as I've tried to explain the results of what I get. I have indeed written up a few standard worlds that weren't rolled; these are mostly worlds that were leftover from back when my setting was still Return of the Jedi + 1,000 Years. But almost everything else has been randomly generated instead, and I agree 100% that it gives really interesting results.
While playing Traveller, Marc role-plays. Very little rules. Traveller is truly a rules-light game system once you start playing. For our scenario, we generated characters by only rolling up stats. No skills. Just stats and pick your service. All rolls were made against those stats, but you couldn’t roll against the same stat again, until you had used them all. Oh, and you had to support your decision on which stat to use. After that, it was all role playing. Creating a communal story. He made it up as he went along, allowed us to build the story, and acted as “referee” just as intended. After we were through, he said “There. Now you know how I play Traveller.”
Well, it probably should have been written that way, then. This is a big part of what I say a lot that I'm not old school, but I am old-fashioned. To me, that's just the normal way to play any game, but it works best when the game is deliberately written to facilitate that, rather than having lots of rules that the designers would actually rather you not use. To that last point:
Originally, there was no intention to publish anything except rules. He wanted players to use their imaginations and play in whatever world they wanted. The Imperium became the setting after a reviewer made a comment that he wouldn’t play a game that did not include a pre-defined setting. Marc implied that he didn’t want to play in one in which there was one.
Well... I guess maybe it was a smart decision to pay attention to your customers and try and deliver them what you want. I mean, normally I'd 100% applaud that. And maybe that's why we still talk about Traveller today and not so much Star Frontiers or Star*Drive or Space Opera or Spacemaster or any of the other myriad space opera games that were published the decade or two since D&D.
- Traveller was most influenced by the “Dumarest Saga” books, as has been discussed here (and which I apparently need to get my butt out and read asap).
I've read the first one. Not bad. But... not the best space opera I've read, either. To be fair, sometimes the first in a series isn't the best. I should try to round up Derai just to try the next one.
One interesting aspect of this book, though, is that for a book about a "traveller," he does very little traveling. In fact, the whole point of the book is that he's stuck on a weird backwater planet the entire time. In any case, AD ASTRA is most influenced by Star Wars. Which is, in turn, probably most influenced by Dune and the Lensmen books most particularly, although the whole thing about Star Wars is how broad its influences actually are within the space opera genre.
He loves the character creation system because the dice rolls give you interesting characters to play. He pointed out how, during the weekend, he had several PCs that were really just dumb, and it was fun to see how the players handled playing those characters. He mentioned that this is what made the game interesting, and gave exciting results.
Yeah, but there's a lot of weird assumptions about the setting in the character generation system, especially the idea that the characters are retired or mustered out of some kind of armed services division of some sort or another. There's nothing like the Navy or the Scout Corps that Traveller assumes in AD ASTRA... or rather, the Navy is... which Navy? The Bernese Navy? The Revanchist Navy? The Imperial Navy?
Curiously, this paradigm works very well for Anspach and Cole's Galaxy's Edge series, once you start talking about characters who aren't still in the military during the course of the books themselves. If there's a book about Wraith and his crew, for instance...
While he doesn’t play Traveller using lots of rules, he does like to play with systems. Just like many of us here who play with building starships, or worlds, or the merchant system. T5 is this way. He said “I always wanted a system that would make interesting aliens with 5 arms and stuff and I couldn’t figure out how to do it. Finally I did.” I haven’t read T5, but given how much fun I have personally had playing the games within the Traveller game, I may have to pick it up some time, just because.
I can kind of empathize with this, but I'd rather make slight tweaks to a system that I'm already happy with rather than play around with system for its own sake. Just because I can empathize doesn't mean that I have the same desire myself.
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