Another quick comparison of Ad Astra to Traveller

I'd really like to compare AD ASTRA to some other classic space opera games, like Star Frontiers and Alternity, but I have to admit that I don't know those games nearly as well as I do Traveller.  And I'd like to compare it to newer OSR-style games, maybe, like Stars Without Number or White Star—but I happen to have a ready-made format to compare it to Classic Traveller, so I'll use that.

"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.

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.

Ad Astra mapping conventions vs Traveller

AD ASTRA isn't really meant to be too much like a Traveller game, but I am borrowing a lot of the mapping conventions from Traveller, with some other material "inspired by" Stars Without Number, another sandboxy space exploration game.  Keeping that in mind, here's some quotes from a blog post about how it works, which in turn quote some of the early versions of Traveller.  Keep in mind that Traveller came out in 1977, and although Star Wars also came out that year, the timing is such that Star Wars can't have played much (if any) of a role in developing the game (although no doubt it influenced it later, and it influenced the sales and the expectations of the players, if nothing else.  AD ASTRA is meant to imitate more of the Star Warsian type of swashbuckling space opera, although the mapping and travel conventions—as well as their obligate implications to the setting—are more like that described in Traveller than that described in Star Wars.

Anyway, on to the quotes.  They are from the Tales to Astound! blog.

Part of the lure of the Official Traveller Universe is its immense size.

It stretches across countless subsectors. Contains 11,000 worlds. Has politics back at the Core as well as on the frontier of the Zhodani borders. There are 16 subsectors in the Spinward Marches alone. It’s vastness and immense scope is part of its glittering appeal. And yet, I am going to suggest you don’t get lured by all that glitter. The key is to ask, “How much do I need to get going?” 

Here is what the 1977 edition of Traveller Book 3 said about the matter:

Initially, one or two sub-sectors should be quite enough for years of adventure (each sub-sector has, on the average, 40 worlds), but ultimately, travellers will venture into unknown areas and additional subsectors will have to be charted.

The text above was written two years before GDW published any material abut the Third Imperium. 

Let’s assume for now that the text is valid even if we are setting a game in the Third Imperium. Let’s assume further that the rules and text and the implied setting details of Books 1-3 and why a starting in a setting of limited scope makes perfect sense.

Here's another snippet from another post:

In the section on generating the setting, the 1977 rules state: “Initially, one or two sub-sectors should be quite enough for years of adventure (each sub-sector has, on the average, 40 worlds), but ultimately, travellers will venture into unknown areas and additional subsectors will have to be charted.” 

The 1981 rules, on the other hand, state: “Sixteen subsectors (arranged in four rows of four subsectors each) form a sector, probably the largest size practical for a continuing Traveller campaign.” There is no mention of the details from the 1977 quote. 

Note that in the 1977 rules, the process is laid in the most practical terms: “Here’s how you start. Here’s how much you need.” (The term “sector” never appears at all in the 1977 edition.) 

I consider this difference huge, as in one case the Referee is told that 40 or 80 worlds is enough to get going with play. And in the other case it is implied that he or she should probably generate 640 worlds to create a fair sized setting for play.

Now, that's not exactly fair.  The 1981 books do not suggest that you should generate 640 worlds to create a fair sized setting for play, it suggests that that's the maximum practically usable size. When I started developing the New Alderamin sector, using mapping conventions very similar to Traveller, I did indeed have an entire sector, but at the same time: not really.  Not that I need to justify myself to the comments of this guy, but I think he's right in broad terms, and I'm going to show that actually I don't think that I'm as far off as all that anyway.

For one thing, I did not use the same "standard" density.  The standard density means that half of all hexes (on average) will have a system in them.  This works well because of the Traveller convention of jump-1 and jump-2 drives being much more common than jump-3.  In AD ASTRA, jump-3 (or its equivalent) is standard which means I can reduce the density, which means route-finding can still be interesting and yet also more varied.  Rather than a ½ density, I went with a ⅓ density.  Rather than 640 worlds, my sector would have 425 (given the law of average, anyway—in actuality, I got 421.)  Even then, I doubt that I will ever actually develop more than ⅓ of even those, so if I get 140 worlds, I think that's about the maximum scope that I'll be looking at.  That's between three and four subsectors worth of standard Traveller mapping; a bit more than the blog post is recommending (actually, if you deep dive his post, he only recommends starting with about half of a subsector!) But given that I'm not actually running, developing this stuff is, at the moment, the expression of my hobby. I think I'm in good shape, honestly.

If I'm only going to develop about ⅓ of the worlds that I generated placement and political affiliation for, then why did I generate the rest of them, anyway?  Much of it was to give the setting that I do develop context, and because the workload to do so was trivial.  Even then, I had much more material than I was ever going to need; I've probably named about 200 systems, but I won't actually develop any detail beyond the name, hex location, and political affiliation of about 140 (I actually tried to count the ones I identified as targeted for development on my setting page, but I got distracted, lost count, and decided that I didn't care, because I was obviously very close to my targeted number as determined by the mathematics of using ⅓'s)  That was more than I thought I'd do, but the other reality is that as I'm doing this development, I'm finding that it's giving me ideas for games and fiction and all kinds of other things, but that I've got several campaigns worth of stuff out there, much of it discreet from other campaigns.  I can see several campaigns, in fact, centered on the Carrick Grand Marches and the stuff around them; political tension between the Carrick and the Carthen Colony, for instance.  Or weird adventure amongst the neighboring Voormellei Federation.  Interesting stuff going on that would take up tons of potential adventure in just a handful of the independent worlds nearby.  Or the Saraeans and their ambitions; they add potential whole 'nother campaigns by themselves.  The same for the Dhangetan "wretched hives of scum and villainy."  And it goes on and on.  And yet; that is in a subsector's worth of worlds.  If I move my focus more to the galactic west, around some of the other, smaller Bernese colonies and their relationships with Saraean Outremer, or the Altairans or the Takach, etc.  I do, certainly, have much more information than I could possibly ever need to run AD ASTRA campaigns on a weekly basis from now until the time that I die, with the material that I already have.  On top of that, I could write dozens of novels that don't even interfere with those campaigns—all with that ⅓ of a ⅓-density sector—and I'd still have dozens of worlds that I maybe dropped a name and a political color code on, but otherwise did nothing else with (for instance, I have no plans at the moment to ever detail any Altairan Ascendency or Reaver world.  Although maybe I'll change my mind about that some day too.)  I find that I want to use the four or so Bernese colonies as potential protagonist characters, if setting elements can be seen as characters, so I'm developing them and their surroundings at the expense of the other areas that will be left in a null state for the time being.

So, again, while I'm not playing Traveller, I've obviously got a lot of information from Traveller, and it's hard for me to step too far outside of the paradigm of Traveller when it comes to setting development.  I think the way that star mapping and star travel (and, as I said, the downstream implications of those) works in Traveller are wonderful.

I do not on the other hand, have as much fondness for the way that character generation and the implications on what that is for characters from Traveller.  Which, I suppose, is why I've adopted rules for star mapping and travel that is very similar to Traveller but not anything else, really, from the game, which is otherwise based on an interpretation of Star Wars.

UPDATE: I went back and did do an accurate count.  Not counting the worlds that I did as a prototype but which are actually off-map, I have 147 identified to do (and granted, there's not a lot of urgency for most of those.)  I've actually done 43 so far, so... just under a third.  Granted, that does make my list more daunting.  But like I said, most of it isn't very urgent to be done, and if it takes me even a couple of years to get around to it, that's OK.  I've got plenty that can be used right now around the Carrick Grand Marches—and to be honest, I think I want to concentrate my first efforts on new stuff with systems that are close enough to the Carrick that they can contribute to a that setting within the setting.

So, my first targets will be a number of Dhangetan worlds that are in the somewhat immediate vicinity of the Carrick Grand Marches and its surroundings:

• 1624 Moise
• 1625 Drini IV
• 1631 Vorli VI
• 1724 Tawasy
• 2123 Kari Jora
• 2223 Fthughu
• 2224 Cadon
• 2328 Kribblu VII
• 2428 Sakuleth

Add to that list, the Cilindarean world 1723 Peleres, and we're all set for the immediate future.

But before I do any of those, I want to continue my work on replacing my sector map with a more aesthetically pleasing version.  Although I will almost certainly still be working on that offline as these data sheets start to come up.

UPDATE 2:  I took about six of the Dhangetan worlds off of the list that needs doing.  They were simply too far away to be necessary for anything centered on the Bernese colonies as a protagonist "Setting of Play."