A to Z: T is Traveller

What is Traveller? Is Traveller the rules system, or is Traveller the setting? This is a debate that crops up from time to time on various discussion boards.

If Traveller is the rule system, then which rule system is Traveller? Classic Traveller, published in 1977, and still my favourite version; MegaTraveller, published in 1986 and including the Task System developed by Digest Group Publications; Traveller: the New Era, published in 1992; Mark Miller’s Traveller (also known as T4), published in 1996; GURPs Traveller, published in 1998, adapted Traveller to the GURPs 3rd Edition rules; Traveller 20 (or T20), published in 2002, adapted Traveller to the D20 system; GURPs Traveller: Interstellar Wars, published in 2006, adapted Traveller to the GURPs 4th Edition Rules; Traveller Hero, published in 2006, adapted Traveller to the Hero System; Traveller 5 (also known as T5), CD-Rom released in 2008 as a “play test document”, and Marc Miller’s latest working of the rules – still in development; Mongoose Traveller, published in 2008 and the latest version of the rules.

I have managed to pick up most of these rule books over the years. I still enjoy Classic Traveller as it is the system I know the best. I liked GURPs Traveller as a concept, and GT has some of the best support material written for the game, but find aspects of the GURPs system very clunky and annoying. I like Mongoose Traveller a lot, as it marks a return to a lot of the stripped-down simplicity of the Classic Traveller rules. I find Mongoose’s continued production faults increasingly irritating, though – if I’m shelling out $NZ30 - $NZ40 for a rule book or supplement, I expect it to be proof read, and I expect it to be edited by someone with a vague understanding of Traveller and the Traveller setting. Traveller 20 had a very interesting setting, but I really don’t like the D20 system – it’s too much like Dungeon and Dragons for my taste, which doesn’t work, in my opinion, in a Science Fiction game. Of the others, while each seems to have its fans, I have never played them.

At the end of the day, it appears that the best version of the Traveller rules is the one you feel most comfortable with. For me, I want a system where the mechanics are easy to remember, there’s a bit of on-line support with apps for designing ships, characters, star maps and systems, and the mechanics don’t get in the way of the story telling.

If Traveller isn’t the rules, but the setting, then which setting? The original Classic Traveller rules had no setting – you could do anything you liked. Later, what is now called the ‘Golden Age’ of Traveller formed the backdrop – the 3rd Imperium in the year 1105, on the eve of the 5th Frontier War with the Zhodani Consulate. MegaTraveller took the 3rd Imperium and destroyed it, and then nuked the ruins with a sentient computer virus called, (drum roll, please ...) Virus. The blurbs on all the material were so gor-blimey that for years I couldn’t take the MegaTraveller or Traveller: The New Era settings seriously. Some of the material, like “Path of Tears” is well written, evocative, and incredibly depressing, and some of the material, like “Vampire Fleets”, is creepy in a haunted-house/2001: A Space Odyssey sort of way, and immanently stealable for other games but, on the whole, left me with a feeling of “meh”.

The setting for Traveller: The New Era attempted to put the wonder of exploration back into the Traveller Universe, but it is a story of re-contact and rediscovery as the characters shuffle through the ruins of fallen empire. GURPs Traveller sidesteps the entire rebellion storyline and carries on with the same-old, same-old. With T4, Marc Miller was quite clever and decided to go back in time to examine the birth of the 3rd Imperium. This was a gentler way of gaming exploration and first contact than picking through the bone worlds of Traveller: The New Era. Traveller T20 explored the Solomani Rim War period, but set in the Gateway Sector – an Imperial backwater looking out over a turbulent neutral zone towards the alien K’kree. This is a fascinating area of space, and some excellent adventures were set here, often with both T20 and Classic Traveller stats. GURPs Traveller: Interstealler Wars explores humanities’ initial encounters with the Vilani Imperium. Finally, Mongoose Traveller has taken the setting back to 1105 and the “Golden Age” – though to date, Mongoose has concentrated pretty much on rewriting Classic Traveller material rather than contributing new material.

So, if Traveller isn’t about rules or setting, and we have seen that rules and settings can change, then what is it about?

The two consistent things about Traveller are that there is no faster-than-light communication, and that Jumps last approximately one week. The best description of what Traveller is comes from the little black box that the little black books came in, way back in 1977. Traveller is “science fiction adventure in the far future”.

“Version – we do for the love of it”

Since its release in 1977, Traveller has been through a number of versions – Classic Traveller; MegaTraveller; Traveller: The New Era; Mark Miller’s Traveller (also known as T4); GURPs Traveller; Traveller T20; Traveller Hero; and Mongoose Traveller. Mark Miller’s legendary T5 is still in development.

Mongoose Traveller is the current, officially supported, version of Traveller and along with a slew of excellent titles, Mongoose has been quite supportive of third-party publishing groups, such as Spica, who have published adventures, supplements and ship deck plans.

I started playing Classic Traveller in about 1980 and, to me, the core mechanic is roll 2d6 and score 8+ to succeed – this covers so many situations, with the GM able to add or subtract DMs as required that, like the paper clip, it seems impossible to understand why we haven’t been using it since the Egyptians began playing dice to while away the hours between pyramid builds.

What put me off MegaTraveller was DGP’s Task Roll mechanism. To me, they had taken an intuitive system and attempted to reduce it to a formula, reduce it to something that the GM had no control over. Looking back now, this was probably a mistaken assumption on my part.

DGP did do a lot of amazing stuff for Traveller, but they did have this completist streak that extended from quantifying the Task Roll to mapping the Universe. There is always this desire to know what’s ‘over there’. DGP took this to its illogical extent by mapping the entire Imperium, but otherwise providing little or no data on what they had mapped. So, creative wandering within the Imperium was effective curtailed, but hundreds of worlds, now with basic stats, were left hanging with no further development. Fan groups, like HIWG, did do a lot of work backfilling in what DGP had created – expanding the tables of stats into worlds with their own populations and cultures but, at the end of the day, most of this work was never picked up by DGP, as the licensee, or GDW, when they took Traveller back in house. This illusion of completeness did have people complaining that the Imperium, as a setting, was boring.

And then there was the Imperial Civil War story line, started by GDW and carried forward by DGP. A war can add interest and uncertainty to a campaign as the players work their way around the edges. The Imperial Civil War tore down what, to a number of players, was a viable setting, but did it in areas that had been poorly described beyond the broad brush Imperial Survey. Consequently, there was this feeling of frustration at the loss of the background, but little attachment to the places of conflict (the Core Worlds and Ilelish, for example).

I missed T:NE completely. I read the blurb on one book that talked about a sentient computer virus called, drum roll, “Virus”, and said, ‘Nah!’

I nearly missed GURPs Traveller as well, but saw the main, 3rd Edition Rule Book and bought them, probably out of a feeling of nostalgia. I was very impressed with what Loren Wiseman did in converting Traveller material to GURPs. I subsequently collected a number of the supplements and support books. Love GURPs character creation and the character templates, love the supplementary material that came out, and collect it purely to mine it for ideas, I’m just not keen on the GURPs combat system. As I get older, I have less time for gaming and so want simpler systems. I therefore bend back towards Classic Traveller because it is so simple in that regard.

Of the later versions of Traveller, such as T4, T20, Hero, and the 1248 setting, I’d never heard of them until my interest in Traveller was rekindled by the release of Mongoose Traveller. I have generated a number of MongTraveller characters, but have yet to play, or run, a game purely under those rules. I find that, in places, MongTraveller is so similar to Classic Traveller that I might as well generate the characters in MongTraveller and run the game as per Classic Traveller to prevent confusion.

So, which version of Traveller is the best? The one you, as a player or referee like, and feel most comfortable with. I’m fortunate in that I love Classic Traveller and like Mongoose Traveller and love the background material for GURPs Traveller. I also like Pocket Empires for T4, a lot of the MegaTraveller material, and Path of Tears for T:NE. In fact, there is always something one can lift from any of these sets of rules to add depth and breadth and height to your own game, no matter what version of Traveller you use.

Accountants in Space

In April of 2008 I began drawing up a spreadsheet containing all the statistical data I had to hand on the six subsectors I had developed in detail for my Traveller campaign. I had been working on the history of the RimWorlds Sector just prior to this, and had narrated a major civil war that had wracked the region several centuries prior to the current campaign date, the Imperial year 1109. This civil war was followed by a couple of centuries of intermittent conflict along both the Rimward and Spinward Imperial borders. As I was doing a lot of starship combat wargaming at the time, using the Full Thrust rules from Ground Zero Games, I wanted to have an idea of both the resources available to the various combatants and whether the scenarios I was happily belting out on my computer were actually feasible as military campaigns.

Using the formulas and exchange rates from CT: Adventure 5 Trillion Credit Squadron (and after having a quick look at the similar but different formulas in Striker), I worked out planetary military budgets and port capacities for all the planets I had developed, plus the total naval budgets for the various non-Imperial alliances, as well as Imperial Subsector Naval, Sector Naval and Imperial Naval budgets for all the developed subsectors.

It was an interesting exercise, and has given me a much more detailed understanding of my area of space. The next step is, of course, to develop the naval fleets of the various polities and, possibly, game with them. I have attempted this at a minor level in the past, gaming out the Miazan Subsector Rebellion, but found that battles fought under the CT: High Guard rules are incredibly boring buckets-of-dice fests, especially if attempted solo.

I was fascinated to discover the ‘collapsing’ mechanism used both by GDW for Traveller: The New Era, and by writers for Traveller T20 for the 900 period prior to the ‘Golden Age’, to shift Baseline UWPs forward or backward in time. Coupled with my discovery of the T4 Supplement Pocket Empires, I began to conceive of a metacampaign, possibly starting from a point two centuries prior to the current campaign date – 1109 – and rolling forward to see if I would achieve a result similar to my current campaign. I began working my existing data into the various formulas for Pocket Empires, though gaps in my Excel programming knowledge has rather stalled that part of the project at present.

The universality of such tools as Excel make such thought exercises quite doable now days, and a lot more fun than trying to keep your millions, billions and trillions in order with a pocket calculator and a pencil. The job of Interstellar Megalomaniac has just got that little bit easier.