Friday, October 9, 2015

Alternate Traveller Campaign Frames: Strange New Worlds

I've discussed a couple of alternate campaign frames previously, covering the Mercenary campaign along with the Squadron and Active Duty campaign frames. Though the last was only presented in terms of Navy games (and so incorporating Marines by default), it would have been easily converted for use with other active duty military games involving the Army. I'm going to start skipping around, because the other campaign frames from the classic Traveller era are either minor and not well detailed, or ones that I am not very familiar with at this time (I will be discussing the frame implied in The Traveller Adventure later on, which is related to the "default" Traveller campaign frame that I've also described previously, but includes some new concepts that are very important).

Unfortunately, the classic Traveller expansion for the Scout service, Book 6 Scouts, did not incorporate a specific campaign framework. It included only a set of tools for the Referee to detail whole systems instead of the main worlds that were rolled up in the basic world generation system along with an expanded character generation system for Scout characters that followed on the same lines as the military services presented in the previous two books. Paranoia Press, who presented an expanded Scouts character generation system a little earlier in their supplement Scouts and Assassins, also did not expand on the sorts of activities that a Scout might perform as part of actual play. The supplements for MegaTraveller titled Grand Survey, Grand Census, and World Builder's Handbook started to cover the sorts of things a Scout might do, but as I have never actually seen the first two of those supplements I can't comment on them. World Builder's Handbook did include some very useful tasks related to surveying a world, but didn't go much further toward detailing a campaign frame related to exploration - though an enterprising and interested Referee could easily turn the notes presented into such a campaign. Instead of discussing those, then, I will skip ahead to the two editions of Traveller that presented Scout campaign frames at least reasonably well.

EDIT: Re-reading some of the World Builder's Handbook, I see that it includes more detail toward an exploration and contact game than I remembered. I may return to that supplement later.

First, Traveller: The New Era got in on the action. In its extensive rewrite and reimagining of the MegaTraveller supplement called World Builder's Handbook, titled World Tamer's Handbook, GDW presented detailed descriptions of the tasks necessary to survey a new world in the wilds ravaged by Virus. Those tasks were generic, of course, and so not limited to the New Era setting. Highly detailed looks at the environment of a world were presented, along with methods for generating them beforehand. Information down to the amount of extractable wind and hydro energy, soil fertility, and so on in a 10km hex was presented in a usable and efficient manner. Scouts could go in, find out the details of a world, and return to provide the results of their survey to whatever home base they served.

The supplement didn't stop there, though. The other side of the Scout coin in SF is colonization, and World Tamer's Handbook presented a campaign frame of colonists, a first in SF gaming generally, and for Traveller specifically. A model was provided that allowed players to determine the economic output of their colony based on decisions they made about allocating resources both infrastructure- and human-related, which they could then direct toward various improvements and maintenance - a true domain-level game at last. This also saw the return of the sandbox format for a Traveller campaign, which had largely dropped by the wayside during the late Traveller and most of the MegaTraveller eras in favor of the then-popular story-based format. In addition to whatever the Referee chose to throw at them to further the story, colonial administrators (the PCs, the rules assume) would experience various random events that provided story hooks related to administering a group of people in a colony. Sadly, this wasn't well implemented, as the events mostly were defined in terms of a single task roll to resolve them ("Crime Wave, succeed in a Difficult Investigation roll" or suffer some penalty, for example). Nonetheless, this was a great idea, but didn't see much support from the community of players, something that can really be said about most of Traveller: The New Era, unfortunately. Some general notes toward scaling the colonial model up to cover entire world governments were included, but the system becomes unwieldy at the higher end. This would lead to a different system for world-spanning empires later on, and I will probably discuss that campaign frame next time.

When Steve Jackson Games picked up a license to produce a Traveller edition using their GURPS rules, one of the supplementary books they produced was GURPS Traveller: First In. First In gave the GT version of Scout activities, including, in addition to the expected detailed world generation system, a set of rules for surveying a system. As is the case with most of the GT materials, though, these tools were provided with no real guidance as to what to do with them. A decent GM could certainly take them and turn them into tools for adventurous games or even campaigns, of course, but no such framework was explicitly provided. In a nice turn, there were a number of optional rules included, ranging from minor to as radical for the Traveller game as incorporating 3D star mapping instead of the traditional parsec-wide-hex based 2D sector/subsector system. The designer's notes for that supplement, available for free on the SJG site, give more detail still toward a game using 3D star maps, including discussion of possible changes to the Jump Drive and so on. I should add at this point that if you have any interest in the GURPS Traveller line at all, you should hurry up and get the PDFs, as SJG's license to sell that edition expires at the end of this year, and they will not be renewing it. After that point, they will not be selling GT materials, not even the PDFs.

6 comments:

  1. GURPS Traveller and the Interstellar Wars supplement are some of the best representations of Traveller, in my opinion.

    I may have to buy a New Era book. Works Tamers sounds grand. Something neat to add to CT.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think that the GURPS Traveller books are great, among the best Traveller materials published (Behind the Claw and Star Mercs excepted) if you already have a good grounding in both the setting and what to do with it. But, the GURPS books leave out many of the fundamental tools that exist for running a Traveller game properly, such as the patron tables and the like. GURPS assumes that the GM will be setting up the situations without that sort of assistance, and that's fine. It's another way to play. I plan to talk about my current thinking (which is somewhat different than things I've said in the past on the subject) regarding what roleplaying games are soon, and that is one of the issues that is relevant to that discussion.

      One of the things about GURPS generally that is frustrating is that it assumes one already has a good idea of what to do with setting material. Transhuman Space is perhaps the most notorious for this, presenting a fascinating setting but offering precious little guidance for how to actually use it, but it seems (now, looking at it in retrospect) like much of the material published for GURPS over the years has failed in that basic area. That works for GURPS, because it is really a toolkit to allow a GM to manifest their particular game and setting, but other games incorporate setting into the rules, to one degree or another, in an emergent fashion. That lack of any guidance may also contribute to the widespread impression that GURPS is particularly difficult to play.

      World Tamer's Handbook really is great in concept, if not always in execution (if only those random events were treated more like patrons or rumors were in the basic rules!). The basic framework seems like it should be eminently adaptable to CT with only a little effort. That's one of the things about Traveller I really like: even in the most varied editions (TNE, T20, Traveller Hero, and D6 Traveller are the most extreme examples), there's almost always something that a player of any particular edition can take and use.

      Delete
  2. You might find the missing Classic pieces in the Introductory Adventure The Imperial Fringe, released as part of the Deluxe Traveller set. It has rules for exploring and surveying worlds that never show up anywhere else.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ah! I'd never heard anyone say that there was anything particularly useful at all in that one. I'll have to bump it up my priority list for filling out my collection.

      Delete
  3. One of the items I've noticed about GURPS is they give you a setting, and expect the GM to build a future out of it. The philosophy isn't like GDW or FASA who would built an ongoing gaming universe, and keep it growing and changing, but to give you a point in time and say "It's yours, take it and run".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That is generally true of SJG setting materials, though they did make some attempts at an ongoing setting with Transhuman Space (see the Teralogos News quarterly volumes that lasted a year), and they continued the tradition of Traveller News Service entries for their alternative future history of the Imperium in which Archduke Dulinor did not assassinate Emperor Strephon's robot double. Other than those, though, they have always taken the option of providing a setting starting point that the GM could continue as desired as you say.

      Another company whose philosophy of world presentation is based on providing a single starting point and then leaving it to the individual Referee is Columbia Games, whose Hârn setting products are always presented at a fixed point in time.

      As a personal preference, I like that method better than an ongoing storyline given by the publisher, as they don't know what is going on at my gaming table and so can't accommodate events that happen there. The only possible exception is what happened in TORG, but even there the ongoing story imposed by the company (in reaction to play reports from various game groups) makes the game slightly more difficult to use now, after that support was withdrawn, or to some extent for any groups that didn't start at the moment the game was released and then kept up with the changing situation.

      Delete