What do mean no ships? Or why I think my previous Traveller games have failed

As much as it pains me to admit it the times I have tried to run a Traveller game I failed badly, on the bright side so did every one of my peers. I have thought about this a lot because I really want to run a sci-fi game and have it last and be fun. What I finally concluded was that calling it sci-fi was the first and biggest mistake. Unlike fantasy there is no baseline assumptions everyone will have. In fantasy you have some variation on the four base characters using swords and magic to kill orcs and then take their stuff. FTL travel is about the only constant trope people will share when starting a game. I like Andre Norton so a scenario I come up with is going to have a wildly different set of assumption than a player who loves Gibson's cyberpunk stories. Then you need to consider the real world constraints of one person creating a universe and all the information for it. We have a huge amount of information organized and nearly instantaneously available to us through the web which I don't think is ever going to be replicated in anyone's game ever but it is what was expected even by me. It is not satisfying to say or hear "you should be able to do that but the GM and game system can't provide it" but without the acceptance of this limitation I think any campaign will fail. Even more broadly without the group as a whole accepting the need for a lot more cooperation in planning a campaign the game will probably fail. It may look like sci-fi but should have the same expectations as a fantasy campaign. Which is not the same as blast open the iris valve kill all the denebian traders and take their credits but instead don't assume everything works like today's tech.

In a fantasy game to find out about a place you are okay with maybe digging up some old books in a library having sketchy information but to really find out something you travel there. GM and Player's need to come up with a way to be comfortable with this as the norm in a space game as well. It isn't as far fetched a concept as it first may appear though. First a world needs to be at least TL7 to have a WWW of it's own, then it needs a Pop of 6+ to have enough people to make it work and finally it has to be important somehow to the surrounding area otherwise no one would bother making the information available off world. A GM only has so much time to create their game so every world can't be the Forgotten Realms all available on Wikipedia from the ship's computer. This magnifies the problem of it has a map it must be the place we're supposed to be. There are tools around to rapidly create world and location maps so you could have red herrings equal to the North Sea annual herring catch but then your players will be likely to miss what the adventure you created. It is going to be pretty difficult to generate all kinds of stuff if you (as the GM) don't have a need for it but if the only place and people who get fleshed out are necessary to the current adventure the players are going to end up feeling like tourists rather than the star of the show.

I did a crappy job dealing with this conundrum in the past and am still a little unsure how to deal with it. My current line of thought is the GM and player should sit down before starting a campaign and come up with a campaign idea everyone is interested in. I do realize every game in every genre has said this however I do think lip service to this rather than actually doing doomed every game I tried to run. I came up with a cool idea, developed it enough to start and then tried to run it for people who had very different ideas about what would be cool to do for a sci-fi game and it sucked for us all. There is a product put out by Avalon Games called "How to run a great campaign" (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/84392/How-to-Create-a-Great-Campaign?cPath=1658_5872) which presented an idea that never occurred to me namely start with the end of the campaign. Why do I think this is a great idea to use for a CE game? The universe is to big a canvas to paint so instead you need to have a smaller goal.

Finally we get to how this all ties in with ships and why I don't think they should be given out as random awards. Pretty much everyone's first goal will be getting their own ship. Why throw away the best idea to start a campaign with on a random roll? With a group goal of getting a ship you have the first ending in the campaign. What kind of ship a free trader? One capable of system survey? Pirate ship? The answer to that question gives the GM an idea of where to start and the kind of adventure and details to create, it also will probably influence the decisions players make when generating characters. I should note that the ending I mean here is of a story arc not necessarily the whole campaign. Assuming you get 2 sessions in a month just reaching this goal can take 3 or 4 months of real time to reach without it becoming a seemingly unreachable goal. At the conclusion I would suggest doing the other thing everyone says, talk over the whole thing at the end and find out what worked and what didn't not just for the GM's benefit other players may not realize how much one of them enjoyed rebuilding the junkbox air/raft into a hotrod. For the GM doing this can provide solid gold because if possible when you start playing again returning the elements everyone liked should pay off.

I feel like this was a disjointed rambling post but I have tried a couple of times to write it and none of them made more sense . My apologies.