I thought I would tell you all why I have been making my posts on my version of the OTU for clarity. I have been trying and failing to run and or play in any kind of Traveller campaign since 1980 and the fault is solely with me. Holmes D&D is how I entered the hobby and pretty much every other game was run by my teenaged self as D&D in different settings. Traveller (and any non-fantasy game really) requires a lot more pre game prep to succeed which I understand now and didn't then. CT provides stuff to go on in the background of a campaign (if you are using the OTU) but almost nothing along the lines of a WOTC setting or Adventure module.
The Third Imperium as a setting is pretty much a couple paragraphs for how it functions and then tons and tons of past or current events to go on around your characters which means the GM (and players) need to decide how it impacts the course of a session to be in the imperium. GDW Traveller adventures are probably the number one reason our group never "got" traveller. I have picked on Adventure #1 before so I will use it again. Being used to running dungeon crawls I tried to railroad the 4 situations in order and everyone was underwhelmed as they should have been. At 50 I grasp what I didn't at 15 the GM should use the material provided to have news stories pop up about Kinunir's and senators and missing ships but if the PC's don't bite move on. GDW were geniuses that I failed to appreciate by trying to put the PCs in the driver seat rather than the GM.
The Double Adventures go the closest to other companies version of adventures but even they required the party to be at a certain place to start and required some forethought if they were to be satisfying Annic Nova for instance has your space dungeon but the GM needs to decide where it came from and other stuff to make it worthwhile. Even the BBG isn't obvious and can take a longish time to be revealed by which point the PC's could have wandered far a field.
And of course there are the two biggest sources of stuff library data and TNS stories both done in a style that were totally gameable. I don't know if gamers have a short attention span or if it just normal to not be able to read a page and a half or set up info and retain anything but GDW gave us info in little chunks in these two forms and even more they gave us little bits of trivia not related to the adventure itself that added to the feeling of a thousand year old empire.
Okay so that is my take on why I failed before, so what is the point of these posts now? Roll20 and the Classic Traveller G+ community makes me think I could try running a traveller game again but this time I want it to be fun. To do that I need to have a clear idea of how the setting is going to affect the game and be able to articulate it in a simple enough and short enough way that PCs don't feel like they are taking a course in Warren's Traveller 101. I also am grateful that the G+ group is full of descent and really creative people who I can bounce these ideas off of and have them improved by the comments. At the end of this I want to end up with is a setting that is different than today in a gameable way.
An easy trap to fall into is using analogy. A starport is like an airport; psionics are like the force and others. They are a handy way to try and get a shared vision going but detrimental to playing in a future different from our current life. On the other hand you can't get to far away from where we are now because we have lives that limit how much time and effort a game can take up. If you get to far away player enjoyment will suffer because it turns into work to play or they don't understand the point of something. So I want to end up with "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" in a rubber suit in effect, there is a functioning government but stand alone heroes running around doing what they wish as well.
To that end I have a couple premises:
1) The population in general (non-PC & non-NPC) are much more concerned about their worlds government that the imperium which is reflected in game as a disinterest in off world affairs.
2) System governments have a certain rivalry going on within the Imperium along the lines of sporting team rivalries to cover why being naughty on one world is mostly problematic on that world only.
3) A certain degree of ambivalence toward the Imperium because if it lack of involvement in day to day affairs to explain the apparent prevalence of people engaging in extra-legal activities. If there are that many people comfortable with saying to strangers "Someone told me you're okay with stealing" it can't be viewed as all that illegal.
4) The Imperium has to provide something at least because I am not interested in the space nazi empire everyone is wanting to overthrow.
5) Bringing the time of travel element out in play. In the internet age I think we miss how dramatic this would be on a day to day basis. If you aren't in the same system it is 2 weeks minimum to engage in a conversation and that is going to be limited in nature as well. You can't just call someone up and ask them what is going on.
6) Because of the impossibility of hands on running of things trust has to be more important. T4 talked a lot about this with good reason. You can't for whatever reason go do something yourself so you have to send someone to do it for you and they will have effective autonomy in how they go about it because of #5.
7) The overwhelming majority of citizens never leave their home system to feed into 1-3 to also make PCs special.
8) A reason for why there is the technology and population spread that exists in the Imperium. I know the basic Long Night premise but there has been 1100 years to get everyone up to TL 9 Interstellar society and there are way to many worlds that aren't for me to accept this. There are also lots and lots of worlds that don't have a self sustaining gene pool. I don't have a biology background to know what that is so I am going with the BattleStar Galactica (SyFy version) 50k number or Pop 5.
And finally I am going to switch to blog posts so I can find stuff again. G+ is awesome to have freewheeling discussions but it really sucks to try and find something after about 2 days.
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