Starter Traveller in order post 2

The next section is GETTING YOUR FEET WET a high level view of the overall system. Ummm, even though this section is longer than the two I talk about in my first post I don't really have anything to say about it. It is a well written snapshot of what Traveller can be which I have no quibbles with so I am going to move on. If you are just starting with Traveller give it a read as it does bring up some reoccurring themes.

REQUIRED MATERIALS is up next and seems quaint and nostalgic considering I am posting to a blog as a way to get organized enough to run a VTT game. A few things strike me though concerning players knowing the rules and imagination. It isn't as annoying to explain what a total newbie needs to do in CT as in a lot of games because there aren't many rules. The relative lack of rules (as opposed to 3.5 and it's derivatives) encourages (IMHO) players to ask more frequently can I do this?

As for imagination I think my fantasy background actually inhibits me somewhat because I am more used to thinking about the possibilities offered by a world as opposed to an entire universe. So I need to try and make each location different than the others. It is very seductive to have every starport and world be the same if an adventure isn't fleshed out for that world. Realistically however I am not going to be able to make all 440 systems of The Spinward Marches a fully developed as your average D&D campaign so what is my goal? I have a fairly extensive library of fiction; history; DVDs and RPG stuff so I am planning on assigning an inspiration source to each world.

For instance Esalin is going to have "Casablanca" as my inspirational source. This doesn't mean space nazis per say but instead I have a reason to watch one of my favorite films and try and create a sense of a paranoid population with little respect for the terribly corrupt government. Also the natives resent both the Zhodani and Imperial outsiders. Because you can't tell who is a disgusting mind reading freak by looking at 'em there is a large group of people trying to flee the Zhodani empire but unable to get passage into the Imperium. I think I mentioned I am better at adapting things than creating whole cloth so this seems like a way to get a different feel for each world without an enormous amount of work.

To take the place of scrap paper and index cards I am going to shamelessly shill for people who have never heard of me. Cherrytree is a super awesome free windows and linux based app. It says it is for note taking however it is easily a lot more than that. Roll20 or Roll20 in Google Hangouts go without saying although the free ScreenMonkey from NBOS is an alternative I am still mulling over.

DEFINITIONS OF TERMS is a necessary section with no reason to discuss.

CONDUCT OF THE ADVENTURING SESSION is mostly a primer on how to run any kind of RPG with some Traveller specific mentions. "Don't split the party" kind of stuff is routine if everyone has played an RPG but if you have some neophytes it would be very worthwhile before the session (and ideally one on one through email/IM) to cover. Why do it away from the game session? Because it is mostly because of meta-game reasons you don't do them and things that take away from being in game are probably best dealt with outside of the context of the game.

One thing mentioned I need to work on is passage of time and tracking the flow of information. If the party blasts it's way out of say Heroni/Rhylanor  a low tech backwater off of the main xboat network I need to have an easy way to track when the info gets where. Mostly because it isn't going to be reasonable that they will be anonymous. The "Blatant Lie" is the ship that fled and the crew roster will be accessible to the authorities. Besides if I don't screw it up the fun potential of this is huge. The PCs get up to typical naughtiness on a low pop world off the main line and it takes 3 months for word to hit the Xboat network and it takes another month to catch up with them. I can say without fear they won't remember that they did it and will get the best dumbfounded expression when confronted. I am exploring ways to actually do this however and am leaning toward outdated day planners from the local dollar store.

Before starting the campaign I am going to have to come up with how long news takes to travel from the subsector capital to each world in the subsector so I only need to know when the alert reaches a capital not track it for each world individually. Again I am trying to come up with a way to use a potential awesome way to make the game different from real life but balance it against the amount of time and attention I can devote to a game. I also think I am going to use Google's IM version of hangout to send secret notes to players because the whisper feature of group chat isn't as convenient as having a different window for each player and with chat history it is a good way for players to have access to stuff their PC's should know without having to ask me while the game is going on. That isn't clear but I mean have a instance of the chat window for each player.

The end goal of my Traveller discussions

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.