So I’ve been reading the Traveller rulebook these last few days…
I’ve been struggling for quite some time with getting the appeal of this classic game, as browsing through the pages doesn’t really bring up anything that looks special, and trying to just start on the first page and continue forward very quickly slams you into the wall that is character creation in Traveller. Which I believe is quite famously known as the most elaborate mini-game in the history of pen and paper games. It’s not quite as scary as it first looks, and once you have made your character you will never have to deal with it again for the rest of the campaign, unless your character dies. But for my ADHD brain, it’s a whole lot of information being thrown at me all at once, for which I don’t have any real context at this point. But there’s been a lot of chatter about Traveller over the past months, much of which did sound quite intriguing. And so this week I made the decision to just skip the whole part about character creation for now, since this is something I wouldn’t have to deal with anymore once a campaign starts, and instead read everything else in the book first instead.
And I can absolutely see the appeal of this game. Scum and Villainy is a great system, but as a GM, I actually have always enjoyed it a lot to have games be at least a little bit an attempt of simulating a world, with NPC and creature stats, equipment and loadout management, vehicle rules, and the like. The old Star Wars d6 game does that, and it’s by far the best of the many Star Wars RPG out there. But if I don’t want to explicitly run a Star Wars campaign, I don’t feel so sure that the generic d6 Space system would be the best choice. And then there’s of course also Stars Without Number, but something about that game just doesn’t feel quite right to me. I think it’s the OD&D framework on which it builds. Traveller is the fourth game dominating in this particular niche of games, and my first impression so far is that it actually could be the thing for me. Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition specifically. From what I’ve seen on the internet, almost everyone seems to be playing either Classic Traveller from 1977, or Mongoose Traveller 2e from 2016. I went with Mongoose over Classic. Don’t ask me why.
There is a lot about this game that makes me think “Hey, this reminds me of Stars Wars d6.”, “This reminds me of Scum and Villainy.”, and “This reminds me of Coriolis.” Because, of course, all these games are build on standard and conventions first established by Traveller.
I mentioned the issue with character creation being a rather elaborate process above. But that is indeed something that you do probably just once at the start of a campaign, and after that it won’t be part of actually playing the game. So that’s something that doesn’t bother me as much anymore than I thought it would. (Even though I still don’t have it fully figured out yet.)
Another thing that always sounded weird is that characters don’t get experience points to improve their abilities. But realistically speaking, what’s the time frame over which a Traveller campaign will take place? Maybe a year, or perhaps two? And probably a large majority of that will be spend idle in hyperspace waiting to arrive at your destination. Characters improving their skills to a clearly noticeable degree isn’t really part of the fiction with games like these. Yes, Luke Skywalker gained a lot of new abilities over three movies. But Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and the two droids didn’t. And people probably don’t play Traveller to play a Jedi apprenticeship story. However, you do of course gain resources. Money, equipment, and allies. This can always be a source of significant growth in what characters can accomplish and how they engage with the obstacles of the world. And to be fair, not having to deal with deciding on new abilities when leveling up actually does sound refreshing.
The one main negative thing I noticed is the dubious editing quality of the rulebook. One of the very first things you read when starting with the character creation rules after the introduction is “assign the scores in any order you wish to the six characteristics, starting with Strength”. And there are so many cases of this. Sentences that have correct spelling and no grammar mistakes. But when you try to understand how the game works from reading the rules, there are constantly cases where the sentences are missing important information. It’s not too terrible, and most of the time I think I can assume what the writer was trying to say, based on 25 years of having learned many different RPG systems. But I always have to guess. My impression is that this was proofread by someone who already knew the game well and only checked for spelling and grammar. But when you write an RPG rulebook, you really should “playtest” it by having people try to learn the game from the text. In just a day, I could have easily filled a page with questions that would only have taken the addition of half a sentence to the respective sections.
It did awaken some vague memories from back in the day when I was very active on many RPG forums and people quite regularly making jokes about one publisher in particular for the really bad editing of their books. I am not completely sure, but I think that might actually have been Mongoose.
But overall, I really quite like what I’ve been seeing. Over the years, Traveller has been recommended to me many times, in particular in regards to discussions about my Iridium Moons setting. I’ll have to see what my ADHD brain is going to say in two weeks from now. But I think I might actually prefer this one over Scum and Villainy for running an Iridium Moons campaign.