Quote from: Larsdangly;943426This is because the people who wrote the 3 LBB's kicked ass both at game design and technical writing.

The UWP code system is pretty elegant. As well as the subsector mapping system, the starship construction system. The trade system works but has exploitable loopholes which is why there has been multiple trade systems over different editions.

I will note (because I'm a dick on this subject) that by 1981 the Traveller line focused primarily on GDW's Official Traveller Universe (The Third Imperium). As a specific setting the Third Imperium makes lots of assumptions about how to apply the Traveller rules.

However, the original three books make no mention of the Third Imperium or any official setting. (The 1977 has not mention at all. The 1981 edition of the books has the Third Imperium creeping in slightly with the introduction of Communication Routes and Travel Zones. And notice how light those two elements are.)

My point is that original Traveller was designed for the players to create the setting they wanted with some implied setting details: Worlds full of adventure outside of any centralized government proper. Interstellar travel is rare; people who spend lots of time traveling between worlds ("travellers") are a unique kind of person. If you look at Traveller through the lens of later material you will see it one way. If you look at it through the lens of pre-imperial material, you will see it a different way.

In particular, SF elements and tech. In original Traveller the SF elements are actually quite light. It is my belief that this is because the game is setting a conservative baseline for the PCs to be aware of so the Referee can introduce stranger and more exotic elements for them to investigate and interact with during play.

But this isn't how the Third Imperium is built out. Apart from a few mysteries that the PCs can't interact with (the mysteries all took place millions of years earlier with a long vanished race) the tech is as conservative as it is in Traveller Books 1-3. Now that's fine if that's what you want.

But because this view of SF is conservative in The Third Imperium, lacking the exotic and full range of strange wonders found in the SF books Marc Miller wanted people to create for their games, this conservative view became codified in the source material and conflated the rules of Traveller with an SF conservative setting.

And I've always found that sad.

The Traveller Book came in today:)

Quote from: Baron Opal;943418I just ordered the Classic Traveller CD, that should keep me in reading and imagination fodder for a while.

That was my first thought. Why limit yourself to the 3 LBBs when *everything* is so cheap?

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943447My point is that original Traveller was designed for the players to create the setting they wanted with some implied setting details: Worlds full of adventure outside of any centralized government proper. Interstellar travel is rare; people who spend lots of time traveling between worlds ("travellers") are a unique kind of person. If you look at Traveller through the lens of later material you will see it one way. If you look at it through the lens of pre-imperial material, you will see it a different way.

While I agree with the bolded sentence. The only thing that implied by the 1977 version is that communication is at the speed of travel. The rest are subjective, you can easily run it with a setting that has centralized interstellar polity, and interstellar travel is common.

With that being said, yes Traveller became focused on the Third Imperium very quickly. However regardless of editions it never lost it ability to be a toolkit for some other setting. Precisely because of the conservative nature of the science fiction of the Third Imperium. Third Imperium material was and is easily re-purposed to other types of settings.

But one of the virtues of Mongoose Traveller is the explicit callout and support given to other science fiction setting. Before it was just a side effect of the how the rules were designed, now alternative setting had explicit support.

And because of this and the TAS fiasco, I feel that alternative settings have a permanent niche in Traveller fandom. In a sense the problem has been "fixed".

Quote from: Baron Opal;943418I just ordered the Classic Traveller CD, that should keep me in reading and imagination fodder for a while.

Cool, I have that too, and also the Travellers Aid Society collection CD.  They are really fun to look back at. I haven't played in years but have great nostalgia for Traveller


To the OP,   We had pretty much everything GDW ever made for Traveller, it was the game we played the most by far.  The 3 books will cover you for the game, but if you like space combat and ship building then High Guard was very nice, and we used the crap out of Mercenary, we were always mercenaries in our campaign.  We were the A-Team in Spaaaace!  

Quote from: RunningLaser;943448The Traveller Book came in today:)

You can game for years with just what is in that book. Enjoy!

(Oh, if you are on Facebook, there are several Traveller Groups there.)

Quote from: estar;943463While I agree with the bolded sentence. The only thing that implied by the 1977 version is that communication is at the speed of travel. The rest are subjective, you can easily run it with a setting that has centralized interstellar polity, and interstellar travel is common.

With that being said, yes Traveller became focused on the Third Imperium very quickly. However regardless of editions it never lost it ability to be a toolkit for some other setting. Precisely because of the conservative nature of the science fiction of the Third Imperium. Third Imperium material was and is easily re-purposed to other types of settings.

But one of the virtues of Mongoose Traveller is the explicit callout and support given to other science fiction setting. Before it was just a side effect of the how the rules were designed, now alternative setting had explicit support.

And because of this and the TAS fiasco, I feel that alternative settings have a permanent niche in Traveller fandom. In a sense the problem has been "fixed".

Hi Ester,

First, I think that blog post about setting up a Traveller setting is great.

Second, a couple of points about what I see in the "implied setting" found in the first three books. Note that what I'm about to type is not arguing with you. What I'm seeing and paying attention to in Books 1-3 may be of no interest to you (or anyone else!). Moreover, as I always say, the rules of original Traveller were a simple, smart toolkit (in the same spirits as OD&D) so people should use them to build the settings they want and the gameplay they want.

That said...

Yes, the first and most important setting detail in original Traveller is that communications moves at the speed of travel. That, in fact, is the really only SF-premise in the rules that really defines the setting. (There are other SF concepts, but nothing is as important as this one.)

But here are some of the other setting details that are baked into the text that I was talking about:

The sixth characteristic is Social Standing. Here is how the rules define this: "Social Standing notes the class and level of society which the character (and his or her family) come." Again, this characteristic is right up there with Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, and Education. So we know this characteristic is supposed to matter. And so it is implied that somewhere in the polity the characters come from the society is stratified along social classes and that these class distinctions matter.


If one looks at the average cots of living expenses listed in Book 2 and compares them to the cost of a travel from star system to star system in Book 3 one finds that per Jump the fare is almost the equivalent of a year of living expenses. And that is one jump.

   Ordinary Living averages Cr4,800 year
High Living averages Cr10,800 per year

High Passage: Cr10,000
Middle Passage: Cr8,000
Low Passage: Cr1,000

If you have to take several ships across the stars to reach your destination that is years of living expenses you are spending to travel. Especially since the ships in Book 2 range in Jump capability from Jump-1 to Jump-3.

This implies a great deal, I think, about how rare space travel is in the implied setting found in the books. Or, to put it another way, most people don't travel. Much like that Age of Sail that original Traveller used as a analogy, most people stay home their worlds and never set foot on a sailing vessel, just like most people in Europe never left their home town or their shores. The man who heads off down around the tip of Africa or journeys to the Indies, or hell, goes whaling, is thus the man who comes back with stories. He is the unexpected man. He is a traveller.

This view of the rarity of starship travel can also be seen if one looks at the income that can be earned by starship crews:

Pilot Cr6,000
Navigator Cr5,000
Engineer Cr4,000
Steward Cr3,000
Medic Cr2,000
Gunner Cr 1,000

This means that if you are a starship pilot you are earning, per month, what an ordinary person spends in a year on living expenses. Thinking in terms of supply and demand, I'm assuming then that Pilots and Navigators and starship Engineers are in demand. There certainly is interstellar commerce going on... but it isn't so common that the flight crews are common.

Further leading to the rarity of starship travel are all the dangers listed in Book 2. Highjacking, pirates, risk of misjump. In particular, ships risk a 3% chance per jump of various drive failure if they are not using Refined Fuel. But refined is available only at A and B-class starports. After that you are buying Unrefined Fuel from C and D-class starports or skimming from gas giants. Using the random Main World generation system as written on average 42% of the worlds will be A or B class starships. Meaning more than half of the worlds in a subsector will not have refined fuel. Which means that travel between A and B worlds (when possible) will be frequent, but travel to most worlds in a subsector will involve a 3% risk of misjump either on the way, on the return, or both ways. For a lot of poeple what risk would not be worth it. Again, travelling is the activity of a rare breed of folks.

We also know that even neighboring worlds have utterly different cultures and governments, implying a lack of immediate trade and cultural cross-pollination. Space is not cosmopolitan (at least not in the setting of play implied by the rules, which are assumed (as far as I can tell) to be at the remote edges of a larger polity that might have very different economics, technology, and much more common space travel.)

Finally, the bottom of the Tech Level chart in Book 3 is full of empty space. It is assumed that the Referee will be adding all sorts of cool Science Fiction ideas and technology for the Players to explore and interact with via their PCs. The tech listed in Book 1-3 is not the be all and end all of a Traveller setting, but a baseline to start from. But if you look at the Third Imperium, you'll note that there really isn't that much strangeness on all those worlds and that the tech assumptions in the setting are never more than those found in Books 1-3.


Now, there's no reason to stick to these elements. Again, people should make the settings they want. And my guess is most people don't even notice these details.

But to my point about the Third Imperium:

The Third Imperium removes social class issues entirely, as far as I can see. The "nobility" are just bureaucrats with fancy names.

Space travel in later editions of classic Traveller is described as being "as common as airline travel is today" (which, again, is not the case implied in the economics and dangers described above). (The game changes utterly with Book 5, which allows any ship to carry its own fuel purification plants, for example. Before that only military vessels could do this -- and I assumed they did this at great cost and needed extraordinary maintenance to clean their systems out regularly.)

The technology ignores the potential of all that lovely white space in the lower 25% of the tech level chart.

All of this only matters to me (and perhaps only to me) because when I first picked up a copy of Traveller (the boxed set, 40 years ago) I fell in love with the implied setting in the books: A strange and exotic frontier of isolated worlds with its stratified society and promise of exotic technology and SF strangeness.

And then GDW produces the Official Traveller Setting which seems to blow off all of that. The fact is you can't get The Third Imperium from the rules found in Books 1-3. You need all the changes added to the rules to justify and allow the Third Imperium setting to exist.

Again, not a big deal. Change the rules to build the setting you want. The Third Imperium is, after all, a terrific example of a Traveller setting!

I simply liked what happens if you grow the setting from the actual text and rules in Books 1-3.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618Second, a couple of points about what I see in the "implied setting" found in the first three books. Note that what I'm about to type is not arguing with you. What I'm seeing and paying attention to in Books 1-3 may be of no interest to you (or anyone else!). Moreover, as I always say, the rules of original Traveller were a simple, smart toolkit (in the same spirits as OD&D) so people should use them to build the settings they want and the gameplay they want.

Having read the rest of your post your reasoning looks solid. My comments follows.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618The sixth characteristic is Social Standing. Here is how the rules define this: "Social Standing notes the class and level of society which the character (and his or her family) come." Again, this characteristic is right up there with Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, and Education. So we know this characteristic is supposed to matter. And so it is implied that somewhere in the polity the characters come from the society is stratified along social classes and that these class distinctions matter.

(Shrug) All human technological cultures larger than the tribe have class distinctions. B-F are defined as Nobles of various ranks so that in there. But the system doesn't break if you consider E to be member of the Subsector Politboro instead of Count and F is the Subsector Chairman instead of Duke.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618one finds that per Jump the fare is almost the equivalent of a year of living expenses. And that is one jump.

Good point, although to me it more like late 19th, early 20th century steamship travel with low passage as steerage. Middle and High Passage are for those of means or are on some official business.


Duke.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618This view of the rarity of starship travel can also be seen if one looks at the income that can be earned by starship crews:

This part is NOT like 19th oceanic voyages. But then again we are talking about a technologically advanced society.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618Further leading to the rarity of starship travel

The steamship era of the late 19th century had it dangers and problems as well yet there was no question that the world was knit together in a global civilization.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618Now, there's no reason to stick to these elements. Again, people should make the settings they want. And my guess is most people don't even notice these details.

Sure, however even with the defaults there are several interpretations available.  Moreso the entry on pirate encounter specifically leaves it to the referee whether the P means that a pirate encounter has occurred. Probably Miller put that in recognizing that not everybody will want the spacelanes be infested by piracy.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618The Third Imperium removes social class issues entirely, as far as I can see. The "nobility" are just bureaucrats with fancy names.

More or less but it quickly developed there are three types of nobles, high nobles, rank nobles, and honor nobles. The high nobles are true nobles in every sense of the world. The rank nobles are the bureaucrats, and the honor nobles are a form of lifetime achievement award. Imagine how the daily duties of Queen Elizabeth II would look to King Henry V.  Her life outside of ceremony is far more bureaucratic than anything that King Henry would imagine it to be. Although even medieval king had to deal with paperwork.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618Space travel in later editions of classic Traveller is described as being "as common as airline travel is today" (which, again, is not the case implied in the economics and dangers described above). (The game changes utterly with Book 5, which allows any ship to carry its own fuel purification plants, for example. Before that only military vessels could do this -- and I assumed they did this at great cost and needed extraordinary maintenance to clean their systems out regularly.)

My view is that Classic Traveller was science fiction first, Third Imperium second. Later editions until Mongoose were Third Imperium first, science fiction roleplaying second. The changes are part of the shift to  focus on the Third Imperium and it premise. Luckily even with that shift, the foundations of the Third Imperium are loose enough to make it the game flexible enough for other types of settings with different premises.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618All of this only matters to me (and perhaps only to me) because when I first picked up a copy of Traveller (the boxed set, 40 years ago) I fell in love with the implied setting in the books: A strange and exotic frontier of isolated worlds with its stratified society and promise of exotic technology and SF strangeness.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618That great that it it inspired. I hope I demonstrated that it is possible to read the original another way to produce a similar yet different setting.

Having lived through the evolution of Traveller, I disagree. The Third Imperium always seemed to me a natural extension of the classic rules. The only thing to me that was disappointing that when expanded material came that there wasn't a lot of words devoted to alternative visions. The classic core is a flexible lite science fiction RPG. The classic core plus the entire line of books, supplements, and adventures is about roleplaying in the far future of the Third Imperium

For me the key links were jump drives, communication at the speed of travel, the diversity of the social part of the UWP, and the noble titles. The fact that those far were woven into the Third Imperium setting made it seem Traveller to me. While I admit I didn't notice the disparity between travel costs and income, I will contend that what was published still make sense as even 1% of a trillion citizens is a very large number floating around in space.

Also I will point out that even with the detail it got the Third Imperium setting was only a sketch. My Third Imperium is not the same as my friends Third Imperum nor it is the same as others. This make even the official setting a pretty flexible thing. Which is why unlike other RPG the Third Imperum never totally pushed aside the generic science fiction part of Traveller.

Quote from: estar;943631Having lived through the evolution of Traveller, I disagree. The Third Imperium always seemed to me a natural extension of the classic rules.

Wouldn't it just depend on how you filled in the voids of Traveller's open framework? What your influences/experiences/tastes were?
When I first had the Traveller box and read it the visions it sent dancing through my head were nowhere near as... bland as the OTU has always struck me as being. It had more to do with music videos and Heavy Metal and the Arduin Grimoire. I hadn't read lots of old scifi at that point so those pictures weren't in my head. My Traveller universe was way more Moebius and Druillet than it was Frederick Pohl.

Quote from: estar;943631(Shrug) All human technological cultures larger than the tribe have class distinctions.

Except there is a lot of science fiction based on societies without those distinctions, Star Trek most famously but also in the short stories of John Varley and some of the novels of Le Guin and Delany. Or the far future stories and novels of Moorcock and Vance which are essentially classless as everyone is a super rich and powerful 'noble.'

Quote from: estar;943631Many things...

There's no point going through most of it, we agree on most. (Even parts where you say, "Yes, but you could interpret Social Standing this way..." is something I already stated in the previous post.)

The misimpression I want to correct is that I don't think the Third Imperium is an expression of Traveller. I definitely think it is. It is a terrific implementation of many of the ideas found in Books 1-3 in a specific way for a specific setting.

But I also know that without, for example, Book 5: Highguard one simply cannot have the Third Imperium as written. Like, it just can't happen. The size of the ships is required and the ease of all ships being able to install fuel purifiers is required. This is the boldest distinction that separates The Third Imperium from Books 1-3, but there are others as well.

Please note I'm not saying the Third Imperium is wrong for being different. I'm simply pointing out the places where Books 1-3 end and The Third Imperium begins.

Quote from: Voros;943644Except there is a lot of science fiction based on societies without those distinctions, Star Trek most famously but also in the short stories of John Varley and some of the novels of Le Guin and Delany. Or the far future stories and novels of Moorcock and Vance which are essentially classless as everyone is a super rich and powerful 'noble.'

Yes however a Starfleet Admiral (F) has a bit more influence and resources than a drifter stoned out of his mind on Risa (0). Traveller Core does equate it in terms of noble rank, it is easily re purposed to some other relative social scale. Just use your imagination.

Quote from: estar;943668Yes however a Starfleet Admiral (F) has a bit more influence and resources than a drifter stoned out of his mind on Risa (0). Traveller Core does equate it in terms of noble rank, it is easily re purposed to some other relative social scale. Just use your imagination.

Exactly. The moment you see those values as widgets (throughout the game) to be re-labled as needed a whole magical thing happens.

They are like powers in CHAMPIONS. The rules provide mechanical effects, but the color for each power can be created and defined in character creation and applied and defined in specific ways through play.

A lot of Traveller's concepts seem to have been taken from Sci-Fi books.

No FTL communication (and computer size) seems to be from H. Beam Piper's TerroHuman stories. Imperial Nobility seem to be from Poul Anderson's Flandry stories.  Space travel being expensive enough that people freeze themselves to travel cheaply and risking death is from E.C. Tubb's Dumarest novels.