Running Traveller - Part 3: Tweaking the Game
The Referee engages in the contemptible activity known as game design
I've often seen OD&D and Traveller described as 'more toolsets than games' and play style in the 70s as modifying the books to suit their needs. Certainly this seems true for the setting, Marc Miller has stated that GDW only developed the Third Imperium setting after a desire from players to have a unified setting.
From a rules perspective I've always been curious how this play style worked out. Reading about classic Traveller has presented a soft paradox, where some rules are vitally important for holding the whole thing together (ship mortgages, trade, patrons) but also situated in the style of 'well tweak the game to suit your setting/table/goals'. I don't think this is an outright flaw or anything, but it's made me a bit cautious in making tweaks to the system.
My default opinion is that it can be easy to miss the nuances of a game system without playing it enough times, and that jumping to house ruling too soon can wash away some very interesting play. Most of the time it's probably fine, but I have read people specifically struggle with Traveller because trade rules seemed too complex (which they do seem) but are pretty necessary for the economics to work and put pressure on the players.
Now am I following my own advice? Of course not. I am tweaking the game we'll be playing, but I hope in considered ways that will still preserve the overall intent. I may fail at that, but only time can tell.
The first biggest tweak is broadly just simplifying combat dramatically. For personal combat I'll turn to the rules to think about microgravity or range only if absolutely necessary, otherwise I've adjudicated enough combat encounters to get to the good outputs (characters hurt, tradeoffs made, resources spent) without the crunch/chrome. I will also be simplifying space combat for the very easy reason of not wanting to measure out a 100km to 1mm scale combat board and everything that entails.
Beyond that however, I am mostly only making additive tweaks. Trade will remain in place, I'll still run all the encounter tables, life support expenses will be monitored. While I feel like the narrative outcomes of combat are pretty straightforward, I cannot anticipate the outcomes of forgoing ongoing costs of fuel, for example.
Now to contradict myself again: during the subsector generation I skipped over populating Naval and Scout bases. This decision was at first one I would pose to the players and say 'how much military presence is this subsector', but by the time I finished creating every planet the map was already heavily populated. So I left these on the cutting room floor, but this decision has bloomed into other interesting outcomes.
Since this area of space is less policed, we have more pirate bases. Our player with a scout ship was boarded and captured, and this led to the situation at the start of the game. With more pirates I've adjusted the spaceship encounter table to have a few more pirate entries, even near class A starports. With less policing, justice is more self-administered and decentralized. This, to my mind, means bounty hunting. Here is my procedure for generating a bounty, where each month at a location I roll 1d6-1 to determine how many bounties to make.
Bounty Generator
- Value:
- High end bounty: 2d6 * 2d6 kcr
- Low end bounty: 2d6 * 1d6 kcr
- Bounty source: if not obvious, 1d6-1 systems away, 1d6 direction
- Target location: 1d6-1 systems away, 1d6 direction
- Crimes: use WRCC10k, roll once or twice
- Stats: use 1001 characters
- Name: from namelist
- Appearance: use WRCC10k
- Wanted: 1-2 Dead, 3-5 Alive, 6 Dead or Alive
Note: WRCC10k is a wargame about bounty hunting and has a wide and silly range of tables I'll be using for flavor.
The value of the bounties is the really important bit here, as I want a wide range of bounty values to present to the player. Sometimes they'll get a high value target right on the planet they're on, or other times a low value target that is far away. The values are balanced against their ongoing costs of life support (12kcr/month) and refined fuel (20kcr for a full tank). This means low end bounties average right around one month of the bare necessities. If the players want to buy better weapons for themselves or their ship or put several jumps from their pursuers, they'll have to get lucky with a high paying bounty or figure out another way to make money.
I've also added some procedures for the pursuit of the pirates and scouts of the players, but I'm keeping those secret! That's it for now, I'll reflect later how this all worked out.