The Traveller Mindset

[copeab]

Originally Posted by ak_aramis

Naw, it's not just you. I've had several ex-scout PC's refuse the ship. Just park it at the base, and walk away. In part, because it is such a powerful hook. But then, I also warn new players that a scout PC is never let out, just allowed leave of indefinite duration.

OTOH, in my cawmpaigns the scout was wuite popular in part because it was easy for them to end up with a ship.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by copeab

Almost all of my Traveller stuff is 500 miles away, but IIRC there are many places in the Spinward Marches where J1 is sufficient to visit multiple worlds. Your situation seems non-trivial.

Moreover, this is one of the realism issues with the OTU that Centisteed mentioned up-thread. Both of the early published sectors (Spinward Marches and Solomani Rim) incorporate jump-1 mains of more than 100 systems each. The odds against generating a single such main by chance using the rules as written are something like a million to one.

[copeab]

Originally Posted by thrash

Moreover, this is one of the realism issues with the OTU that Centisteed mentioned up-thread. Both of the early published sectors (Spinward Marches and Solomani Rim) incorporate jump-1 mains of more than 100 systems each. The odds against generating a single such main by chance using the rules as written are something like a million to one.

Million to one odds crop up 9 times out of 10 ;)

[hal]

Originally Posted by thrash

Moreover, this is one of the realism issues with the OTU that Centisteed mentioned up-thread. Both of the early published sectors (Spinward Marches and Solomani Rim) incorporate jump-1 mains of more than 100 systems each. The odds against generating a single such main by chance using the rules as written are something like a million to one.

were the early published sectors actually intended to be built randomly, or were they built for a purpose?

It is one thing to specify that the rules for adding additional advanced information (aka SCOUTS) to the original published sectors and then discover that the SPINWARD MARCHES CAMPAIGN data was flawed if it were supposed to have been generated via SCOUTS or MEGATRAVELLER rules. It is another to expect that the original published sectors were intended to be purely random.

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

Originally Posted by thrash

Moreover, this is one of the realism issues with the OTU that Centisteed mentioned up-thread. Both of the early published sectors (Spinward Marches and Solomani Rim) incorporate jump-1 mains of more than 100 systems each. The odds against generating a single such main by chance using the rules as written are something like a million to one.

Is that a realism issue or a rules issue? Just because you can't generate it using the RAW doesn't necessarily mean it is unrealistic.

No, the unrealism I see is the emphasis in setting material on mains as being immensely important to trade. This is true only as long as jump-2 or better is not available. Once it is, mains become practically irrelevant. Mains with J1 trade interrupting systems (no readily available fuel and/or low populations) doubly so.


Hans

[thrash]

Originally Posted by Hans Rancke-Madsen

Is that a realism issue or a rules issue? Just because you can't generate it using the RAW doesn't necessarily mean it is unrealistic.

If the rules-as-written are supposed to be more or less accurate depictions of the underlying reality, it does. Jump-1 mains are portrayed in canon as significant cultural and economic features. Certainly, playing in a jump-1 freighter is considerably less interesting when you have a hard time traveling beyond a single subsector.

The two worked examples of sectors from the CT era both include mains that no practical amount of die rolling would ever produce. The conclusion is that the developers knew that fudging the rolls was necessary to produce useful astrography, but didn't share that information with their customers.

Remember, this is the same company who insists that wholly impossible combinations of size, atmosphere, and population are simply spurs to the imagination that should be accepted as-is and explained somehow, and that there are no "bad" randomly generated characters -- only challenges to roleplaying.

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

Originally Posted by thrash

If the rules-as-written are supposed to be more or less accurate depictions of the underlying reality, it does.

But are they? Or are they merely supposed to be easy to use and gaming-friendly?

Jump-1 mains are portrayed in canon as significant cultural and economic features. Certainly, playing in a jump-1 freighter is considerably less interesting when you have a hard time traveling beyond a single subsector.

But logically jump-1 mains are not significant cultural and economic features of the Classic Era. They would have been during the early days of Vilani expansion, but not once jump-2 was invented. (And lets not overlook that the original rules allowed jump-3 or -4 at TL 9, so they weren't a more or less accurate depiction of the underlying reality, were they?)

The two worked examples of sectors from the CT era both include mains that no practical amount of die rolling would ever produce. The conclusion is that the developers knew that fudging the rolls was necessary to produce useful astrography, but didn't share that information with their customers.

Further proof that those rules weren't a more or less accurate description of the underlying reality. They did have the virtue of being easy to use, though.

Mind you, that particular problem could have been solved by dropping the jump-1 ship as a PC vessel and made jump-2 ships the default.

Remember, this is the same company who insists that wholly impossible combinations of size, atmosphere, and population are simply spurs to the imagination that should be accepted as-is and explained somehow, and that there are no "bad" randomly generated characters -- only challenges to roleplaying.

Well, they were wrong there.


Hans

[thrash]

Originally Posted by Hans Rancke-Madsen

Further proof that those rules weren't a more or less accurate description of the underlying reality.

Isn't that what "unrealistic" means? I'm not sure what you're trying to prove, here.

We could talk about how likely it is that chains of a hundred or more star systems, all one parcec (+/-) apart, exist in the real world, if you prefer.

[Drifter]

Well, if the ship the players would usually have access to, in the original game, was the J1 Free Trader, then the designers would have to make those subsectors useful. A few, isolated clusters of J1 accessible worlds wouldn't be very exciting, given the scope of the game back then*. Plopping in a system here and there to make Mains would make the game more playable.

To me its just a fudge for playability. And while I don't really remember what my first subsectors looked like, I know I fudged dice rolls to get worlds I wanted.



*To me the feel of the CT books was of 'grand vistas' where the player jump from world to world in a Star Trek/Star Wars fashion. This is the mobster world, this is the desert world, this is the city world, etc., instead of worlds with multiple societies, or detailed environments. Then again "I" was heavily influenced by the Star Trek/Wars ideals of story telling.

[far_trader]

Originally Posted by thrash

...Remember, this is the same company who insists that wholly impossible combinations of size, atmosphere, and population are simply spurs to the imagination that should be accepted as-is and explained somehow, and that there are no "bad" randomly generated characters -- only challenges to roleplaying.

B.S.

This has never been true the way I read the first set of rules in those old LBBs. Certainly it was clarified and emphatically proven as untrue by Book 0 - An Introduction to Traveller in 1981 ! If not sooner. How is it this myth persists after decades?

Book 0 Introduction to Traveller - pg29 (emphasis mine):

Like the generation of characters, the generation of planets should be more than a matter of tossing dice and noting the results. ...expand on the brief descriptions thus generated, explaining away contradictions, or eliminating them by changing the numbers in the planetary profiles.

This continuing delusion that players are slaves to the dice rolls, much like the similar belief that the rules are somehow a true simulation of every possibly extrapolated minutia of the Traveller universe, have never been correct. Why do some people insist on saying they are?