Monday, October 29, 2012

How Traveller is Supposed to Work, Part 3 - Responses

Well, I made the dubiously wise decision of posting a link to this on the /r/rpg subreddit.  Got very little feedback, but the main point which all commenters agreed on was "Man, if you run Traveller with strict economy, it makes life so much easier because you can lead the PCs by the nose, especially when they can hop between worlds!"

To which my response was kind of "Augh damnit guys, you're missing the point."  If you lead the PCs by the nose, then they're forced into particular situations of your choosing.  If such a situation is impossible to overcome, then it's your fault when they lose.  Likewise, if they do manage to succeed, it's because you designed it in a particular way and drove them into it.  Hollow victory on success and bad blood on failure?  Noooo thanks.

On the plus side, local response has been pretty good - Tim went "I'd play that!" and Alex went "Damnit John, I want to run a Traveller campaign next semester!"  ...  upon further reflection, that's actually a mixed response, but neither of those were "This sounds like an awful idea."

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