Scarcity, Traveller, and Starcraft

Several things happened recently which reminded me of Traveller.

My father flies cargo around the Pacific, and it came up in conversation with him that much of what he carries is hazardous or generally "does not play well with other cargoes".  Oxidizers, corrosives, fertilizer, livestock...  and when you put these on a big container ship, there are more things for them to interact violently with if something goes wrong.  So instead they travel alone in a cargo plane.  Seems to me that this provides a potential out for one of the core problems of Traveller economics - why is anyone hiring this tramp freighter to move their goods when there are enormous shipping lines who have economies of scale?  Because there are some things that are more hassle than they're worth to the big players.  This is already supported, technically, but it's a shift from "hazardous cargoes exist" to "hazardous cargoes are the default."  This also adds an extra layer of potential excitement to cargo operations, especially since cargo is on the table of "things that can be hit in space combat."

I also tested for a ham radio license, and all the finicky details of talking to satellites got me thinking about how we abstracted away communications (between, say, ship and ground) completely.  Even outside of dealing with doppler shift and the ship only being in line of sight a fraction of the time, ground-to-ground communication might be complicated by alien atmospheres (in this case, it looks like Mars' ionosphere is sufficiently lower and thinner than Earth's that practical range for single-bounce ground-to-ground RF comms is about 600 miles instead of 2500+ miles you can get on Earth).  This seems like the sort of thing the old Traveller nerds, with their planet-to-planet time tables based off of acceleration, would've enjoyed thinking about.

Finally, I read this post of Charles Stross'.  His bit about economics got me thinking about post-scarcity, and I came to the conclusion that I'm extremely critical of the notion.  Hanson articulates a reasonable critique here.  So I was reminded of Niven and Traveller's belters (grungy, working-class subsistence futures) and also generally that populations expand to fill their carrying capacities - biological replicators.

Between radios, future-scarcity, jobs, and replicators, I got to thinking about Starcraft, in its grungy, space-Australia-western-full-of-ugly-assholes-but-oh-god-what-are-these-bugs-aiiieeee flavor that I enjoyed at the beginning of the first campaign (it is, of course, hardly great science fiction, but so be it).  I realized that I had never actually caught up on the plot of Starcraft II, so I set about fixing that.  In so doing, I found this little gem (just the next ~30s after the linked time).  A hell of a Traveller campaign that would make: a posse of destitute space hicks - miners, drone operators, mechanics, welders, hydroponic farmers, meth cooks...  probably two or three terms, one or two military or criminal and one civilian - living dirtside and working day jobs to afford ammunition, stimulants, and explosives to go zerg hunting in the desert on the weekends, and selling the body parts for mad science...  or barbeque ("Infestation?  Naw son, you just gotta cook it real good.").  It's just another bug hunt until you wake up something you shouldn't've...  and then the fun really starts ("Worlds will burn.").

This also starts to get into some more typical OSR territory; it could turn into a rather dungeon-crawly (tunnels), resource-managementy (cash and consumables), and probably high-body-count way to play (might want to find a way to accelerate character generation...).  Taken from that perspective, starship deckplans start to look rather dungeonesque too, after you have some transport, vacc suits, and a reputation as crazy bastards who will go into infested holes for fun and money (enjoy your zero-G melee...).  Maybe Stars Without Number would do it better, since it supports mechanical advancement and building capital ships as a PC activity.

NPC palette:

• Patrons:
• Scientist wants samples (or to radio-tag some live specimens, or to test some attractant / repellent, or...)
• Tourist on zerg-hunting safari seeks guides
• Company-town mine foreman needs a mine cleared of bugs, willing to look the other way if you use weapons normally forbidden by town charter as long as you don't do too much collateral damage
• Crashlanded bush pilot or starship crew in infested zone needs rescued (practically traditional at this point)
• Crime boss needs something retrieved from infested zone or something transported through it, can hook you up with good (illegal) gear
• Prospectors / colonists seek protection and guides while looking for site to mine or settle
• Separatists looking for a few good men to help liberate the armory of the local military base
• Rivals:
• Other posses of zerg-hunting rurals
• Confederate marshal concerned about heavily-armed civilians
• Confederate troops using hunting area as a training ground
• Enemies:
• The bugs
• Old buddy that you left behind back in your criminal days

ACKS and Traveller

Observations:

• ACKS is the lovechild of B/X and Traveller by way of a classical history education
• Mid-level ACKS is structurally Traveller-esque, particularly when played nautically
• We see this especially in the trade system
• Traveller's no-ship, have-ship, and "oh god what do I do with all this money" phases of play are analogous to ACKS' dungeon, wilderness, and domain phases
• Traveller-style Patrons, with money but without land or force, are a good solution to "why hire adventurers" for ACKS
• Traveller is better at Traveller than ACKS is. 
• God I'm burnt out on ACKS.

Conclusions:

•  Maybe I should run Traveller but add the best parts of ACKS
• Steal holdings and trade rules from Suns of Gold
• Probably lots of things worth mining from Stars Without Number, really
• Might also be things worth taking from Classic Traveller
• Add mercenaries and henchmen 
• Steal from Pirates of Drinax intro campaign rules
• Add "treasure map" high-risk high-reward (megacredit+) opportunities (eg starship salvage, piracy, big caches of illegal goods)
• More exploration focus
• Maybe steal SWN's "scream" background too, player maps pre-fall and out of date, jump tech rare

Traveller: Things I'd Change

Mongoose Traveller is a fine game, but it's still rooted in the assumptions of the 70s.  Things that could do with some updating:

• The whole computer technology progression is charmingly quaint.  You never have enough RAM to run all the things you want to run.  VR goggles are like TL12 or something ridiculous.  You get the idea.
• Cybernetics. As has been noted elsewhere, transdermal cybernetics are practically impossible to keep clean and free of sepsis.  Nope, cybernetics ought to be internal-only, wirelessly-charged (or glucose-driven at higher TLs), and communicating either via nerves or over a bluetooth-style wireless personal area network (careful around the Comms jammers...).
• This model also has the convenient side effect of eliminating the ridiculous implanted weapons and wolverine claws and crap...  I guess you could still get claws as wetware, tailor-grown for your immune system and grafted at substantial expense, but less common is better.
• Drones.  At the very least they ought to replace space fighters, since comms are a lot less massy than pilots and life support.  Gives the guy with Remote Ops something to do during starship combat, puts small, cheap, extra craft in the hands of PCs (don't need tens of MCr for a drone), and again some advantages to the Comms guys for jamming.  Miniaturized drones for planetside use are already in civilian hands IRL, too.  For all that Eclipse Phase does, this is one thing I don't recall seeing.  Shadowrun is moderately infamous for this; I suppose I ought to study its mistakes.  The first rule, I would guess, is that if the rigger thinks he's invincible hiding back in the ship or the getaway car, it's time for the customs inspectors or other unwelcome visitors to come a'knocking, or for signals to get traced by the local spectrum-allocation goons.  There may (almost certainly) be legal consequences for having killbots, which might limit the combat utility of a drone operator and push him back towards a utility / reconnaisance role.
• Economics.  The Golden Pair is a persistent problem in travonomics.  Also, the trade system as it exists is fairly boring a lot of the time.  Needs work both from realism and gameplay experience sides.  Suns of Gold may be helpful in this respect.
• Training.  Perpetual sticky in many craws.  L0 skills ought to be easy to pick up; they're basic familiarity.  L4 skills ought to be nearly-impossible to pick up; they're world-champion grade.  The training system does not do a good job of this.  It also seems that a possible balance point might be to alter the difficulty of learning new skills, so that rather than scaling with skills known, it scales with age.  This provides an incentive to stop character generation before the end of the 4th term (the traditional stopping point, when stat-aging kicks in), and would also prevent any one-term-Navy-PDev-only hacks that could otherwise learn an ungodly number of L0 skills very very rapidly (while still providing a reason to play younger PCs).  There is also the inconsistency of one point of a skill being about four years of experience; for character generation to be consistent with play as well as something that actually happens in the course of a regular game, we either need to drastically expand timescales (perhaps Pendragon-style, with large gaps between adventures, or ooh we could make jump take a really long time?  But you don't earn a whole lot of experience in cryostasis, or under relativistic time dilation), or change the assumptions about skill acquisition rate present in chargen.  One might argue that operating freelance brings more opportunities for learning and improvement, and I think that's sort of true but 1) shouldn't Drifters or other freelance backgrounds have a higher rate of skill acquisition during chargen then?, and 2) the opportunities to learn presented by freelancing seem typically circumstantial / of immediate necessity rather than directed, specialized training like one might encounter in a military or corporate setting.  I do not know the proper solution to this problem.
• Lest anyone suggest it, I am fairly certain the proper solution is not reversion to SWN / D&D-style XP mechanics and levels.  Although a "skill point"-based XP system with varying time and point cost to boost a skill based on age and its rating might not be the worst of all evils, honestly.
• Armor penetration continues to bug me.  Something like Classic Traveller's weapon vs armor tables would work, but they're clunky.
• SOC continues to bug me.  I think Eclipse Phase got group standing right in this regard.  It's not quite a skill, and not quite an ability score.
• Wafer Jacks / The Exocortex Problem.  How many people do you know who are basically incapable of navigating without a GPS?  (Certainly many people my age seem this way)  How many programmers rely heavily on stackoverflow to do their jobs?  (...  I don't know anyone like that.  No sir.  Actually though, but only because the stuff I'm doing is so bizarre that it isn't on SO yet, rather than for lack of googling)  Who remembers all of their appointments, deadlines, and scheduled phone calls anymore, or even their friends' birthdays?  I can barely spell without a computer anymore; it's embarrassing, really.  Traveller did not consider this outsourcing of brainpower to personal electronics and The ButtCloud.  There's some thought to be put into making this gameable.  The wafer jack is not a perfect solution (it's transdermal, for one thing!), but it's a start in the right direction maybe.  Also notable is that I don't need a wafer jack to look stuff up on WebMD and have it be way better than guessing blindly.  This is sort of true in Traveller as well, except expert programs live only on local machines, rather than being available on distant servers for public use.  On the flip side, variations in local custom regarding data is potentially a really interesting area to add to the law / government tables (along with drones).  Presumeably you're not running IP Over X-Boat, so you're going to have a lot of fragmented one-planet networks with their own rules (common protocol stacks if you're lucky...).
• Speaking of which, Governments.  What is up with all these Feudal Technocracies, and what does that even mean?  This table needs reworked.
• Psionics. Mind over matter and placebo are one thing, but these are another.
• AI.  AI is hard for many reasons.  SWN did an OK job of it; perhaps I could borrow from there.

On Stars Without Number

I've been reading the Stars Without Number Core in varying passes to varying degrees of detail and just finally managed to put my finger on what was bugging me about it.

This is not a simulationist game.  At all.  It has neither the engineering grunge nor history-simulating character generation of Traveller, nor does it go into the sort of economic considerations that ACKS does (which would, admittedly, be a lot harder in a science fiction setting).

Does it look like a fine, fun, fast-paced, deadly fusion of TSR D&D and Traveller?  Certainly.  But it is OSR of the Golden Age, rather than the Silver Age which I favor.

There are some rough edges on the merger, too.  I'm not really sure how I feel about ascending D&D-style HP in science fiction, for example, and I don't think I like what a strong skill system like the one SWN borrows from Traveller does to the assumed "permitted unless implausible / apply gear, solve problem" competence of the OSR D&D character (as exemplified by the application of the 10' pole to the trapfinding problem - this does come up in the GMing chapter, but I'd rather it be front and center in Using Skills).  I also quite dislike the max-skill-value-by-level rules, which mean that you can't have low-level "civilian" masters of a skill unless you're willing to have NPCs play by different rules from PCs (which is a valid approach, but not one I favor because inevitably they're going to recruit the guy who breaks the rules as a henchman and then someone will die and try to play him as a PC and then things can get messy.  I prefer for PC-species to be more consistently modeled).

Other thoughts:

• Interesting psi system.  The psi healing rules in particular lend themselves nicely to long adventuring days interspersed infrequently among weeks of downtime, which is a nice inversion of the standard approach to resource management.  The ability to master powers for unlimited use at the cost of versatility also handily differentiates this system from traditional magic systems, as does the "one spell per school per level" thing, which limits psychic versatility.  Well done.
• Gear - conveniently straightforward encumbrance system.  Descending AC, though, of which I am not the biggest fan.  Firearm vs. melee damage is always a fun topic, especially with abstract HP.  Sniper rifle save-or-dies.  Revenant Wiring is rad.  Starship construction is very straightforward - pick hull, apply upgrades (which cost money, tonnage, power, and hardpoints), apply modifiers to stat-line, sum costs, done.  None of this "distributed hull or semi-streamlined?" business.  Starship weapons are a bit more exotic than Traveller's ("Reaper Battery" vs "Particle Beam") and the general feel from the gear lists is a bit softer sci-fi.  Sandcasters no longer useful for scattering lasers - just anti-fighter weapons.
• Systems / Combat - PC exceptionalism in initiative betrays the narrative focus of the system.  I kinda like the saving throw categories, though - clearer cut than OD&D's.  Radiation is not as permanent as in Traveller, though xenoallergies are a nice touch.  I would totally graft ACKS' death and dismemberment chart onto these injury rules, rather than "dead at 0".  Natural healing is pretty quick.  Has the "reroll total HD at each level and take best of previous HP or newly-rolled HP" rule, which means you're not going to have the fighter whose primary character trait is "glassjaw" unless he's got bad Con.  Starship detection rules look pretty good, though I'm not sure we've ever actually played Traveller's sensors by rules-as-written.  SWN treats starship ranges much less mathematically than Trav.
• GMing - Fairly good but relatively basic sandboxing advice.  Also good advice on handling a skill system in the OSR style, though I'd've rather seen it up nearer the skill section, in the player chapters - part of the problem with skill systems, from my point of view, is that players whose characters have skills on their character sheet tend to use them as their first resort, rather than seeking clever ideas.  No economic system to speak of in the core book; put off to Suns of Gold.
• World Generation - all of the rolls for atmo and temperature and whatnot are unlinked, rather than linked like Trav's.  I do like having a biosphere roll, though, as well as a chance of an alien population rather than humans.  No government roll, which saves the lookup on the Table of Curiously Quaint Future Governments That I Can Never Remember.  World tags serve the same purpose as the Cultural Differences table in MongTrav, but better (you're going to get more / better adventure seeds, and less Unusual Customs, which can be entertaining).
• Factions - I skimmed this chapter on the most recent pass.  The rules seem reasonable, but they're not really something I feel like I need.  If I'm just trying to generate news bullets, I can get away with less, and if my PCs are leading the Rebel Alliance against the Empire, I'd rather use something closer to ACKS' degree of detail.  My players, of course, might disagree, and therein I expect this subsystem might find its intended use.  Campaign-style wargames aren't everyone's cup of tea, I suppose.  I guess the takeaway here is that these are domains designed to keep the focus tighly on the PCs even into high levels, whereas in ACKS the individual PC becomes less mechanically significant relative to his domain as level increases (there's been some discussion on the fora to the effect that "at really high levels, mass combat-relevant proficiencies (feats) are probably the most influential mechanical bits of PCs.  When you're fighting at legion-scale, your class or spellcasting abilities don't matter much.").  I expect I'd find much the same 'tightly-PC-focused domains' in An Echo Resounding.
• Adventure Creation - mostly skipped.  Average rewards per adventure and a Calibrating Combat sidebar again show narrativist leanings.  Good d% table of hooks, in a mad-lib form similar to the adventure templates in Suns of Gold, though.
• Aliens - I very much like the lenses here; I think it nicely captures Nivenesque alien psychology.  I also like how "Party-Butchering Hell Beast" is an entry on the alien critter base chasis table.  Much less ecologically interested than Traveller, though - more like Star Wars-style wildlife.  I am also amused that the planet Kant orbits around star Schopenhauer, but I suppose Kantian Javelin Lizard rolls off the tongue better than Schopenhauerian anything, really.  Pirate captains are only 4HD?
• Robots and Mechs - the AI rules look like they'd make for rather playable PCs!  It's basically point-buy for mental ability scores, skills, save and to-hit progression, and ability to use various hulls, ranging from a box equipped with a speaker up to a 4m tall four-armed killbot with an anti-vehicle laser.  Unfortunately, no rules for ship's AIs.  The mech rules seem reasonablish for a mech-centric game, but as with starship construction the rules are not very engineery.
• Societies - I enjoyed this chapter, and would steal from it for fantasy games.  The structure of "founded for X reason, had Y government which was altered by catastrophy or time to Z government, two or three interesting traits A, B, and C, and now there's internal social conflict D" seems like a good one-paragraph need-to-know actionable summary.
• Design Notes - Accurate documentation of design decisions; good insights into other chapters.  Some of my notes are derived from them.  Wish we saw more chapters like this one in other RPGs.  Would also have done well nearer the beginning of the book - design decisions up front!
• GM Resources - good name tables, may steal.  The corporation name generation's entertaining too.  Could see borrowing the Quick Heresies stuff for Midnight.

Verdict: Would consider using for a game like 40k, particularly since Darkness Visible is basically the Inquisition Sourcebook (for some reason the notion of using fuzzy rules for cults and secret societies sits better with me than for governments).  The ascending HP (and level in general) provides for a degree of "larger than life"ness that just don't see happening in Traveller, but which is characteristic of inquisitor-type 40k characters.  I think Traveller will likely remain my general-purpose sci-fi game of choice, however - I like the chargen and the fiddly ship design and the ecology and such.  I can play Traveller without ever actually playing Traveller; I think I would have difficulty doing the same with SWN (though the society generation rules are close, and factions could probably work well for that).  I could definitely see pillaging the tables, society generation, and alien psych bits from SWN for use in Traveller, though.

(Introspective moment - why do I prefer simulationism to narrativism so strongly, anyway?  A topic for another post at a more reasonable hour, methinks)

Review: Suns of Gold

Following my reading of Red Tide and favorable impression thereof, I realized that I had a bunch of other Sine Nomine material on my hard drive that I hadn't read yet!  I recall skimming the Stars Without Number Core at some point past, but I do not remember the details.  I was reasonably excited about Suns of Gold, so I decided to read it first and see how much I could infer about SWN from the sourcebook, and keeping its status as a competitor primarily with Traveller in mind throughout (I've read CT's Book 7 - Merchant Prince, but I don't have Mongoose's version).

Chapter 1: Five pages of introductory material and history.  I dig the Exchange of Light and particularly their Context Assassins.  This chapter sets up some very different expectations from those in most Traveller sectors - things are pretty rough, civilization is trying to pull itself out of a dark age kicking and screaming, and the locals would love nothing more than to off yon far trader and steal his ship and cargo.  Establishes the grand context, the place in history, of the far trader after the Scream.  I can work with this.

Chapter 2: Eight pages outlining the obstacles confronting the far trader and the realities of doing business.  Discussion of factors, currency, customs, and some initial advice for setting up a campaign.  Elaborates on difficulties mentioned in chapter 1 while narrowing the scope down to "how's this trading thing play out in practice?".

Chapter 3: Eighteen pages of trade rules.  We're in to the meat of it here.  A couple of things stand out in contrast with Traveller's approach.  First, friction and trouble mechanics model losses from bribes, taxes, theft, and mishaps, but can be circumvented via appropriate adventures.  This reinforces the gritty themes of the setting, but more importantly it ties trading to adventuring.  While Traveller's trade system in our experience is largely a bookkeeping exercise used to fund other endeavours but not particularly entertaining in its own right, this inverts the formula and makes trade a cause of adventures and a source of fun.  The goods tables have less variance per ton than do the Traveller tables, with rare and exotic pre-fall maltech immortality devices capping out at 400kCr per load (compare with Traveller's Radioactives at 1MCr / ton).  The world-type trade good tables are simpler to use than generating available cargos for a world in Traveller, though the trouble tables are disappointingly uniform in their effects (varying primarily in degree).  While these rules fail to address the Golden Pair problem just as most Traveller rulesets do, this is perfectly justifiable within the post-apocalyptic setting outlined in Chapter 1.  The Holdings rules felt slightly out-of-place in this chapter, inasmuch as some holdings that influenced Morale or Supply were confusing without knowing that colonization rules were coming.  That said, the holding rules are neat and something I haven't seen in Traveller outside of maybe the Mercenary supplements, where their effects haven't been particularly memorable (I suppose Dynasty probably has something similar, but probably at a higher degree of abstraction).  They also sort of set up the possibility of Great Ambitions - why yes, as a matter of fact, I would like a Fleet Command and some space-battleships.  Maybe I'll read Skyward Steel next...

Chapter 4: Fourteen pages, mostly of world-tags.  These don't actually influence the trade mechanics (though attaching a handful of purchase/sale modifiers to each might produce some interesting variety), but do provide good ideas for authority figures, antagonists, places, and objects for use in adventures on said worlds.  Again, without having used it, the tag system looks like it should be a useful prep / organizational tool.  There are also some sample worlds in this chapter, some of which are entertaining (I liked Axiom, Boreline, and Inget Station) and almost all of which are wonderfully cynical in one way or another. 

Chapter 5: Fourteen pages on running trading adventures.  The first major chunk of this chapter is a set of adventure-templates.  These are sort of similar to Traveller patrons, but about two steps further abstracted; I think the closest thing I've seen in another RPG product were the adventure templates in WHFRP's Renegade Crowns (another supplement from which I have derived utility despite not playing the system it was written for).  You start with a general objective - Establish Holding, Kill Target, or Do A Favor, for example.  Each of these has a d6 table of mad-libbed plots, with blanks reading Antagonist, Authority, Thing, Place, Hostiles, Thief, and so forth, and subsequent supporting tables with random hostiles and conflicts and such.  I'd be a little concerned with some of these table results becoming expected or par for the course, but I think this is probably avoidable, and this looks like a useful tool.  These are followed by a section on running mercantile campaigns, which has at least two things I could see stealing for any sandbox game (the A Pattern for Inquiries sidebar and the Goal Pyramid structure), as well as a good verbalization / concretization of an unspoken difference in style in trading campaigns, between the "Space Truckers" style and the "Merchant Princes" style, and suggested rules variations for each.  Some of my prior thoughts on Traveller are relevant only to the Space Trucker style, while my prior play experiences have mostly been of the Merchant Prince variety.  Nice of Crawford to give me terms with which to express this dichotomy.

Chapter 6: Eight pages on founding colony worlds.  Now some of the holdings make much more sense!  Again, a wonderful example of a Grand Ambition for a Merchant Prince-style campaign.  These rules look eminently usable, and are rather economically-informed ("You're allowed to hyperinflate your colony's currency...  but it's quite bad for morale, and after a month prices have adjusted for it.").  Again, we have a Trouble Table that serves as a source of adventures.  Also, he named the sample colony Bastiat.  I approve.

Chapter 7: Six pages of gear, ships, and ship fittings.  I will admit that I skimmed this one.  Gotta love having nuclear dampers and weapons for sale to PCs, though, and the Exodus Ship warms the cold, Homeworldy parts of my heart.

Chapter 8: Tables, maps, stats for likely hostiles, a world trade record sheet.  Useful GM things, and closing with a very stripped-down index that nevertheless seems to hit the sort of things one would likely look for in play (gear, adventure templates, the quick-reference pages for buying and selling cargo, &c).

Other considerations: The art is sparse, but pretty good, in a black-and-white pencil style which reinforces the themes of the setting.  None of the art made me go "WTF", and where the art was clearly supposed to be representing a person or thing, it did a good job (the factor on page 10 and the rival trader on page 7 look appropriately supportive/friendly and ominous, from their body language, for example).  The editing was superb - I did not notice any significant typos, though there were some instances of odd diction (while I've never used "confect" to describe building an adventure, as used on page 45 it is entirely appopriate).  From his diction, attention to editing, comprehension of economics, and references to Bastiat, Heinlein, and other authors, I get the impression that the author is well-read (probably better than I).  I like that.  The style is not that of the commercial writer, churning out word-count for a paycheck; it is that of the enthusiast, with extensive knowledge and deep love of both the genre and the RPG form, who wants to share these with others to the best of his ability.

So, in conclusion: at two-thirds the price and 77% of the pagecount, Suns of Gold absolutely blows away any of Mongoose's Traveller supplements that I've yet read.  The subsystems are well-thought-out, varied, and inspiring of player ambition, there are sandbox GMing tips and structures that are liable to be useful in even fantasy games, the editing is excellent, and there is no glut of either player options (careers, gear) or of repeated minor variations on subsystems.  The only accusation I would consider levelling against it is that the trade is somewhat derivative of Traveller's, but this is readily forgivable given that the changes made to Traveller's trade, while small, are significant in their changes to the structure of play, well-thought-out, and sensibly implemented.  It might even be seen as convenient that it is so close to Traveller's trade, since this makes back-porting it to Traveller very possible.

Well done, Mr. Crawford and Sine Nomine.  Maybe I ought to go read the core book...