Against 2d6

The players from my Classic Traveller one-shot last week started asking whether there would be more adventures for those characters.  I felt a certain unease at the prospect, and decided to examine it.

I think I really dislike 2d6 as a core resolution mechanic, and "fighting with" the dice last session reminded me why.

The central tendency is very strong.  You get many results right in the middle of the range, and small modifiers can change the probability of success dramatically when the target number is close to the center of the range.  The total range is also quite small (2-12), so it really doesn't take that many small modifiers stacking up to make success or failure all but certain.  This is the same problem that ACKS 1e ran into with stacking up modifiers to reaction rolls, except that every piece of Traveller is susceptible to this failure-mode.  This was one nice thing about Thousand Suns' move to 2d12 - it becomes much harder for modifiers to completely dominate randomness (apparently I wrote a draft post of a review of Thousand Suns back in 2015 but never published it - oops).

In theory, many Classic Traveller skill rolls have modifiers from attributes and skill level laid out in the text, under the description of the skills.  However, in a time-constrained after-work session, digging out the skill descriptions for every roll is prohibitively time-expensive.  Even in a longer session, it stalls the tempo.  So I am inclined to improvise target numbers.  In an OSR game without a skill system, I would pick probabilities which sound reasonable within the game-world and negotiate with the players.  "That sounds pretty challenging, maybe a 20% chance of success"  "I'm very strong though."  "OK, 35% - give me a 14+ on a d20".  Translating intuitive probabilities of success into 2d6 target numbers is a huge pain, and the central tendency means that there is very little room for fine-grained distinctions between target numbers in the middle of the range.  You go from 72% chance of success on 6+ to 58% chance of success on 7+ to 42% on 8+.  You can only draw fine-grained distinctions out at the edges of the range (11+ vs 12+, for example; 8% vs 3%).  Even there, the granularity of target numbers is no finer than a d20's.

I think the only real virtues of 2d6 systems are that the player-facing math is easy (almost no significant two-digit operations - if your roll plus skill get into two digits, success is a foregone conclusion) and that d6s are easy to come by.  I have heard, apocryphally, that when Gygax first learned of d20s, he went "This changes everything!"  Having returned briefly to pure-d6 gaming, I can see why.

And this all makes me sad, because I have fond memories of Traveller, but man, actually running games on 2d6 kinda sucks.  It's a pity that Traveller d20 was such a poor port (tangentially, I'm shocked that T20 has such good reviews on DriveThru; maybe I should write a dissenting one).

I feel like converting Traveller to just use d20s (and not also importing the rest of the "d20 System"s baggae like T20 did) wouldn't be hard, exactly - just a slog.

Playing with Classic Traveller Book 1 Chargen

Spent some time this morning generating characters from CT Book 1, intending to use them as pregens for a game in the office.

The inability to follow up a career where you failed to reenlist with another career makes for many more low-term characters than I recall seeing in Mongoose.

I don't think we ever rolled stats in order in Mongoose either.  Given the smaller set of careers, if there's something in particular that the party still "needs", fishing it out is much more challenging.

Intelligence seems, if not "king" of the attributes during character generation, at least very widely applicable.  The only career that doesn't get some sort of benefit for good Int is Army, and Merchants rely almost exclusively on Int.  Navy and Marines both have high thresholds for bonuses, and Marines have the widest set of stats to get bonuses from (ye olde Multiple Ability Score Distribution).

Just under half of the characters I generated died, mostly in their first term after a failed enlistment roll and then drafting into a service where they had no bonuses to survival.

The Other career seems terrible.  If you have the Int for the survival bonus, you also have the Int to go Merchant and pick up rank for extra skill and benefit rolls.  It's funny that the "two skills per term" on the Scout is justified with their lack of promotion, but Other doesn't have ranks or double skills.  I guess the play with Other is to hope for Gambling and the 100k cash roll.  It's on both of their skill tables that aren't Edu gated, and you don't really want to be rolling on Personal Development because the -1 Soc result is worse than nothing.

I was surprised at how hard it has been to fish out Pilot, Engineering, and Computer.  You basically need to be high-Edu Navy, Scout, or Merchant, and neither Scout nor Merchant reward Edu in their career throws.  Leader and Admin are likewise locked behind high Edu.

I had previously been pretty skeptical of the expanded character generation rules from eg Mercenary and High Guard.  They seemed like power creep, but having spent more time with the Book 1 rules, I can definitely see the appeal of the college-type options to guarantee access to certain important skills like Medic and Pilot, as well as access to the Advanced Education skills table.

The aging table also kicks in much more aggressively than in Mongoose; you probably lose 1-2 points of physical attributes after each of terms 4-6, whereas in Mongoose you might get unlucky and lose a couple points after one of those terms but it was inconsistent until you hit 6-7 terms.  In Mongoose after the 4th term you have a 1 in 36 chance of losing 1 point from each physical attribute; in CT that chance of losing 1 point from each physical attribute after your 4th term is like 15%.  In Mongoose after your 4th term your odds of not taking any aging penalties are like 80%; in CT after your 4th term your odds of not taking any aging penalties are closer to 10%.  And no anagathics during chargen like Mongoose.

So between stats in order making enlistment and survival rolls tougher, and harsher aging penalties, I suspect characters probably end up skewing younger under good play.  You're definitely going to pay stats for those terms 4-6 in a way that you probably didn't in Mongoose.  Lack of enlisted ranks combined with shorter careers also makes for fewer rolls for benefits.

I still don't have a workable-looking pregen party with a broad skill distribution, because my dice hate rolling high Edu apparently.  But at least I learned some things.

Traveller: Knight-Captains

I read Space Viking in December and meant to blog about it but there has been a lot of other reading to blog about lately.  It was very useful context for understanding Traveller's idea of Feudal Technocracy.  The Sword Worlders in Space Viking have planetary kings, continental dukes, and counts of what sound like large industrial conglomerates.  This is obviously somewhat different than what Traveller seems to expect of eg subsector dukes, but it's an interesting idea.

The bottom end of nobility, though, feels a bit underdeveloped in both cases.  If your counts own large corporations, what do your knights own?

Maybe small businesses.  Maybe well-armed small businesses which can be called upon by their lords for military service.  Like far traders with triple turrets, or a mercenary unit.  And really, if you don't have the central authority to keep weapons out of the hands of your people, getting oaths of fealty and to uphold your laws from at least the ones organizing groups of armed men sounds like a reasonable policy from a sovereign's perspective...

There's a certain charm to the idea of "Finished your fourth term in the Navy with a SOC of 12?  You have received word that your eldest uncle passed away, and you are heir to your family's ship.  Arise, Sir Sigismund of the Far Trader Beowulf."  I've heard worse excuses for giving the party a ship.

I don't think that doing this, even in the absence of a starship loan, necessarily removes the financial tension from the game; she's an old, old ship, been in the family for generations, and has lots of quirks and needs lots of maintenance.  The nobility was often in debt historically; you have noblesse oblige to those under you, expenses to keep up appearances and to maintain your status among your peers, and when your lord calls, you must go, even if there may not be profit in the trip.

And then your third cousin shows up to press his claim to the family ship and you have to settle the matter in a gentlemanly fashion, which is to say, dueling.

...  I wonder if there are any good bits to lift from Pendragon or Wolves of God for something like this.

Classic Traveller: Dark Nebula

 

Continuing my read-through of the Classic Traveller wargames, Dark Nebula was published in 1980 and covers a war between the Solomani and the Aslan over about two subsectors of space, including one difficult-to-traverse nebula.  Turns are two years of in-universe time, each hex is half a parsec, naval units represent individual ships, and ground units are divisions.

Overall the core of this game looks pretty reasonable.  The space combat system is kinda neat.  The defender nominates a ship, the attacker chooses one of their ships to engage it, and then this repeats until one side is out of uncommitted ships, at which point the side with more ships left uncommitted can assign them as they please to the various 1:1 ship combats already committed to.  Once ships are matched up, the resolution of each of these combats looks pretty straightforward.

I think what I like about this fleet combat design is that there are lots of significant choices (what order to nominate and assign your ships in) but little mechanical complexity.  In general this seems like a desirable property in a game.  And at the scale this game is operating at, "where do you assign which assets" probably is the right question to be posing to players.

I'm also tickled by the inclusion of tanker-ships, really mobile refineries that you can park in systems without gas giants to skim hydrogen off of the star and refine it into fuel, allowing that system to be traversed by other ships without delays.  I love me some logistics-infrastructure-construction.

One thing here that I found a bit surprising was that moving ships can move as far as they want on the hex maps as long as they're moving along jump routes between systems with fuel available, until they enter a system that lacks fuel or where there's an enemy presence (or is in the nebula and requires exploration).  It makes some sense under the time-per-turn assumptions and the scale of the map, but "move as far as you want" still made me stop and think.  It almost has a railroad-war feeling, like the American Civil War or World War 1, rather than an open-water naval warfare feeling.  Maybe that's always been true of naval warfare under Traveller's assumptions and I just never realized it.

There are a couple of other surprising things in Dark Nebula.  It feels like a somewhat experimental game; there's tech progress from research in the titular nebula, semi-randomized initial boardstate due to the map placement procedure, and neutral forces with reaction rolls, potentially hostile or potentially hireable.  I definitely didn't expect randomization of map layout in a Traveller game set in the Third Imperium continuity.  Some weirdness arises from this - the maps have hex numbers seemingly from a much bigger hexmap, which are very unlikely to end up getting put together into a sensible order during the alternating placement procedure.  I appreciate that the scan quality is good enough to read the hex numbers though!

There are also a couple of other things about the maps which are weird, and not in a great way.  The star density on them is rather lower than is typical for Traveller.  Several of these quarter-subsector maps only have four stars in them, and the densest have eight.  In a typical Traveller subsector, I'd expect more like 40 systems, or 10 per average map on this scale.  I'm not sure how well the balance of unit production against destruction would scale up to higher-density maps and owning more planets.  Also, having a much higher-density graph of systems might lose some of that railroad-war feel and change the character of the game significantly.  Finally, the way Dark Nebula handles ground forces on planets is that there's a box in an empty hex adjacent to each inhabited system, representing the surface of the planet, and you put troop counters there.  But this would not scale well to higher-density maps.  The quality of infrastructure in these inhabited systems is also denoted by the color of the planet's box, which is a bit lousy - printing your own copy of the map requires color, you have to remember what the colors mean, colorblindness problems, etc.  Frankly I found the color-coding confusing on first read and first look at the map; the icons for the stars use random colors not related to the color coding for the system's infrastructure quality.  They're probably supposed to relate to stellar spectrum class but that's not relevant here and we're already gone non-canonical with the random map so...  I don't know why they did that, rather than making the stars the same color as their respective planet boxes.

The lack of compatibility between Dark Nebula's maps and Traveller RPG subsector maps (both in scale and density) also highlights another oddity here - Dark Nebula is the first Traveller wargame I've read that makes no mention of integration with the RPG.  It does seem like integrating a game where turns are two years of in-universe time would be tough, but I was surprised that there was nothing.  I didn't expect much of Invasion: Earth, but we still got one good patron hook there.

What I didn't realize when I initially read Dark Nebula (not until halfway through writing this post and getting kind of suspicious that the combat system seemed much more staid than the rest of the game) was that it was a clear successor to Imperium, published in 1977.  I've only skimmed Imperium, but it looks like it shared the 2-year turn, combat system, turn structure, etc but is played on a fixed map, with slightly more complex fleet compositions including fighters and carriers, and some neat rules about armistices / inter-war periods (allowing the game to be played in a campaign fashion) and interaction between the Imperial player (playing as a frontier governor, not the emperor) and the Third Imperium.  Notably, Imperium does mostly omit tech progress and lacks neutral forces.  Like Dark Nebula, it foregoes any mention of integration with the Traveller RPG (which made more sense in 1977) and still uses the system of planetary surface boxes in adjacent empty hexes.  I may return to Imperium at some point, but given that my interest is at least nominally in RPG integration, I think it may have to wait.

My blind spot for Imperium and trying to understand Dark Nebula's place in the chronology of CT wargames also caused me to take a quick look at 1981's Fifth Frontier War.   This looks like a monster of a game, bringing together the multi-subsector scale of Imperium and Dark Nebula with some details like SDBs and percentage-based damage to units from Invasion: Earth, but with a greater eye towards RPG integration.  First and foremost, hexes in Fifth Frontier War are one parsec rather than Imperium's half-parsec, and turns in Fifth Frontier War are only one week!  But this means that it can't just abstract starship movement into "move as far as you want this turn", so you have to deal with more details.  And fixed maps allowed Fifth Frontier War to put planetary surface boxes around the edges of the board, rather than right next to the systems they're associated with (which, admittedly, might create some difficulty in locating any particular box), allowing it to increase star system density up towards that typical of Traveller RPG campaigns.  Fifth Frontier War looks tremendously ambitious and hideously fiddly, and I can't imagine why it was the last Classic Traveller boxed-set hex and counter wargame.  At the same time I salute the dream of having a metagame world-engine wargame to run concurrently with one's RPG campaign and I look forward to learning its lessons on a more thorough read/post at some point.

Classic Traveller Apocrypha: Federation and Imperium

I was sent down a bit of a Classic Traveller rabbit hole by a comment on a post over at Grognardia recently, which mentioned a CT book that I hadn't heard of before - Book 0: An Introduction to Traveller, published 1981, which I happened to have around on the Classic Traveller CD from FFE.  I haven't read it properly yet, though I did skim the sections on preparing to referee, changing the rules, and the bit mentioned in the Grognardia comment on the proposed setting:

Once the referee has decided the general features of the campaign, it is a good idea to jot down a one or two sentence summary of conditions for later reference, such as "The subsector is located on the fringe of the Moladon Federation, a loose organization of 300+ worlds governed by a federation council. Half the worlds in the subsector are in the federation, the rest are petty one or two world nations. The federation is currently in a period of stasis, between expansions, but plans to eventually absorb all worlds on its borders. The last war was over a century ago, but minor skirmishes are constantly taking place, especially between the larger outer states. Tech levels within the federation are between 5 and 12; outside they are between 1 and 9. Federation naval power is just strong enough to suppress piracy within the borders, and there is a great deal of local planetary autonomy."

This is a very different interplanetary government from the Third Imperium!  Yet it does show up in an official, GDW, Classic Traveller source.  It's also a lower tech level than I would've expected from CT's generation system; with 300 inhabited worlds, I would've expected the Moladon Federation to have at least one TL 15 world.  In order to get the distribution described, the generation rules were likely not adhered to rigorously.  Which is fine and all, but interesting to see in an official product.

The size of the proposed federation is also interesting.  At 300+ worlds, and an average of 40ish worlds per subsector, you're talking like eight subsectors - about half a sector.

This ties to something else from the Classic Traveller Apocrypha II CD - an article by Marc Miller which was originally published in the Jan/Feb 1979 issue of The Dungeoneer (which was Judge's Guild's competitor to TSR's The Dragon magazine I guess?) titled Dealing with the Concept of Empires.  FFE's Guide to Judge's Guild Traveller notes that "The first glimpses of the Third Imperium can be seen in this early article."  Dealing with the Concept of Empires describes several stages of development and coordination of interstellar empires operating under Traveller's assumption that information cannot travel faster than people (which The Concept of Empires describes as "the most basic assumption of Traveller"; Book 0, discussing changes referees might make to the rules on page 34, likewise cautions, "The speed of communication should never be allowed to exceed the speed of
travel. This is a basic tenet of Traveller..."  I hadn't seen this put so emphatically before!).

Dealing with the Concept of Empires outlines four stages for the development of an interstellar polity.  The smallest and most centralized is the federation, where all worlds are within a single jump, limited to maybe a bit over one subsector with jump-6; 60 worlds or so.  The government of a federation can project its authority and exercise state power efficiently within its whole territory.

Up from the federation is the confederation, at a two-week travel radius and with slightly weaker central authority.  This works out to 4 subsectors, or about 160 worlds under default density.  Sadly this sort of government is almost a footnote in The Concept of Empires.  This is a particularly interesting size to me in light of my observations on time, distance, language and culture for D&D; a two-week travel radius is about the size of many medieval kingdoms, and at scales larger than that I'd expect languages to start diverging.  I'm rather sad that this size of interstellar polity didn't get more attention.

Up from that is the empire, with a "communications radius" of two months, comparable to that of the Roman Empire (some quick googling also suggests that London to India was 6-8 weeks during the Age of Sail).  At jump-6, this is claimed to cover about 225 subsectors and maybe 9000 star systems.  This requires, though, that the central authority is not in "constant, immediate communication with all of its component worlds", and leaves opportunities for mercenaries, as central imperial authority is only brought to bear against exceptional threats, and cannot afford (logistically, practically) to intervene in every small local conflict that might arise within its borders.

Finally, up from the empire you have what Miller terms Imperium, where travel delays for information are so long that travel from one end of the Imperium to the other might exceed a human lifetime.  In such a situation the central authority cannot effectively govern the periphery and must cede most authority to local officials and perhaps to designated "agents", dispatched by the central authority to then wield power on its behalf at the fringes over a period of many years, "perhaps even [with] drug-induced longevity" (an interesting perspective on the level of power required for access to anagathics).  This is the premise for Miller's 2020 novel, Agent of the Imperium, following the adventures of one such agent.  This conception of an empire much too vast to administer, with delegation of authority to dispatched agents, seems to be the original vision of the Third Imperium.

Miller's closing remarks are about the possibility that the essential function of an imperium-scale government is really communications, the Imperial Postal Union.  This strikes me as a delightfully laissez-faire sort of imperial government; you can do most anything as long as you don't mess with the mail, but if you do, that's when the marines in battle-dress start taking an interest.

I think these sizings are also interesting for non-government entities.  Can a mega-corporation meaningfully run operations with more than a week or two delay in communications?  On a sufficient scale do you end up with many wholly-owned subsidiaries, each operating largely independently across their respective subsectors until an Agent of the Board arrives from HQ?

In any case - something which is surprising in the combination of these two documents, Introduction to Traveller and Dealing with the Concept of Empires, is that the proposed Moladon Federation is much too large to be a federation in The Concept of Empires' terms - "300+" planets instead of 60.  And at TL12, Moladon probably isn't using jump-6, so it should take them even longer to get to the periphery than the federation proposed in Concept.  I'm not sure what to make of this.  Concept preceded Introduction by two years.  Did something change in Miller's thinking about interstellar coordination?  Was Concept's definition of "federation" never especially canonical (probably the most likely explanation, really; it was just a magazine article, not a book).  Was it just a slip?  Has the Moladon "Federation" actually grown into a confederation or small empire in practice, but kept the old name out of tradition?  Is it more of a Stellaris-style federation, of multiple smaller interstellar governments each with high state capacity over their own one-subsector territories, all joined in a big mutual defense pact?  It's interesting to think about. 

edit: it turns out that Book 0 was written by Loren Wiseman, not Marc Miller.  So that's a pretty good explanation - maybe Wiseman never read Concept.

I did find something else interesting though while looking into the "what TL do you need for jump-6?" question.  In my previous post on jump tech level restrictions in CT Book 2, I noted that drives and powerplants for jump-6 100-ton ships are actually possible at TL 9, with the limitation on jump range for 100-ton ships really being in computers.  I was looking at the 1977 version of Book 2 and was really confused why I would have thought this, because the Jump-6 program is only size 2!  Apparently this was changed in the '81 version of Book 2, where jump program sizes now increase linearly with jump distance and jump distance is quickly bottlenecked by computers, as I had seen previously.  I think by the '77 rules, jump-6 100-ton starships were totally doable at TL-9, which is pretty wild.  But since Introduction to Traveller was published in '81, presumably for the '81 rules, this doesn't give Moladon a free pass on jump-6 at TL12.  Digging out the '81 rules instead, though, I think you only need a computer-4 to handle jump-6 plus Navigate, which is doable at TL-10.  So I guess holding together an interstellar government with J-6 X-boats is pretty doable earlier than I would've thought.  The fact that the worlds outside the Federation cap at TL-9 sort of makes sense in this light; they are the ones that don't have jump 4-6 yet and are largely stuck in their own little clusters, unable to project power very far.

Classic Traveller: The Imperial Fringe Review

The Imperial Fringe was published in 1981 as an "introductory adventure" included with the Deluxe Traveller boxed set.  I acquired it on the "Classic Traveller" CD from Far Future Enterprises, which makes it a little hard to evaluate its value for money.

Calling The Imperial Fringe an adventure is somewhat misleading.  It is actually the sketch of an enormous, sector-spanning, 20-year campaign.  It is also, however, brilliant documentation on the designer's expectations about how a Traveller campaign might be run.  I wish I had read this like 10 years ago when I was first getting started with Mongoose Traveller.

The pitch, basically, is that a senior member of the Scout Service contracts the players to do a survey of the sector and provide up-to-date UPP codes, based on in-person observations, of each of the 440 planets in the sector, with a time limit of 20 in-game years (1040 weeks).  Reminder: a subsector map is 8x10 hexes and usually about 30-40 planets, and a sector is 16 such subsectors.

This sounds extraordinarily ambitious to someone coming from Mongoose 1e - our games have usually been confined to single subsectors and maybe two years of game-time.  Occasionally a plot point would take us a little bit off of the edge of the subsector but the assumption was that this was a temporary state of affairs and that we shouldn't expect additional subsectors of prep effort.

The players get paid a fixed sum per world surveyed on submitting survey reports at Scout Service offices.  This sets up a brilliant incentive to actually travel - you don't get paid for visiting the same planet a second time.  And this leans into something I've liked about Traveller, which is that "planet of the week" allows a lot of variety.  One week you can do Alien on a derelict, the next week you can do Blade Runner in the big city, the week after that you can do Mad Max stranded on a desert planet looking for water to run the reactor on, all with the same set of characters, without breaking continuity or suspension of disbelief, while continuing to build campaign capital.

I also really appreciate that this setup shows rather than tells you a lot about the Third Imperium.  It is so huge, and travel so slow, that they do the census basically every 20 years, and official records about the state of whole planets can fall completely out of date in that time.  And their solution to this problem is contracting the census out to a handful of retirees on a shoestring budget and a deadline measured in decades.  The implications about the state capacity of the Imperium mark it as a very different situation from ours.  Imperial subjects probably aren't filing individual tax returns with the central Imperial Revenue Service every year.  The empire can just lose track of millions of people for decades.  What does the response time of Imperial law enforcement look like?  Weeks, months?  If your ship gets "pulled over" by the Navy and they want to "run your plates", how out of date is that particular patrol cruiser's database of ship registrations?  Is there even a standard Imperial-issue identification document like a passport?  So it raises lots of fun questions.

Returning to gamier matters, The Imperial Fringe also makes explicit:

The assumption in the adventure is that one character has possession of a type S Scout/Courier and thus provides transportation for the group. The referee should suggest that one player attempt a scout career. If, after all character generation has been performed, no scout has a scout ship, one of them should be arbitrarily given a scout ship in order to further the adventure.

Obviously, I'm not thrilled at the suggestion to respect neither the oracular power of the chargen dice rolls nor the consequences of the risk/reward decisions of the players during chargen.  But it is interesting to see that even this early, the official Word of Miller was "give 'em a ship," at least for introductory campaigns.  And with a campaign of this scale, I have to wonder how many people started "introductory" campaigns and then ended up playing it for years of real-time.

Giving a known ship makes setting up appropriate rewards a lot more viable, plannable; if you know what their monthly ship costs are, and you know the rate at which they can survey, then you can set the pay structure up to keep them under light monetary tension, without it spiraling either down into overwhelming debt and desperation, nor up into huge piles of cash.  And this makes sense in the world; your patron also knows what it costs to run a Scout/Courier and wants to encourage you to actually get the job done, rather than either failing due to lack of funds or retiring due to excess of funds before finishing.

The combination of the known-small cargo hold of the Scout/Courier and the strong incentive to keep moving on to new systems to write fresh survey reports probably constitutes a workable solution to the Golden Pair problem (though not a very general solution).  It doesn't matter if there are two planets with strongly-complementary trade codes next door to each other; you barely have the means to exploit this opportunity on any single transit between them, and you have strong incentives to not do anything in a loop.

And while the initial setup procedure may not be maximally respectful of player agency, once the game has started they're just let loose upon the sector.  No further railroads here...

Until you start inserting other published CT adventures into suggested systems, per page 19; then you might run into some small-scale railroads.  I salute the hustle of using the introductory adventure to advertise the rest of the product line.  But still, even if you do go buy all of those adventures and drop them into the sector map, you still have a big sandbox with a couple more-detailed points of interest rather than an adventure path like The Traveller Adventure, which came out a year later in 1982.

This suggestion to drop in modules throughout the sector does highlight one obvious weakness here, which is that there are a lot of worlds described with UPPs and no further details, and this is very much not a ready-to-use, "grab-and-go with no prep" kind of product.  Significant Assembly Required to make each world interesting, to keep the game from turning into a "we jump, we descend, we check the survey boxes, we take off, we jump..." routine.  Religious observance of the random encounter rules is probably wise, but not mentioned here; it might be easy for a new Traveller GM to miss.  Maybe at the time knowledge of their use was more assumed, from old-school D&D?

The other difficulty that I have with The Imperial Fringe is a less universal one - it probably doesn't handle open-table play particularly well.  You're going places well away from the main routes, so justifying characters appearing and disappearing out in the boonies strains disbelief a bit.  And the ship doesn't have enough stateroom capacity to justify a "you're carrying everyone but half the crew has food poisoning this week" approach.  A bigger ship with more space and enough crew for PCs to fade into and out of the background might be a way to do it though; basically a Star Trek-style "survey cruiser" sort of thing.  But then you start having to think about command structures and payroll...

So yeah, I wish I'd read this back when I had a stable set of players in college, rather than adults with lives doing master's degrees while working full time jobs and raising kids and taking long vacations.

Classic Traveller Jump Tech Levels

Omer of Stellagama made an interesting remark about Classic Traveller on discord the other day:

Ship hulls, computers, and drives interacted very differently with tech levels. Most Traveller players know the Book 5 (High Guard) jump tech levels, which are rigid (Jump 1 at TL9-10, Jump 2 at TL11, etc.) but permit big and fast ships even on low TLs. Book 2, on the other hand, has drives gradually appearing as technology progresses, so that lower-tech ships must be smaller and slower. On the other hand, its computer and jump rules permit Jump 3 at TL9. So that big ships, especially fast big ships with far jump drives, are locked behind higher TL, all while permitting longer-range jumps for smaller ships at lower TLs. This is conducive to adventures, as even lower-tech worlds can manufacture player-size ships capable of traversing longer interstellar gulfs, and as smaller ships make mass planetary invasions a very costly affair - making diplomacy, guile, and subterfuge much more important than simply bringing in your 100,000 ton battlecruiser with a Spinal Mount that can shatter moons and threatening everyone, all while your whole Marine armies land from a few 50,000 ton troop carriers.

I hadn't made particular note of when different jump techs became available in CT (and I haven't read CT's High Guard), so I went and did a bit of digging into the details.

CT Book 3's tech level table on page 15 notes that TL 9 can manufacture drives A-D and jump drives, as well as computers up to level 3.  In Book 2 on page 58, class C jump drives and powerplants are enough to give a 100-ton ship jump 6, while class D drives give 200 tons jump 4, 400 tons jump 2, and up to 800 tons jump 1.  The limitation to jump 3 actually emerges from computers, not powerplants or jump drives, since a computer/3 can only navigate/perform/drive 3-parsec jumps.

At TL 10, jump-capable 1000-ton ships become possible; at TL 11 2000-ton starships.  3000-ton starships don't arrive until TL 13, skipping 12, and 4000- and 5000-ton ships are at TL 15.

Looking at 400-ton ships, at TL 10 they go from max jump 2 to 4; at TL 11, jump 5, and at TL 12, jump 6.  800-tonners get jump 2 at TL 10, jump 3 at TL 12, jump 4 at TL 14.  So an 800-ton jump-3 mercenary cruiser is TL 12 just off of the drives (and TL 11 for the computer/5).  The patrol cruiser looks doable at TL 10.

I was curious to see what Mongoose Traveller 1e had to say on jump drives and tech levels, but the MgT 1e core book didn't really say anything about the tech levels at which different ratings of fusion plant and jump drive become available.  There are some subtle differences at the top end of the powerplant table, and the more relevant difference is in the computers table, with computers of each model available about two TLs later than in CT Book 3.  They are also, however, much less expensive.  So MgT is closer to the Book 5 paradigm, of higher jump numbers arriving across all ship sizes as a given TL.

I was curious just how common worlds of various TLs were under Classic Traveller's world generation assumptions, so I scripted it up, generated 100,000 worlds, and counted.  The numbers below assume an 80-hex subsector with a typical density of 0.5 stars per hex for 40 inhabited systems.

• TL <9: 66446 (66.4%) - about 2 in 3, 26.5 per subsector
  
• TL 9: 10,364 (10.4%) - about 1 in 10, 4 per subsector
  
• TL 10: 8,244 (8.2%) - about 1 in 12, ~3.3 per subsector
  
• TL 11: 6,075 (6.1%) - about 1 in 16, ~2.5 per subsector
• TL 12: 4078 (4.1%) - about 1 in 25, ~1.5 per subsector
• TL 13: 2463 (2.5%) - about 1 in 40, 1 per subsector
• TL 14: 1371 (1.4%) - about 1 in 70, ~0.5 per subsector
• TL 15: 632 (0.6%) - about 1 in 170, ~0.25 per subsector
• TL >15: 327 (0.3%) - about 1 in 300, ~0.12 per subsector 

The highest TL code I saw was a single J, which is...  TL 19?

A-100A56-J    R I  Hi Ht In Na Va

Surprisingly mellow government and law level for that population...

So what does this mean under CT Book 3's rules for powerplants and jump drives by TL?

2/3 of planets basically can't manufacture starship parts at all.  However, model 1 computers are available at TL 5.  45.6% of worlds are in that TL5-8 range and can plausibly provide replacement computer parts, which is nice I guess.

Depending on how you feel about the Industrial trade code, it might not even be possible to build ships at scale at most of these TL 9+ planets.  They can probably nanolathe you a replacement flux combobulator for your drives, but building ships there is a harder sell.  I count 1797 worlds of TL9+ with the Industrial trade code, or 1.8%, 1 in 55, about 0.73 per subsector.  A quarter of typical subsectors can't meaningfully manufacture starships in quantity (to say nothing of low-density subsectors with fewer planets).  There were 563 TL 12+ industrial worlds, 0.6%, 1 in 160, about one per four subsectors.  If you want to have a mercenary cruiser built, it's going to take weeks for an X-boat to even deliver the order to a major TL 12 shipyard.

(TL 7 Industrial worlds may be required to mass-produce non-starship spacecraft; only about 1000 of the 66000 TL <9 worlds are also Industrial.  So probably system defense boats are also mostly imported, under the math I did here about how heavily-defended small worlds in Traveller are?)

This distribution of TLs is all roughly true in Mongoose too (there is one small point of divergence, where in MgT balkanized governments get +2 TL?), but being computer-constrained opens up an interesting angle.  Computers are small but complicated and value-dense.  Since the technical details are under-specified, upgrading a computer/3 to a computer/4 on a TL10 world might not require a heavy industrial base; maybe just a few high-TL pieces that can be manufactured in small batches to glue a bunch of lower-TL hardware together.  Adding one more dTon of computers is like, one extra server rack.  That seems less daunting to retrofit than adding 8+ dTons of fusion reactors and technobabble jump drive bits (sadly it's not quite that simple for either the scout ship or the free trader, whose jump numbers are constrained by their drives as well as their computers.  Still, it's possible to build over-reactored low-TL ships and then just need a higher-TL computer upgrade).

(This does also raise the possibility of extended supply chains for starship construction - if you have a TL 9 industrial world and a TL 12 non-industrial world, maybe getting a hand-crafted TL 12 computer in your starship is an optional upgrade package that the shipyard offers.  Maybe they need high-value computers delivered from across the subsector and it would be a shame if such a shipment were waylaid...)

The same value-density also makes upgraded computers great treasure / salvage.  If you find a high-TL derelict, you're probably not taking the whole engineering section.  But recovering the computer sounds pretty doable and could be a big increase in your capabilities.  And starship programs are also super value-dense (also, you need different jump control programs to jump different distances - you can recover a big computer from an old ship but if they were using it mainly for combat programs and didn't have that big a jump drive, like the Mercenary Cruiser, it may not help you immediately).  I could see collecting starship programs in Classic Traveller almost being like collecting spells as an MU in D&D.

Anyway.  The implied industrial base for shipbuilding in Traveller is much smaller than I thought.  It's not quite Stars Without Number level but it's kinda borderline; there might be extended supply chains and it could be brittle and prone to disruption.  And having jump on small ships at typically-available tech levels be computer-constrained rather than reactor-constrained does seem like it would open up some gameplay in addition to Omer's points about creating space for player-party size groups.

To a certain extent this also addresses the bulk cargo problem Traveller has had, where it's hard to justify tramp freighters making a living when you could just build enormous heavy freighters.  MgT 1e has a 1000 dTon bulk freighter design with Jump 2; it would be TL 11 under CT Book 3 rules, vs TL 9 in Mongoose, which more than halves the number of Industrial worlds where they can be built.  550 tons of cargo is about 7x the cargo volume of a free trader; enough to disrupt a route maybe, but not orders of magnitude more.  Its description notes, "this thousand-ton vessel is still tiny compared to the mammoth corporate vessels that also ply the trade routes", but under CT Book 3, a 4000-5000 ton vessel isn't jump capable at all until TL 15, and jump 2 at 5000 tons and jump 3 at 4000 tons are just barely achievable.  TL 15+ Industrial worlds to build these enormous type Z powerplants and drives are exceedingly rare - 80 in 100,000 worlds, or 0.08%.  A full sector of 16 subsectors has a 50% chance of having such a world.  And then you need jump-2 routes connected to that TL 15 Industrial world for them to actually get where they're going!  So there are going to be places these big ships just can't go that smaller ships locally-build ships can get to, or places where smaller high-jump-number craft can get to much more quickly.  And 5000 tons is certainly not small, but it's a far cry from the 100,000 dTon superfreighter in MgT High Guard with 50k dTons of cargo capacity.

Starship Geomorphs

I was poking through GDW's Classic Traveller catalog in DriveThru the other day and made a remarkable discovery: this Starship Geomorphs listing.  It's a free pdf of about 200 pages of deckplan geomorphs for building large starships, space stations, and just general sci-fi environments out of.  Most of the geomorphs are 20x20 5' squares, or 200 dtons.  There are a couple of sample ship deckplans demonstrating how some geomorphs might be put together and they're in the 700-1000 dton range.

It seems like it would be really useful for HOSTILE, since HOSTILE has a focus on really big, industrial ships and stations, and they're often adventure sites when something gets loose (so you might want a high-fidelity map).  And the price is certainly right...

Traveller and Cruising

It's possible I've been thinking about Traveller all wrong.  Maybe this is obvious to everyone else but here goes.

I've been reading some books about maritime cruising.  "Living for extended time on a vessel (yacht) while traveling from place to place for pleasure. Cruising generally refers to trips of a few days or more, and can extend to round-the-world voyages." There's a lot of discussion about how to do your own maintenance (one, because stuff breaks at sea, and two because hiring professionals to do it in port is really expensive) and how to do odd jobs to make some money on the side since you probably aren't regularly employed.  Some of those odd jobs and cruising stories sounded like the sort of things Traveller patrons would ask for, and here we are.

This lens makes a lot more sense for Traveller than "space trucking".  You don't have to explain the economics of small-scale shipping, because that's not really what is happening here.  Sure you might make a windfall on cargo every now and then (and cruisers attempt this too, with mixed success - "We were told that people in the Marquesas desperately needed reading glasses.  I bought 50 pairs in Mexico and still have all of them [because we were misinformed].") but that's not why you're traveling.  You're traveling for its own sake, and money is a means to the end of continuing to travel.  You're not out to get rich - just to keep funding the midlife crisis and not have to go back to a day job with a boss and a commute. This is why your "career" ends at the end of chargen.

It's interesting to compare with the similarly non-accumulative style of Appendix N, where the heroes adventure to get rich, only to spend it all and then need to adventure again.  Here too it's adventuring for money in order to maintain an unconventional, expensive but unencumbered lifestyle.

I think this view is consistent with the belief that money is supposed to be important in Traveller, but it also admits the Classic Traveller style where PCs having a ship is somewhat rare.  A Traveller without a ship can still work odd jobs in / for the "cruising" community and get working passage to wherever. Losing the money game doesn't end the campaign; it just changes it temporarily.  So the money pressure maybe shouldn't be as overwhelming as it might traditionally be with the starship loan (or you do what many budget cruisers do and get a really old vessel).  It's there to keep things interesting, to add a creeping danger that you can't just run from, not to be the focus of play.

This cruising lens also answers the question of "why do we have a baronet or an ex-admiral on this grungy little vessel?"  They're not loading cargo - they're just drifting.  Plenty of nobles are into sailing ("It seems that of any activity in the world, singlehanded sailors have the best odds of being knighted.") and the admiral retired and decided he just wanted to kick back in the tropics in a low-stress environment but can't help but get himself into trouble.

Some possible implications for DMing Traveller - NPCs from the cruising community.  Lots of cruising vessels have "buddy boats" or form regattas headed to the same place at the same time.  This is good for when something goes wrong.  The vessel at the next berth over in port isn't a rival small trader; they're drifting hippies with a hydroponic weed operation onboard, or a very trad religious husband who used to sell insurance with wife and four kids and a dog aboard, or a reclusive ex-programmer with a bunch of ship systems automated, or a husband/wife pair where the husband is a professional hunter and the wife is a xenobiologist (who is actually the better shot of the two), or...  There's just a ton of room for recurring, charmingly-eccentric NPCs here, who might fill the patron role when things are going well for them, or who might need rescued when something goes wrong.

Another implication for DMing Traveller regards building sandboxes.  When the players are out to do the "space trucking" thing, you have to be really careful to not set up Golden Pairs of planets with complementary economic tags where you can just go back and forth indefinitely and make tons of money.  But if the players are on board with the game being about drifting, you might be able to be less careful with this; it becomes a "sometimes food", because anything that resembles routine work is anathema.  It seems like a way of thinking about the game that would really encourage building a sandbox with lots of wild, interesting bits for your tourists to go see and mess with.  It could be much mellower than the highly-incentivized OD&D sandbox of "where do we go to make a ton of money, hence XP, as quickly and safely as possible?" which so often causes analysis paralysis for optimizers (as does the Space Trucker optimizing his routes).  But cruising Traveller admits satisficing; "sure that sounds like an interesting place to go, uhhh I wonder if they need any eyeglasses, maybe we can make a buck.  Any passengers headed that way to defray our costs?"

GURPS Traveller: Far Trader

I've been told several times over the last decade that I need to read GURPS Traveller: Far Trader, because its trade model nicely solves the Golden Pair problem, where your PCs find two planets with complementary trade codes near each other and make a killing.  Which is silly, because why has nobody else picked up this hundred-thousand-dollar bill yet?

I'm only on page seven and this is already glorious.

Unlike the first two Imperiums and most planetary economies, the Third Imperium has no central bank. No one in the Imperial bureaucracy sets interest rates, acts as lender of last resort to failing banks, supervises check clearing or tries to reduce the impact of recessions. The Third Imperium feels that it has traded the promise of a smoother ride in the short term for a lower risk of financial catastrophe in the long term.

The Third Imperium has replaced the central bank structure with a monetary board. The members of the board are all retired bankers and economists, many of noble birth, but all chosen primarily for their hatred of anything that smacks of using monetary policy to meddle with the economy. Their task is to carefully control the long-term growth of the money supply so as to mirror the long-term growth of the economy...

Part of the task of the survey branch of the Scout Service is to provide up-to-date economic data for the monetary board to use in its long-range growth forecasts.

That's gonna make a great thumbnail image in the ol' RSS feed.

And this was written in 2004, well before the bailouts of '08 for example.

High-level summary of the simple trade system (correct me in the comments): for each world in your area of interest, figure out the size of its planetary economy and roughly how much total trade it does.  For each pair of worlds, compute a statistic for how much trade happens between the two of them.  There's a big table here for turning that statistic into a dollar-value per year and volumes of cargo, but we don't actually need that yet.  We do need to turn these links between worlds into trade routes and classify the routes by their total volume, and then there's a die roll multiplied by the total trade volume statistic of the pair of worlds to determine how much cargo people will pay you to move, and the price per ton is based on the route type and distance.

...  yeah we're not in Mongoose country anymore, Toto

One thing I don't like about this book is the forward references.  For example, a footnote on the big table of trade volumes on page 16 points forward to a heading on page 22. 

I am curious what these trade statistics and route types end up looking like under unusual subsector generation parameters, like Mongoose's "hard science" subsector generation option where bad atmos reduce population and low population reduces starport.  Also, what I'd have to change to apply them to HOSTILE's alternate FTL drive system.

The advanced trade system also takes those planetary economy sizes, openness to trade, route classifications, and trade-volume-by-planet-pairs as inputs, but the volume of available cargo for free traders is determined by the big table back in the previous chapter (with terms for random fluctuation and damping back towards average volume on the route), the market rate for shipping on each planet varies over time (random fluctuations plus a damping term), and there's a skill roll to see what fraction of the going bulk freight rate you get.  Also, cargo gets split into lots and it has traits like "biohazard" and "fragile" and some three-letter codes for...  conditions of delivery or something?  Also also, you can try to predict what the going rate for freight haulage will be in the future using skill rolls or asking brokers, and can try to learn what it was in the past in other markets by asking questions of crews coming from those places (and then making your own predictions from those estimates).

And this isn't for speculative cargo, where you buy high and sell low (wait no, the other thing).  This is speculating on how much you can get paid for hauling boxes of other peoples' stuff.

This definitely requires some book-keeping, because you need to know the 4d6 price volatility roll last week for the damping term in the computation of the new price and volume this week.  For each planet of interest.

No penalty is listed for failing to appear / deliver on a futures contract.

I do wonder how they figured the baseline costs per dton per parsec of haulage.  This would probably be relevant in a HOSTILE-like situation where jump works differently.

I am now on page 35 of 146 and my erec enthusiasm has subsided somewhat.

Skimming passenger stuff.  Passenger prices are less volatile than freight prices, and it's not too hard for free traders to eat the whole pie of available passengers on smaller routes.  It's not a very big pie though.

Page 36, on to speculative trading in cargoes.  Properties of speculative cargo are randomly generated independently (eg you roll for price on origin world and which planet codes have modifiers to buying price on separate tables) rather than from a single big table of types of goods.  You probably want to know a guy to find available speculative cargos.  You can try to predict one die of...  3d6? per destination market that you're considering hauling it to.

Huh.  So time series stuff is sort of discouraged in speculative goods trading.  Curious.

And it seems like the solution to the Golden Pair problem is a combination of "you can't consistently get any particular speculative cargo with the trade code modifiers that you want" and "the volume of contract cargo available for free traders on high-trade routes is limited".

We're now a third of the way through the book and we've covered pretty much everything that I expected to have covered.  What's left?

Incorporation, business plans, loans, stock market?, freight handling, traffic control, hiring crew, shipboard law, keeping a logbook, cargo manifests, filing flight plans, freight handling equipment, character options for GURPS, campaign models (tramp freighter, corporate, pirate, and smuggler), a subsector map and notes about its economy, lists of the trade stats for worlds in various published subsectors, some new starships (no deckplans though).

This feels like a reasonable cutting point, where there might or might not be a follow-on post about the rest of the book.

Traveller's Terms and HBR's Tours of Duty

I had an interesting text-chat conversation with a former coworker recently (excerpted):

me: I suppose maybe that is a good argument for me going to XXX next rather than YYY...  Just to see if XXX is the way that I think it is (which was part of why I wanted to go to $CURRENT_EMPLOYER - to see it).  The tourist approach to career planning.

them: Ha, I like how you describe your career strategy!  Kinda reminds me of Reid Hoffman's tour of duty https://hbr.org/2013/06/tours-of-duty-the-new-employer-employee-compact

It's a pretty good article.

I have thought about careers and life in terms of Traveller's terms for quite some time; my blogger profile used to have what I estimate my Traveller stats at, including terms in various occupations.  When I'm at a new company, I think of staying a full four years as a good solid run; I've only done it once so far, and it was a pretty darn successful four years, definitely worth an extra benefit roll (with a shift in company direction in the final year or so which I did not think promising).  More commonly, after 18-36 months, if things are looking mediocre, I move on.  Not a failed survival roll, but more like a failed roll to promote.

So I think it's a little funny to see a serious publication like the Harvard Business Review take basically the same perspective, following in the footsteps of some geeks in the '70s trying to model careers.

Traveller: Why Are Radioactives Expensive?

Reflecting on Traveller and gross planetary product, I got to thinking about radioactives.  They're worth a million credits a ton, and it's a little puzzling.  What are radioactives used for in Traveller?  Nuclear weapons are purely the Imperium's prerogative, so that's pretty much out (but radioactives aren't illegal on their own, so it's also not like a black market price inflation sort of thing).  They're not being used for starship armor, probably (almost certainly not for crystal-iron or titanium steel.  Maybe for "bonded superdense"?  But that sounds more like neutronium than depleted uranium).  Is DU being used in infantry weapons and armor?  But you don't really need radioactives for DU, it's depleted.  It's probably not being used for medical imaging with all the higher-TL stuff available.  And it's not being used for power because fusion technology exists.

Fusion, incidentally, sounds like a decent way to synthesize radioactives, since that's how stars do it.  Horribly energy intensive, yes - but you have fusion power.  So fuse hydrogen for energy, and then use that energy to fuse lead or whatever to get your radioactives.

I've got half a mind to remove fusion power and make starships fission powered, as a means of explaining why anybody in Traveller gives a hoot about radioactives.  Doesn't matter how far in the future you go, fusion is still 10 years away.

But I don't think I'd want to use Mongoose's rules for fission power, which are pretty punitive.  I'm fine with the gameplay of the fusion reactor, just not the in-world implications.  Keep the same reactor volume and cost, keep the same fuel volume, but you only have to replace it once every, oh, ten years or so, and have the total cost of the replacement fuel rods add up to what you would've spent on refined hydrogen fuel for a typical fusion reactor over that time.  And then lift HOSTILE's hyperdrive and maneuver drive rules, you're heating hydrogen on the reactor and using that for thrust.

Traveller: How Big is the Militia of that Mining Colony?

(This is a "thinking out loud / showing my work" post)

Thinking about Boot Hill, Traveller, and (naturally) Starcraft led me to the question - how much military hardware and how many trained men does a backwater mining colony have?

Fortunately, Striker has rules for the GDP of planets based on their population, tech level, and economy tags, and suggestions about what fraction of that GDP is allocated to military spending (and ground vs spacy-navy spending) based on situation.

Let's take, say, the world of Serpentine from HOSTILE (subsector New Concession Zone, UWP D590355-C, Desert).  Population digit 3 means it has a few thousand people; applying Benford's Law and a d% roll, about 3000 people.  Per Striker, a TL12 Desert world has a per-capita GDP of 16kCr, so with 3k people total planetary GDP is 48 MCr.  Assuming 3% of GDP is spent on the military (Striker's baseline), that's 1.44 MCr/year.  60% (864 kCr) goes to the navy and 40% to the army (576kCr) (again, Striker's baseline for a world with an atmosphere).  

One place I'm diverging from Striker's assumptions is that 30% of defense spending goes to the Imperium.

That Navy budget is enough to afford a new police cutter (at MgT1e's prices) every, mmm...  65 years.  Once they have one, maintenance and fuel is about 120kCr/year.  A pilot is 72kCr/year salary, and a gunner is 24kCr/year, so TCO of a crewed cutter is 216 kCr/year.  Assuming the colony has been around a long time, their "navy" might field four such police cutters, and maybe 1-2 are on duty at any given time.  The limiting factor here might be human though - pilots have to sleep, machines don't.  If we went down to three cutters we could pick up an extra two pilots and three gunners (and maybe some admin staff) and that might improve availability somewhat but ultimately "between 1 and 3 police cutters on duty at any given time" is still going to be the right answer.

A solar system is a lot of space to cover with three cutters, at least one of which is probably off duty at any given time.  Pirates take note.

Meanwhile, on the surface, 576 kCr/year in army budget.  Government type 5 is the infamous Feudal Technocracy, which sounds like the sort of government that would field a mix of long-service feudal retainers and militia.  A long-service professional soldier costs 30kCr/year in wages, facilities, support personnel, etc, while a militiaman costs 10kCr/year.  So if we didn't have to buy or maintain any gear and were going just for number of bodies, the upper limit on the size of Serpentine's army would be (drumroll) 57 militia, about two platoons.  Which, to be fair, is about 2% of the population.  In times of crisis, with the military budget jacked up to 15% of GDP, they could support almost 300 militia, about two companies (10% of the population).

What gear do our infantry need?  Atmosphere type is 9, "Dense, Tainted", which means they'll all need filter masks.  Serpentine's temperature isn't listed in HOSTILE, but rolling it gave me Temperate, which is a bit odd for a desert world but whatever I'll allow it.  In any case, it seems like they don't need a great deal of protective equipment just to go outside.  Let's go with something like HOSTILE's ballistic vest (450Cr, 45Cr/year maintenance, AR5, 2kg) for armor.  Probably don't need more than one short-range radio per fireteam (250Cr each in HOSTILE), plus one medium or long-range radio for per platoon (1kCr in HOSTILE).  Assault rifles are on the order of 1-3 kCr each, depending on details.  Machine guns are in the same range.  So with equipment maintenance per year at 10% of its base price, we're looking at about an extra, say, 400 Cr/year in gear maintenance, which is peanuts next to personnel upkeep.

Without going through Striker's design sequences, we could consider picking up a couple of APCs at HOSTILE's prices; 100kCr to buy, 10kCr/year upkeep.  Crew of two, 13 passengers, means that four APCs would definitely cover us for the annual price of four militia.  Sounds like a reasonable deal to me, and helpful for moving them around in an unfriendly (though not outright deadly) environment.

So at the end of the day, neglecting the potential "feudal retainer professionals", we're looking at four APCs, 53 militia.  Eight of our militiamen are vehicle crew (four drivers, four gunners), leaving 49 infantry.  Maybe drop one more of the infantrymen and pick up a couple trucks or something in case one of the APCs is down for maintenance, and that also leaves us some buffer to buy a bit of new gear every year.  It is a little weird to give armored vehicles to militia, but it's a mining colony, they're operating and maintaining dump trucks and excavators daily anyway.

Or we could go up to professionals, and get one APC, 15 guys (two of whom are crew), and have a lot more slack to work with for replacing and upgrading gear (about 100 kCr/year - enough to replace the APC annually if necessary).

But the important thing here - this is a small enough army that PCs could conceivably go up against it, or make a difference against the sort of threats that it could deal with.  15-30 guys with assault rifles and an armored vehicle or two is a scary encounter in Traveller, but not impossible to deal with given command and control, morale, dispersion, defeat in detail, low skill levels on militia, and fighting dirty.  If you get the entire army of 50 militiamen and four APCs shooting at you at once, yeah, you're probably hosed.

But because Traveller's population codes go up exponentially, at Pop 4 we'd expect about 10x the population, 10x the GDP, and consequently 10x the army.  So that would be more like a couple of companies, and a much harder thing for PCs to deal with.  So I guess I got lucky picking the break point as my first testcase.  Meanwhile at population 2, which is 1/10th the GDP of Pop 3, you're looking at an "army" the size of the party.

In conclusion: Population 3 or less, maybe you can personally fight their army without having a military unit to back you up.  Population 4 or more, probably not.

Traveller: HOSTILE Review

Update: at some point since I wrote this review, HOSTILE was split into two books; one covering rules and one covering setting.  This review is about the original version, which included both setting and rules in a single book but which I don't think is available on DriveThru anymore.  Parts of this review may no longer be correct about the new version.

HOSTILE is a setting book for Cepheus (an OGL clone of Mongoose Traveller 1e) very explicitly inspired by grungy, industrial 80s science fiction movies including Alien, Aliens, Outworld, Silent Running, The Thing, and Blade Runner.  The spaceships are dimly lit with metal grille floors, the aliens are not sentient but definitely carnivorous, space is for working-class heroes crewing 10k dton ships rather than tourists in 200 dton ships, FTL travel makes you go mad if you're not frozen, videophones live on your desk rather than in your pocket, and the corporation is usually hiding something.

This is a pretty darn good setting, and I could absolutely see using it more-or-less as written.  I think it will probably make a lot more sense than Traveller's default setting to many people my age, since it's grounded in media that they've at least heard of.

The good:

•  Advice on design and employment of horrible alien monsters (HOSTILE was sold to me as "HOSTILE answers the question "How to run Aliens when the players know Aliens?" And supports that answer.")
• I like what they've done with technology; no antigrav, no personal energy weapons, limited electronics.  A setting of big hydraulics, treads, slugthrowers, and Newton's Third Law.
  
• The descriptions of the relatively well-settled and hospitable core worlds are quite good and make it clear that "hospitable" is very relative.  "Temperate climate, breathable atmosphere, a friendly biosphere: choose two."
  
• Clever changes to the way jump and maneuver drives work in starship design; maneuver drives use reaction mass, but FTL travel doesn't, so you still end up with a substantial fraction of the ship's volume used for fuel (preserving loose backwards compatibility with other Traveller designs) but FTL plays more "normally" for science fiction.
• I like that the new careers are simple, more like Classic Traveller careers than Mongoose's "three paths and an event table for each career" approach.
• Pretty good production value; chapter heading pages look good, the book as a whole is structured as a corporate new employee manual, mix of black and white art and pictures of modern-day industrial equipment filtered for atmosphere color and with low-hanging celestial bodies in the background.
• More detailed rules for decompression and opening airlocks from the outside.  There's even a diagram of "here's what the exterior panel for an airlock looks like, here is what each button does".
• Putting everything under corporate control and making ships enormous solves Traveller's historical problem of "where is the economic niche for a tiny Far Trader when there are supposedly these bulk cargo lines?" by saying "Well there isn't, but that's OK."

The bad:

• Some editing/proofreading issues.  Many run-on sentences, some of which don't make sense.  Some spelling / word-replacement issues (eg, "if" when clearly "of" was meant), but Zozer is definitely better at using spell-check than Mongoose.
  
• Kind of a steep price-point for a pdf ($20).
• Long (right around 300 pages - about 1.5 times the length of the MgT1e core rulebook) and colorful means that it is not very friendly to printing your own copy from the pdf.
  
• Some oddities in the careers (eg medical career gets Medical skill 1, 2, and 3 at ranks 1, 2, and 3, while no other career get anything like that level of guaranteed skill for promotion).  This isn't really bad (lord knows we had problems getting a competent medic in MgT), but it is a little odd.
• The changes to basic training mean that you get many fewer skills at level 0, which seems very questionable to me.  I could definitely see players used to having a broad range of skills at 0 objecting to this, and I don't think I would disagree with them.  On the other hand, this again works out pretty close to Classic Traveller's level of skills, where you got two skill rolls during your first term, one each term thereafter, and no basic training (whereas in HOSTILE you don't get two rolls in your first term, but most careers give a skill at rank 1).  But I'm not sure the utility of skills in CT and in HOSTILE/Cepheus/MgT is directly comparable; many skills in CT gave you a bonus of greater than +1 per point of skill level, and others seemed like you didn't need to roll them at all.  And many important skills, like Vacc Suit and weapon skills, were easy to get at level 0 in Classic Traveller ("Skills appropriate for level-0 are: air/raft, ATV, forward observer, steward, vacc suit, and
  weapons.", CT Book 1, page 23).
  
• Equipment weights in tenths of a kilogram, breaking with Mongoose 1e's standard where equipment weights were multiples of 0.5 kg (at least in the core rules).
  
• While I'm picking nits about units: in-system travel rates and distances in millions of kilometers, rather than gigameters.  Why would you ever pass up the opportunity to use the word gigameter?
• I could have used a little less setting history.  I'm already on board with the premise, I don't necessarily need all the details of how we got here.  I skipped over some parts of this.
• Felt very concrete, not a whole lot of gaps intended for DMs to fill in in order to produce their own variations on the setting's history (there are plenty of gaps in terms of described planets and suspicious facts about various corporations for DMs to author stuff into, though - there are six subsectors' worth of maps, but only the Core Worlds are described in great detail, with a few rim and frontier worlds getting 1-3 sentence descriptions and most undescribed except for UPP and trade codes)
• The organization of the equipment chapter is pretty odd, with armor coming first and weapons coming last, with all the survival gear and chemicals and robots and android construction rules and vehicles in the middle.  I assume it's alphabetized by sub-heading, which is fine for reference, but it seems like it would be pretty annoying for, say, equipping a new character, where you probably want to start with armor and weapons (the heavy, expensive things that keep you alive), then misc gear, then maybe a vehicle.  In Zozer's defense, MgT 1e's equipment is organized armor, misc gear, weapons, vehicles and robots (but in MgT, it's only ten pages between armor and weapons - HOSTILE has 34 pages between armor and weapons).
• I'm not really clear why the world generation rules (with the "hard science"
  modifiers baked in) were included/duplicated in this book.
  

The missing:

• Thoughts on dealing with replacement characters - if you actually run it as a horrific game, people will occasionally die, and if you follow the advice that horror is made more effective by isolation, where are you to get replacement characters / what are players of dead characters supposed to do?  Playing the monsters only works when there are at least as many monsters as dead players...
  
• Thoughts on agency.  Three models of play are proposed - Work (crew an industrial ship (probably cargo, because then you get around) and deal with things that go wrong), Fight (another bug hunt?), and Explore (gee I wonder what happens if I poke this egg).  Work and Fight are both pretty reactive, and if you're a corporate surveyor, Explore is likely to be too.  Just by the nature of the setting where the corporations own everything in space, it doesn't seem particularly amenable to sandbox play.  This is probably fine but it might have borne more discussion as a difference from how Traveller is often run.
  
• Example in play of the burn / maneuver drive system.  Or just a rewrite of the Starship Operations chapter of MgT updated for the setting's changes to drives.  If there were five fewer pages of setting history and five more on how the new maneuver drive and hyperdrive work in play, instead of having them crammed into the ship construction chapter, I would be much happier.
• I am informed that more detail on how HOSTILE's maneuver and hyperdrives work is present in the Crew Expendable supplement.
  
• Wages / economy?  The Broker skill description mentions "Trade and Commerce rules" but they aren't in here, presumably it's pointing back to the SRD.  Does crewing a ship pay differently than under stock MgT assumptions?  How do you go about making money, and what can you do with it other than buy weapons and survival gear?
• How much of your paycheck does the company take for food and gear?
• How's the health insurance?
  
• It would be kind of fun to have "accumulate a certain amount of money" as a win-condition; "I have enough to retire to one of the core worlds on, I'm getting out of this business.  Just need to survive a few more jumps back to the core and then I can buy me a soy farm and never set foot in space ever again".
• Or a Charlie Company-style 9-month or 1-year contract; "And he was only three weeks away from finishing his contract...  damn shame."
• I recognize that this is all a gamier perspective than HOSTILE's author probably intends, and that mixing horror and fair play is a hard thing.  But this is the Wandering Gamist.
  
• Advancement - if you're a meat popsicle during jump, you don't get those free weeks of training.  It might take a week or two to get to (or from?) a jump point sometimes, but in higher-maneuver ships this will be shorter, so it seems like training time will be rather inconsistent (and may not come in nice one-week chunks, since distance to jump point is rolled).  Any mechanism to make up for that?  Shift training to days instead of weeks?  Or do people just not really run campaigns, and hence advancement isn't something anyone worries about?
• On the other hand, the discussion of horror does suggest having frequent normal sessions only occasionally punctuated by horror, because this contrast makes it more effective.  So I don't think dismissing this campaign-play aspect is consistent.
  
• More deckplans for big industrial ships.  You get one for free in a separate pdf with the main book, but you're probably going to need more for environments for PCs to explore after Something Has Gone Horribly Wrong and they're called in to investigate.  Looking at Zozer's supplements for HOSTILE, it seems like you get about one deckplan per supplement (eg Colonial Freighter for $8.99, Roughnecks has deckplans for a drilling rig, Alien Breeds has floorplans for a colony).  So I sort of wish there were just a "here are all the deckplans from all the supplements" book.

In any case, despite my complaints, this setting does a good job of evoking the feeling that it sets out to evoke, and as stated at the beginning, I could absolutely see running it with few changes to its canon, or mining its ambiance and technology for a less corporate but still grungy setting.

Traveller, Open Tables, and Boot Hill

There's been some discussion of Traveller on ACKS discord lately and it has me thinking.

All of the Traveller campaigns I've run or played in have been of the "crew of a single ship, small-cast" model.  And Mongoose Traveller, at least, explicitly encourages this with the party skill package.  But what would an open table Traveller campaign look like?  How would you make that work?

If I thought adapting ACKS to open-table play would be tough, Traveller seems a whole 'nother animal.

The biggest difficulty, obviously, is ships.  If there is no party-as-a-whole to own a ship, do you instead have individual players hold the leases on ships?  But then what do you do in a session where no player who has a ship is present?  Is this what the rules for paying for passage are for?  And likewise, what do you do if multiple players with ships are present?  Do you just both go to the same place, convoy-style?  Do you let one ship sit idle?  But then you're paying loan for something you're not using, which brings up another point - if you're a loan-holding player and you can't make a session but time passes in-universe, then what?

Maybe it's best to assume that ships sitting idle are doing boring local deliveries that just break even.

I suppose another answer to the trouble of ships would be "the party (as in the whole playerbase) is a corporation", with ships, debts, and treasury held in common.  But then what if some particular session's subparty really screws up and gets the ship destroyed, or loots the party treasury?

(I suppose another solution to the ship problem is to break with tradition and embrace jump-capable small craft, allowing you to move a party but not a whole lot of gear on a much smaller budget than a typical starship)

Another difficulty - what do you do if you do have a ship-holder at a particular session, but no pilot?  Here again, a seldom-used rule might be relevant: salaries for various crew positions on MgT1e page 137.  The rules in Pirates of Drinax for hiring NPCs would help too.  But it could get weird if the NPC part of your crew is getting paid salaries while the PC part of your crew isn't, and weirder still if you pay different PCs different rates.

Cost of Living for different PCs with different SOC stats (MgT1e page 87) also poses difficulties.

There also isn't really a good Traveller equivalent of a megadungeon.  I suppose one could build an enormous wreck to explore over the course of a campaign, but megadungeons benefit from being fantastical environments which admit lots of internal variance; in a simulated "real" space, you can't do that, so it risks getting dull. 

On the other hand, open table Traveller could be a lot of fun, in part on the basis of variety between planets.  One of the things I liked about Traveller is that it can vary a lot adventure to adventure; it's easy to do Firefly one session, Alien the next, and Mad Max after that.  And in an open table environment, with a broad set of players with different preferences and different skills, it seems like such variation might be more welcome than in a higher-continuity campaign.  It might even be a good excuse to bring out some of the supplements from time to time - if you don't have a ship this session, sign on for a short tour with some mercs and do Hammer's Slammers with Striker this session, or do a stint of private eye work and bust out Agent.

But the point about salaries brought another things to mind: Boot Hill's campaign structure as described in the books, where each player is doing their own thing and you occasionally convene to resolve combats.  A subsector with one or two high-tech or industrial worlds and a smattering of low-pop worlds starts to look rather like the Boot Hill campaign map, with a central "city" and a smattering of ranches, homesteads, and mines.  An X-boat route is a lot like a telegraph line, while an established jump-1 trade route has a certain resemblance to a railroad (using something like warpgate stations instead of ship-mounted FTL really starts to look like a railroad, in that you have to build expensive infrastructure and only service certain spots).  And like Boot Hill, Traveller admits high-volume automation of NPC generation; the process is more complicated, but the output is still simpler than most characters in D&D-type games (particularly if you prune some of the softer noncombat skills / go back to Classic Traveller).  Lining up the passage of real time with the passage of game-time like in OD&D's campaign rules puts the "one week per jump" rule in a new light (I don't know that you'd really want to do 1:1 time, but it's an interesting idea.  2:1 might be more reasonable, so you can do a week in jump and a week in port per IRL week).

A lot of interesting options open up when you break the notion of "party", move to a big cast of PCs with conflicting interests, and maintain campaign-time.  Multiple PC-run mercenary companies, possibly deployed against each other from time to time?  Some players playing at Merchant Prince scale, some players playing individual crewmen of ships and earning salary?  Cat-and-mouse games between PC leaseholders and PC jump tracers?  PC pirates and smugglers who accumulate bounties vs PC bounty hunters, like Boot Hill's dynamic between lawmen and outlaws?  PC belt miners claim jumping each other?  Your hit the motherlode of radioactives and next thing you know you're hiring PC mercenaries to keep the PC pirates off of you.

There's a whole weird world of ways of playing when you let each player play their own subgame which interacts with other players' subgames, and it seems under-explored in tabletop games.  If you don't want to deal with ship mortgages, or asteroid mining, or whatever, there's no party dragging you into dealing with that particular mechanic.  On the other hand, "many players independently playing their own interacting subgames in spaaace" may have also just described EVE Online.  But there's something to be said for games that have below Dunbar's Number of players and a flexible referee.

And Traveller covers two of Boot Hill's weaknesses: lack of information on economy and yields of various activities (if anything Traveller refs are spoiled for choices, across the various editions) and political difficulties around the Wild West setting.

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