If you’re used to playing D&D, think of it like this. In short: Starships make for great plot hooks. Maybe the ship is an experimental prototype that just requires the correctly spoken keyphrase to unlock its advanced systems. The heroes could have all signed up to work as crew on a deep space exploratory vessel that just happens to have served as a Zombie Plague Ship, or their recently acquired Subsidized Merchant once belonged to a smuggler who wants to retrieve some illicit cargo from its secret storage hold. This is where the GM can have a lot of fun. The alternative is for them to be assigned a vessel owned by a third party – a mega-corporation, shadowy benefactor or other interested party – or gain one as a reward for completing a mission. Starships are horrendously expensive and the monthly expenses alone are reason enough for the party to take high-risk jobs just to keep up with the payments. A range of standard starships are provided in the game with the Type S Scout/Courier and Type A Free Trader potentially available to the characters as a benefit during character generation. In Traveller, you can do all the role-playing stuff and still be in character, all the time.Ī Traveller without access to a starship isn’t a Traveller but a Passenger, and that’s not the name of the game. In D&D, for example, there’s the constant shuffle between being In Character and saying what your Armour Class, Hit Points and to-hit modifier is. I can’t stress it enough – this makes a huge difference to how Traveller plays compared to any other game. Worlds, animals, subsectors and spaceships are all expressed in terms that feel sufficiently science-fiction and in keeping with the tone of the game and traditional “role-playing” language is kept to a minimum. Traveller takes that metaphysical breakthrough and runs with it – pretty much everything that needs stats in the game has them in ways that your character can use in-game. Paranoia is the only other one that comes to mind, and that doesn’t come close to the depth of Traveller’s commitment to the concept. Traveller is one of the few games where the in-game stats break through the Fourth Wall and enter the game itself. Picture your character looking at his own character sheet, then watch out for flying brain-matter as your head explodes. If your crew is looking for a new Engineer (the last one having been accidentally flushed out of the airlock) they can stipulate they want one with a UPP of at least 779878 and have Vacc Suit-1. Your character’s stats – his Universal Personality Profile or UPP – can be looked up by your character in the game on any convenient info-terminal. One of the most awesome things about Classic Traveller (and derivatives) is that the in-game values and role-playing data is present in the game itself.
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January 2023
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