My college D&D group looked at playing Space Opera; we even made it as far as creating characters (which, as you note, was a pretty extensive process, as I remember it). From what I saw of it, it was, essentially, Star Wars, without the actual intellectual property – I specifically recall one of the planned PCs in our group being of a race that the GM said was clearly meant to be like a Wookiee.
Were there any explicit rules on what a player was to do when their character died during generation? If the player is then expected to just sit out gaming night until the campaign concluded, well, that’s not much fun. But on the other hand, if the player is expected to just start the process over with a new character, then there’s no reason not to make the high-risk choices like staying in the marines for multiple terms, and just sticking it out until you get one that gets the dice rolls in their favor.
Which, as it turned out, they pursued, in large part, because Lorraine Williams (a.k.a. She Who Shall Not Be Named, who ran TSR after Gygax was forced out) was a granddaughter of John Dille, and she was one of the beneficiaries of the Rogers franchise.
And, to address a point asked by Ascenray about “space opera” RPGs – the default setting for Traveller, as I remember it, was more hard sci-fi, and less space opera. At the time I was playing it, I was also reading Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s CoDominium books, like “The Mote in God’s Eye” and “King David’s Spaceship,” and the flavor of the Traveller universe reminded me a lot of the CoDominium universe.
I saw “Free Trader Beowulf” in the title and immediately flashed back to my days playing Traveler. I was always a scout because there was a chance you could start the game with a small ship. That game was a blast.
The sci-fi game that I remember fondly from TSR was Star Frontiers, which used a percentile system. Unfortunately, TSR folded and all their base were belong to Wizards of the Coast when Magic: The Gathering infected the gaming world.
You can find all the Star Frontiers stuff online for free these days, and I know I’ve seen a few of the races from it (the Yazirians, or “Monkeys”, and the Dralasites, or “Blobs”) in at least on d20 setting.
You make it sound like WotC killed the franchise when they bought out TSR. But it had been over a decade since TSR had published anything major in the Star Frontiers setting when Wizards acquired them. The franchise was long dead by then, and the mentions of a couple SF player races in d20 Future paid more attention to the property than anything TSR had done with it since 1985.
Another one of the things I liked about the Traveller system was the codes that describes a worlds infrastructure, population level, law(less)ness level, tech level, biome type, etc.
You could find a “map” of our section of the galaxy (with common space-trade routes marked on it), and beside each star system was this string of codes. I found it an enjoyable challenge trying to create a star system that feels my own, yet still jives with the codes given in the “galactic atlas”.
Imperial Survey Corps, sound off!
Yup! That was it! Playing it at the internet archive now and I’m flood with teenage nostalgia. Vivid 16 color graphics!:eek::eek::eek:
Oh, and Trinopus:
That, and the “Free Trader” part harkens to Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy.
Traveller had a really interesting default setting. Massive thousand-year old galactic empires, but FTL travel was still very slow. So everything was massively decentralized, and most planets had to be mostly self-sufficient.
Very reminiscent of the much later Firefly. Lots of dirt poor marginal low-tech planets with barely survivable biospheres, a couple of high-tech high population subsector capitals, crappy little ships carrying hard-bitten mercenary/pirate/merchant/scavenger crews around looking for jobs, and the occasional gigantic ludicrously overpowered warfleet from the central cores.
The combat system, like many from back in the early days, had a wargaming flavor. Which meant deadly. Super-easy for your characters to just get mowed down if you run into opponents with weapons and armor just a few tech levels higher than yours.
And yeah, the character generation. Every other system started out new characters as absolute beginners heading out to make their mark on the world. Traveller’s system meant that the longer you could stay in service the better your skills were, so 50 year old grizzled veterans were the goal.
I’ve been a Traveller fan for eons…but I have to confess, one of the first things my gaming group did was to trash the rules and write our own variant, using a percentile skills system.
(Something vaguely akin to the RuneQuest/BRP system.)
We also went to a point-build system, so you could choose which skills you wanted, rather than having skills randomly assigned. Hey, I wanna be a hot-shot Pilot like Han Solo…but the dice keep giving me Admin, Engineer, and Medic!
The settings, and especially the spacecraft, were the berries: Traveller is one of the best-ever settings for an RPG. But the skill system was too binding.
But that’s part of the fun! In any other system, you can min-max everything about your character to the point that every Shadowrun decker has essentially the same race and stats and gear as every other one. The best part of Traveller is roleplaying the cards you’re dealt. At least for me, anyway.
You had to roll to re-enlist, so it was possible that your character would get mustered out against his or her will.
I think our rule was that you could be as risky as you wanted, but once you had three characters survive the process you had to pick one of them.
That meant that pressing your luck too much might mean you end up with three characters who got kicked out of the scouts after only one term when you should’ve taken retirement on that Lt. Commander of yours who made it through five.
Stat rolling was also independent of the rest of generation - so if you have a character with AMAZING stats, you probably don’t want to press your luck too much with multiple enlistments.
This is what I was going to say. It steered you away from playing dull stereotypes
Loved traveller , it was our standard go to game. The game play was also pretty quick, and the universe had a good mix of background , but left it loose enough for creative play. The planet system was great and enabled a good mix of thinking and investigating on high law level worlds, to getting tooled up for a showdown, and remembering not to get lippy with the goons of the gang boss who may have access to an old unreliable pgmp-13
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Sorry pgmp12. That was the two man version. The 13 needed battle dress.
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That’s interesting. I did not know about that connection. Also to the other poster I completely forgot about Star Frontiers but as someone else said, the seemed to let that die whereas Buck Rogers got novels and Computer games (possibly because of the above connection?).
Not just that (though I agree). There are other games from that time with random character creation - this was before there was much of a sense that everyone should be on even footing in a group. Anybody ever play RIFTS? That game could have some truly wacky outcomes - you could have a group where one character is a drunkard with a broken knife and the other is a nuclear-powered cyborg ninja who can punch holes in tanks and then eat the tanks and then poop out smaller, fully functional tanks.
Not only did characters spit out of the Traveller generation system make sense, but the process itself informed your character’s backstory. Plus, it had a “press your luck” component which turned the whole thing into its own game.
It was a unique and wonderful little work of art.
It’s pretty widely believed that Williams pushed TSR’s heavy investment in Buck Rogers because she and her family personally profited from it.
Nicely said! Man, I miss that game.
Heck, even the early editions of D&D treated character generation as a fundamentally random, unbalanced process. You rolled 3d6 for each stat, in order. You wanted to play a wizard, but you ended up with a 5 Int? Tough on you; you figure out something else to do instead. Your highest stat was a 9 Str? Well then, you’ll shut up and play a fighter, and it’s just too bad that you’ll be the worst fighter ever, stop whining and go get yourself killed already.