The Culture: Traveller Is Gundam To D&D's Mazinger Z

(Following from yesterday's post.)

Traveller is one of the first clear examples of a Game other than Dungeons & Dragons. Published in the same era, the rules explained a blueprint for a machine whose paradigm of play was far closer to a user's real life.

The Gundam To D&D's Mazinger Z

Characters in Traveller are generated by means of a Lifepath system, putting them into play (if they survive) well into maturity if not creeping into old age. The tradeoff to make is between time spent in a career to accumulate skills and assets against the increasing odds of death, disability (measured in penalities to one's Attributes), or disgrace (to Social Attributes) for failure.

Characters are notorious for being in a permanently fragile state, disincentivizing fair fights when they do happen and otherwise avoiding it entirely; wounds are delivered as temporary penalties to Physical Attributes, and dropping just one of them to zero takes your man out of the fight entirely. When your man's average score is 7, and weapons do an average of 3d6, that's not trivial even after accounting for specifics in the rules.

Characters are also notorious for being more or less frozen as they are, in terms of skills and Attributes, coming out generation; it takes years of Mandatory Downtime, as if one were still in generation, to learn new skills or improve existing ones on a permanent basis. Attributes are subject to medical technologies, but aging can only be slowed most of the time and injuries can and do leave permanent effects for the worse.

For someone coming from Dungeons & Dragons, this is all a major mood change to consider. A lot of people who've bounced off Traveller over the decades do so because they do not change how they play the game to account for how different the procedures of play operate; it is no different than getting mad because Kieran O'Connell's Irish Pub does not serve Chilean Wine or Sichuzwan cuisine or play the latest hits from Seoul.

The default structure for play is the only similar point between the two Games. A group of adventurers, and their entourages, go from place to place every week or so to seek out yet another opportunity to make a fortune by being freelance trouble-shooters.

This is implied to be of the violent sort, and often is in D&D, but Traveller disincentivizes needless combat far more than D&D does so "trouble-shooting" can be pulling a heist, neogtiating contracts between belligerants, supplementing (un)official authorities in their own schemes (e.g. delivering supplies to someone otherwise unreachable due to lack of manpower), doing favors for people with valuable consideration now to build up credit with them later, etc.

(All of that, by the way, is why Firefly is reckoned as "Traveller: The TV Series".)

From Freigher Captain To Merchant Prince

Yet, as dedicated players over the decades have shown, it is possible to move into far more high-powered positions- into what the #BROSR calls "Faction" or "Patron" Play. Recall that Social Status is an Attribute, and that by itself implies all sorts of things in a campaign. Now you go from Firefly to Babylon 5 and beyond.

However, unlike D&D, Traveller makes no assumption that Authority Equals Asskicking. You can begin play in a position of authority, leadership, and thus power- and you certainly can ascend to one given sufficient ambition, skill, acumen, and support. This is how that middle-aged ex-Merchant with a 40-yr. old Free Trader can become a Merchant Prince with a fleet of vessels under his command, and through the accumulation of those assets become a power to be reckoned with.

The Pillars Examined

Does Traveller fit?

• Rules As-Written: Yes.
• Faction Play: Yes.
• Strict Timekeeping: Yes.
• Always On: Yes.

Traveller is as ideal as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition for Fantasy Adventure Wargame campaigning, as it benefits so much from doing so that the game comes alive and fulfills its promised potential- just like AD&D1e.

Injury, travel time, character improvements, etc.- all require mandatory downtime that adds up fast. FTL travel by itself locks those in transit down for a full week. Improvement requires study and training, akin to D&D doing spell or item creation, and thus locks a character down until complete. Injury and disease recovery is self-explanatory, and so is major economic activity. A Traveller session can involve all of these as costs to be recouped after the fact.

This means that the same potential for multiple active groups of characters, and multiple referees running in the same campaign, is also present here- making Strict Timekeeping necessary, proper, and useful as well as opening the door for Always On activity away from the table.

Now we can see how a Traveller campaign can go well beyond what one small group on a single ship can do, and events affecting an entire galaxy (or more) can be driven entirely by player-controlled factions. Scalability is easy to achieve in this game.

Brands Of The Game

The premises expressed in the design of Traveller are extant in other games, rebranding the structure to fit. Twilight 2000, Dark Conspiracy (both by the same publisher) are obvious. R. Talsorian did this with Mekton (and its sequels) and Cyberpunk (and its sequels), FASA varied significantly in omitting Lifepaths but otherwise Shadowrun conforms and so did some of the BattleTech RPG adaptations. Other products out there like these exist (e.g. Burning Wheel), and all of them are Brand overlays of Traveller.

As the sample list shows, this gets into "realistic" scenarios like T2K where there is nothing unreal about the scenario at all as well as wildly unreal ones like the '80s mecha anime informing Mekton. Yet, while this apparent swing is severe, the substance remains that of the more-like-real-life design preimises of Traveller rather than the heroic adventure premises of AD&D1e.

Conclusion: "Real vs. Super" Is Not Just For Color

The key takeaway on the difference? Best illustrated by this example: a mecha campaign has a battle where a Faction Leader takes the field.

A wargame in the AD&D1e style has the Leader with a stat line far and away superior to line troops, and equal to that of notorious monsters, so his personal impact on the battle is obvious in gameplay as he can and will break enemy units by himself.

In the Traveller style, his stat line is barely different than that of the line troops and his position is entirely due to factors that have no impact on playing out the battle, so his path to victory requires on something other than his direct combat prowess. The former is Conan; the latter is Sun Tzu.

This is why Traveller is the Gundam to D&D's Mazinger Z. The Real Robot premise is that the machine is just a machine; the Super Robot premise is that the robot is a stand-in for the hero's superpowered alter-ego- and the OG Gundam series is the point of divergence where Reals split from Supers just as Traveller split from the D&D norms of the hobby.