How to make Traveller more popular with TTRPG players

[Sigtrygg]

Keep on the Borderlands seems like the opposite of what Marcus is proposing. It's hardcore grognard bait, reusing the very first adventure from the old D&D boxed set.

The new D&D starter set? I absolutely love it. Maps of the keep and the cave complexes, tokens, cards, dice

It would be really nice for more people to realize that you can run Traveller with your own setting.

Traveller is the Third Imperium, everyone says so... take away the Third Imperium and what are you left with...

yes that was sarcasm.

But that runs against the industry trends, where most people seem to WANT a prefab setting (why Charted Space was created in the first place) and the fact that almost every sci fi game out there is focused on a single setting.

People are complicated that way. Personally my biggest dislike of the Third Imperium is the over detailing - I don't want every world in the Spinward Marches described by MJD... the more details are pinned down the more I have to discard.

SWON makes a big deal of letting you make your own setting, but it also has a published setting for it. Basically everything else is "Here's a setting with some rules for it" rather than "Here's some rules that let you make a setting".

SWON almost always tops the list for "recommend me a sci fi game to run my setting" at rpgnet.

And considering that the first comment you get about Traveller when you mention it is a meme about dying in Chargen, which hasn't been the rule in over 30 years, I can see how it'll be hard to break out.

It is tied to the Third Imperium which is overly detailed and yet inconsistent, it has flame wars that have been ongoing since before the interwebs, it has edition wars, it has a toxic fanbase, you die in character generation.

And yet we are all here because it is one of our favourite games and we want to see Mongoose do well.

 

[Sigtrygg]

What is actually out there IP wise that is available and popular? Foundation and Murderbot have been mentioned but I have no idea about how you get rpg rights to such properties. Free League are pretty good at hoovering up rpg licences...

Amazon have just announced Stargate is coming back...
anything on Netflix?

 

[AndrewW]

nothing illegal about attacking developers. Why would you sign an "illegal" licensing agreement?

I never said anything about developers. I was referring to charging computer manufactures for every system they shipped regardless of what was on it when it shipped.

But not really on topic here.

 

[Vormaerin]

SWON almost always tops the list for "recommend me a sci fi game to run my setting" at rpgnet.

Yeah, because SWON is basically D20 OGL for space. I love reading the books, but the mechanics standard simplified D&D with classes, levels, and all that stuff that I consider rubbish, but is very popular with a certain portion of the player base.

 

[To Tha Moon!]

The rules need to be separated from the setting.

I think this is only partially true. There are several distinct settings for Traveller:

Classic Traveller and current Mongoose Traveller era
MegaTraveller - the Rebellion and Hard Times era
Traveller The New Era where there's no longer an Imperium
T4 Milieu 0 era back to the beginning of the 3rd Imperium and Psionics are legal.
T5 Galaxiad? era
GURPS Traveller where MegaTraveller never happened
Traveller Hero and I'm not sure of the era
T20 Traveller for the D20 system I think it's the Classic era.
There's also Mindjammer Traveller

Mongoose should come out with a book that lets you play in each setting with their current rules.

And people have made other settings on their own.

Since it's most likely that Joss Whedon had both The Traveller Book and The Traveller Adventure that he ran a Sci-Fi game with in college, then you can consider Firefly/Serenity to be a setting.

There's a Reticulan Parasite in one of the old JTAS books that would let you run games in the ALIEN setting.

They almost had a Prime Directive (Star Trek) setting which could easily be done now, I think.

And there's this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/traveller/comments/po801g/combining_taveller_with_call_of_cuthulu

There are all kinds of settings that could be done with Traveller. Someone mentioned Stargate with Traveller on Reddit the other day.

Ask what Settings you can play in with the current version of Traveller and you'd probably get a lot of great answers.

So I don't think they need to be separated. You can play just about any setting with the current Mongoose version.

 

[paltrysum]

It's just possible that what the people on this hellforum want - what players with decades of experience with traveller, many of whom never actually play the game with other people, constantly demand - is not what drives sales to new players.

I can almost guarantee you that 'the kids' do not surf this forum. Their demographic does not play that game. That said, it's great to engage in a dialogue about how we might reach out to them.

 

[Studio Cat]

I'm on break at work, so this will be quick.

Traveller doesn't need to change.

If you want the game to become more popular, then Referees and Players need to play it in public. Do demonstrations of Traveller at game stores, conventions, pubs, and game clubs. Show potential players that it exists, that it is different but not complicated, and that it is fun. The game is less popular because there are not as many advocates for it. So go out there and advocate! Show people how much fun the game is!

The Traveller Starter Pack is a free download. How many of you have posted a link to it when discussions of sci-fi games happen? Why not? If you want the game to be more popular, then you are missing out on a great lure to bring in new people if you don't.

Making Traveller more popular doesn't start with Mongoose Publishing, it starts with the person reading this giving enough of a damn to put some skin in the game and doing something about it instead of just posting on a forum.

 

[Micky]

I can almost guarantee you that 'the kids' do not surf this forum. Their demographic does not play that game. That said, it's great to engage in a dialogue about how we might reach out to them.

they are too busy going ga ga over the evolved Alien game aren't they... talk about a game married to a setting and certain vibe. Yet it is being eaten alive.

two things most any reviewer can and have said about Traveller. It's character creation system AND the incredible default setting of the game which continues to evolve over nearly 50 years along with the game and has one of the greatest resources any RPG game has, Travllermap.

Settings matter to many gamers. Look at Mystara. That setting is has been dead, unsupported officially, for nearly 40 years and still has a vibrant, large, and creatively active community that supports the setting and continues to add to the setting.

I'll toss back off my two cents for how to reach them

instead of pushing a blank canvas, tool box game which appeals a very limited, and yes generally older kind of RPG player that by in large are already into the game, a good way to reach out to today's gamers, the younger ones, is to emphasize that setting from the get go. As I suggested earlier a good way to attempt to break in with the kiddies is split the core book into two books, something many RPG games do do. A players book with core, setting agnostic rules, and a 2nd which acts as the DM/GM/Keeper guide with tools on how to run Traveller and in that you introduce to them the Charted Space/Third Imperium setting along with guides on how to run them. DId Cthulhu stunt its audience by setting its game in a particular era in its core books? No. It was a gateway to Gaslight, Modern, Roman, etc. Conversely, how successful would Cthulhu have been if it had were system neural and presented itself as a toolbox to run in any era. Just because the core rules introduce a particular setting does not man you HAVE to use it. Not does it stop the toolbox game aspect. It becomes not a selling point for younger players but a discovery for them once they explore the game.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Yeah, because SWON is basically D20 OGL for space. I love reading the books, but the mechanics standard simplified D&D with classes, levels, and all that stuff that I consider rubbish, but is very popular with a certain portion of the player base.

It is basic D&D with Traveller skills added, the author even says so. 2nd edition improves on 1st edition but it remains a D&D/Traveller mash up...

 

[Sigtrygg]

I think this is only partially true. There are several distinct settings for Traveller:

Classic Traveller and current Mongoose Traveller era
MegaTraveller - the Rebellion and Hard Times era
Traveller The New Era where there's no longer an Imperium
T4 Milieu 0 era back to the beginning of the 3rd Imperium and Psionics are legal.
T5 Galaxiad? era
GURPS Traveller where MegaTraveller never happened
Traveller Hero and I'm not sure of the era
T20 Traveller for the D20 system I think it's the Classic era.

T20 had the Gateway setting at the tail end of the Rim war ~1000 from memory, and the 1248 TtNNE

There's also Mindjammer Traveller

Mongoose should come out with a book that lets you play in each setting with their current rules.

This has been suggested many times. Now that Mongoose owns the entire back catalogue it is just a matter of having the time and the people to do it.

And people have made other settings on their own.

The vast majority of my Travelling has been in my own settings.

Since it's most likely that Joss Whedon had both The Traveller Book and The Traveller Adventure that he ran a Sci-Fi game with in college, then you can consider Firefly/Serenity to be a setting.

There's a Reticulan Parasite in one of the old JTAS books that would let you run games in the ALIEN setting.

They almost had a Prime Directive (Star Trek) setting which could easily be done now, I think.

And there's this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/traveller/comments/po801g/combining_taveller_with_call_of_cuthulu

There are all kinds of settings that could be done with Traveller. Someone mentioned Stargate with Traveller on Reddit the other day.

Ask what Settings you can play in with the current version of Traveller and you'd probably get a lot of great answers.

All of them. I run a game set in the Culture, Traveller can handle it no problem at all.

So I don't think they need to be separated. You can play just about any setting with the current Mongoose version.

Sadly the trope is that you can only play in the Third Imperium, that is what needs to change, that and that you die during character generation.

I would go as far as having a side bar in the crb showing how you can do character generation as points buy rather than random rolls... random characters is something else that is a trope that puts people off, quite why a referee can't make the decision to allowing a player to choose the skills they want is a mystery...

 

[Sigtrygg]

I can almost guarantee you that 'the kids' do not surf this forum. Their demographic does not play that game. That said, it's great to engage in a dialogue about how we might reach out to them.

Tik tok videas with a link to the free starter pdfs...

I would purpose Bu and Embla to the task...

 

[Sigtrygg]

The Traveller Starter Pack is a free download. How many of you have posted a link to it when discussions of sci-fi games happen? Why not? If you want the game to be more popular, then you are missing out on a great lure to bring in new people if you don't.

Every single time on rpgnet someone asks about sci fi games I give them the links to the free stuff and the CT Facsimile edition.

 

[Sigtrygg]

instead of pushing a blank canvas, tool box game which appeals a very limited, and yes generally older kind of RPG player that by in large are already into the game, a good way to reach out to today's gamers, the younger ones, is to emphasize that setting from the get go. As I suggested earlier a good way to attempt to break in with the kiddies is split the core book into two books, something many RPG games do do. A players book with core, setting agnostic rules, and a 2nd which acts as the DM/GM/Keeper guide with tools on how to run Traveller and in that you introduce to them the Charted Space/Third Imperium setting along with guides on how to run them. DId Cthulhu stunt its audience by setting its game in a particular era in its core books? No. It was a gateway to Gaslight, Modern, Roman, etc. Conversely, how successful would Cthulhu have been if it had were system neural and presented itself as a toolbox to run in any era. Just because the core rules introduce a particular setting does not man you HAVE to use it. Not does it stop the toolbox game aspect. It becomes not a selling point for younger players but a discovery for them once they explore the game.

Or how about split the game into three core rulebooks
player stuff
referee stuff
setting stuff

Slipcase the lot or sell separately.

I will leave it to others to come up with names for the three books.

 

[pholus96]

When I introduced Traveller at my tabletop, the major pushback was from someone who wanted to do Alien RPG from Free League instead. This was while the forever DM was trying to retool us from 5e to Daggerheart and full group availability was a problem due to summer school activities for the parents.

So as an experiment we tried both. The adventures were "Mission to Marduk" vs. "Chariot of the Gods." We have two geezers (myself and one other in our early 50's) and four younger sorts (30's and 40's).

In Chariot of the Gods you could say which movie character each premade based on. We started using those names instead and it was immersion breaking. The monster of the day was unbeatable because the alien has to be unbeatable and because STORY FACTORS we had flamethrowers and wrenches and a couple guns and one EMPTY pulse rifle where the lack of ammo was meant to force you into a fight and it was so obvious we didn't bother. The alien was not beatable or at least in the first fight it greased our strongest melee character who had to fight to save some of the others. The person playing the corporate executive actually was highly dissatisfied that story factors made her the bad guy and she was constrained to have to play it because the corporate exectuve has to be the bad guy in the universe. We all died because in the face of the threat the only rational thing to do was to blow yourselves up before the big bad made it to a colony. When the GM asked if we wanted to play again, it was a hard pass because the setting of Alien is about being outclassed, betrayed and then dying.

In contrast, Mission to Marduk none of the players knew a thing about the 3I and the 3I stayed firmly in the background. I briefly explained the starfaring society and the fact that they all were in-transit somewhere else when the adventure hit and the 3I stayed out of the way for the rest of it. It was a first ORIGINAL sci-fi rpg for most of them and since they had characters they made they were free to rpg and this group rpgs. The call from orbit told them the adventure was dirtside and so they were taking the trip as a way to interact with the surroundings and so the attack during descent was a perfect surprise -- the missile strike came mid-character joking argument and was a complete suprise (to my delight). After that being plunged into a jungle in the darkness and rain and the atmosphere made them channel "Predator" but that was because they wanted to, not because the setting demanded them too. It was a nailbiter (and I made the tower battle at the end a bit more deluxe with rules and a multi-level fight with climbing to where they could get a signal out) but they won and felt good about winning.

In the end, while not our regular game and the Daggerheart campaign is now running, my campaign is the "incomplete group" night fallback, not Alien. They had never made a character with a pregame before and that was a strong experience for most of them who were used to having to be novel-writers because they watch too much Critical Role. The player who hated being the executive rolled a great SOC and is the noble in the group -- but because she is able to define that role for herself she loves her character and her character's responsibilities. Overall the character group is stronger because the pregame gives them accomplishments to focus on that they didn't summon out of thin air and the first couple adventures gave them accomplishments that define their characters a lot harder than pre-written backstory. Another good moment was when I presented a sector map before their first jump. they looked for prompting on where to go and I said "I don't care, that'a YOUR choice." The setting made that moment of "wait, we have choices?" possible.

I guess I'm saying, setting is not the issue here. Your best setting stays in the background and implies hidden depth under the surface. Your worst setting takes player choice away. Your adventure sets the mood for the group. And adventures are hard to write.

 

[Grognardia]

There's a persistent idea in niche hobbies that you must abandon what makes you unique to attract new people. This rarely works.

D&D didn't grow by ditching the Forgotten Realms. It kept its flagship setting while adding others. Mongoose seems to be doing exactly this with Charted Space, Pioneer, and 2300AD.

The real problem is perception. People think Traveller is only the Third Imperium and that you die in character generation (which hasn't been true for decades). These are marketing issues, not setting issues. Abandoning what your existing customers love to chase hypothetical new ones is how you end up with neither.

The solution isn't killing your identity. It's showing people that yes, the Third Imperium is great, and also you can run your Firefly game or whatever else you want. Keep what works, market it better, and demonstrate the versatility that's already there.

 

[Jet_Black]

I'm into RPGs for about 35 years now, but I've discovered Traveller for myself only about three years ago. Of course, I've heard about it before, but for me, Traveller was always that RPG to do 50s- to 70s-era space opera - quaint, out of date and totally irrelevant. When I learned that Traveller could also do more modern stuff, including cyberware, uploading, cloning, I suddenly became interested!

And now we even have the Singularity campaign to finally pull the Third Imperium kicking and screaming into the twentyfirst century, if one is so inclined.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Sadly the trope is that you can only play in the Third Imperium, that is what needs to change, that and that you die during character generation.

I would go as far as having a side bar in the crb showing how you can do character generation as points buy rather than random rolls... random characters is something else that is a trope that puts people off, quite why a referee can't make the decision to allowing a player to choose the skills they want is a mystery...

True, I have had a bunch of players turned off when they realize that they don't get to build their characters. They don't have any real choice. They roll the dice and the dice tell them what character they are playing. Most games are that way with stats, but Traveller is that way with skills too. Other games you write your character's backstory. In Traveller, the dice tell you the backstory, not the player. Lots of people don't like that. I changed character creation at my table to get around it. I just have them choose their skills.

Most people that I have gamed with approach roleplaying from a character idea. In Traveller, you can't start with a character idea because the dice determine your character, not the player. In Traveller you start from, "I want to game. Let's see what character the dice want to let me play." Other RPGs, you start from, "I have this cool character concept!" I understand that you can use houserules to make this not the case, but new players may be turned off by that.

 

[Grognardia]

True, I have had a bunch of players turned off when they realize that they don't get to build their characters. They don't have any real choice. They roll the dice and the dice tell them what character they are playing. Most games are that way with stats, but Traveller is that way with skills too. Other games you write your character's backstory. In Traveller, the dice tell you the backstory, not the player. Lots of people don't like that. I changed character creation at my table to get around it. I just have them choose their skills.

Most people that I have gamed with approach roleplaying from a character idea. In Traveller, you can't start with a character idea because the dice determine your character, not the player. In Traveller you start from, "I want to game. Let's see what character the dice want to let me play." Other RPGs, you start from, "I have this cool character concept!" I understand that you can use houserules to make this not the case, but new players may be turned off by that.

Traveller Companion has full rules for point buy. Which, granted, should be in the main rules. I always offer my players the choice.

 

[Studio Cat]

True, I have had a bunch of players turned off when they realize that they don't get to build their characters. They don't have any real choice. They roll the dice and the dice tell them what character they are playing. Most games are that way with stats, but Traveller is that way with skills too. Other games you write your character's backstory. In Traveller, the dice tell you the backstory, not the player. Lots of people don't like that. I changed character creation at my table to get around it. I just have them choose their skills.

Most people that I have gamed with approach roleplaying from a character idea. In Traveller, you can't start with a character idea because the dice determine your character, not the player. In Traveller you start from, "I want to game. Let's see what character the dice want to let me play." Other RPGs, you start from, "I have this cool character concept!" I understand that you can use houserules to make this not the case, but new players may be turned off by that.

If the Player is given the choice to create a character RAW or with houserules, then it is on them. The game is new to them and they need to be given the space to experiment with the rules so that they can see what the game can do.

If not playing RAW turns off the potential Player from the game, then it is their decision. Personally, I'd ignore them from that point on and concentrate on the Players who are actually interested in creating a character.

In your own quoted post, you turned off a bunch of Players when you didn't let them build their character and you are worried that RAW will turn off new Players. You are damned if you do and damned if you don't, so you might as well just do what you want. You are never going to get 100% participation, so concentrate on what gets the most Players.

 

[pholus96]

True, I have had a bunch of players turned off when they realize that they don't get to build their characters. They don't have any real choice. They roll the dice and the dice tell them what character they are playing. Most games are that way with stats, but Traveller is that way with skills too. Other games you write your character's backstory. In Traveller, the dice tell you the backstory, not the player. Lots of people don't like that. I changed character creation at my table to get around it. I just have them choose their skills.

Most people that I have gamed with approach roleplaying from a character idea. In Traveller, you can't start with a character idea because the dice determine your character, not the player. In Traveller you start from, "I want to game. Let's see what character the dice want to let me play." Other RPGs, you start from, "I have this cool character concept!" I understand that you can use houserules to make this not the case, but new players may be turned off by that.

The one problem with "cool character concepts" is that they always tend to have to have Gun Combat 4 for <backstory reason>...and they're always 18 years old. The Alien RPG ref in my campaign was very unhappy to start at 34 years old -- "geezers in space" as he put it. Then again, his ALIEN pregens wouldn't be 18 based on their roles and responsibilities but they didn't explicitly state that point so I guess the age wasn't front and center for him...

Anyway you have a point. My house rule is that each term's normal skill must be a roll, but an earned advancement skill can be chosen from any eligible list in the career representing your individual initiative to succeed rather than just punch a timeclock.

Best of both worlds because you get the undesigned breadth that random rolls give while the character who really wants to be a pilot can still be a pilot. And the career system with events really gives a chance for the player to "live in the character's skin" before Session one.