Setting Size

[Vormaerin]

So over in the State of the Mongoose, there was a sidetrack about the state of Charted Space and it's flexibility. I don't want to re-sidetrack that thread and most of what the sidetrack was about didn't actually interest me.

But I am interested in the bit where some folks talked about how it was annoying to have adventures be 20+ jumps apart. One of the solutions, of course, being to speed up travel. For me, I just don't play in that big a space.

Campaign worlds having vast amounts of space seem to me to exist so you can have radically different situations in different parts of them, rather than because anyone is actually trekking from IceWind Dale to Kara-Tur or jumping from Earth to Regina.

Sometimes I think people forget just how disparate worlds are. You can have a small area (for me, it's a campaign area that was originally based on the Islands subsectors in Trillion Credit Squadron which only slightly resembles the way it's presented in Mongoose ). The US is not like the Sahara or the Congo or the Himalayas or the bottom of the Ocean. And the Mars colonies are not like the settlements on Io.

You can, of course, make travelling from Dinom to Bellerophon pretty easy and travel light years per hour or whatever. That works just fine. You can also just make a smaller campaign area and fill it full of cool areas. If you like the adventure on Bellerophon or Azun or whatever, you can put that in your smaller play area.

Traveller doesn't require jump drives. It doesn't even require no FTL communications, though I think that expectation in setting design is one of its strong points. It doesn't require any particular setting.

I agree that having a sprawling setting that players are expected to spend years crossing doesn't make for good gameplay. I just don't think that's the purpose of having a sprawling setting. I think that if you have a sprawling setting, it's best used so you can run multiple different kinds of campaigns in different regions while your players have basic familiarity with the campaign concepts. Over here, we have things that do trade pioneering, over there is a big space war, over there super built up Stainless Steel Rat controlled zone, etc. Charted Space tries, with varying degrees of success, to do that.

If you want to mix those things up, you can have fast travel. Or you can use the default slow travel speeds to put those things in a relatively close space.

Charted Space is a wonderful setting with lots of cool stuff. But it's only a good setting for any individual group if it does what they need. There's no need to use Charted Space and even less need to use it in any particular way.

 

[shirgall]

My rule of thumb is "if there was a TV show about this crew, what would they show on the screen?" If the expense and day-to-day was understood, I think we've skip a bit past the boring parts.

 

[Condottiere]

Should be dependent on what the player party wants to do, and if the Dungeon Master is capable of providing them a satisfactory experience in pandering to them.

 

[Vormaerin]

my rule of thumb is "if there was a TV show about this crew, what would they show on the screen?" If the expense and day-to-day was understood, I think we've skip a bit past the boring parts.

That is a fairly reasonable stance, but it does have some issues. The characters on Firefly know that they are poor and in debt and can barely afford to repair the ship and that's just what the script says, so that's how it is. Players tend to want to fix those kinds of problems.

The folks on Earth 2 just know that they are short supplies and have to improvise whatever the immediate issue is. Players tend to want to know what their supply situation is and what they can do about it.

McCoy knows what his salt shakers do. The players probably want more of an idea of what they can do than viewers are ever given. And they probably want the transporter to work the same way all season, not vary episode to episode.

You can certainly get too far into the weeds on these topics to the point the game isn't fun. But you can also easily gloss over them to the point the players don't feel they have much agency because the script just says they need money and so they do. RPGs are not TV shows. Or books. The players do need to know more than the viewers do, but less than a person actually in that situation would need to. It's a balancing act.

On the actual topic of the size of your campaign setting, sure you can just say "and it was a boring trip from Gamma Zebulon to Arcturus Space Resort if your players don't mind being told they just do their jobs and play video games during the trip. But some of them are gonna want to learn kung fu or otherwise advance their stories if you skip a three month trip. Whether you can do the Indiana Jones line on the map thing or not really depends on your player group. And how much time that line on the map is covering.

 

[shirgall]

You can certainly get too far into the weeds on these topics to the point the game isn't fun. But you can also easily gloss over them to the point the players don't feel they have much agency because the script just says they need money and so they do. RPGs are not TV shows. Or books. The players do need to know more than the viewers do, but less than a person actually in that situation would need to. It's a balancing act.

On the actual topic of the size of your campaign setting, sure you can just say "and it was a boring trip from Gamma Zebulon to Arcturus Space Resort if your players don't mind being told they just do their jobs and play video games during the trip. But some of them are gonna want to learn kung fu or otherwise advance their stories if you skip a three month trip. Whether you can do the Indiana Jones line on the map thing or not really depends on your player group. And how much time that line on the map is covering.

So, like the TV show approach, the idea is for them to say what they'll do as a strategy, and we roll it one time to see how it goes, and if it goes well enough, we file it away as routine and don't do it every time unless there's a new wrinkle that would mess with the tools, the people, or the odds. Or if it's too close, try to narrow it down to a single roll per leg instead of something long and complicated.

We are a roleplay-biased group, and I lean on the crew to focus on the parts that matter to them and their characters.

 

[MarcusIII]

RPGs are not TV shows. Or books. The players do need to know more than the viewers do, but less than a person actually in that situation would need to. It's a balancing act.

Very well said

 

[Vormaerin]

We are a roleplay-biased group, and I lean on the crew to focus on the parts that matter to them and their characters.

Whereas I tend to just say "Why have the space if it's not going to matter?" If I don't want to deal with travel as an element of play, I don't create a setting where travel is a factor.

Published settings, of course, have the trouble that they have constituencies with a variety of tastes, so they never exactly hit the spot for any of them.

 

[NOLATrav]

You can also just make a smaller campaign area and fill it full of cool areas.

This.

My very first ever home-brewed subsector (using The Traveller Book, 1985-ish) was a mash-up of all my favorite movies. There was a Blade Runner world, a Road Warrior world, a Brazil (Terry Gilliam) world, Outland in an asteroid belt… Hawk the Slayer and Lynch’s version of Arrakis made it in too lol. I didn’t actually roll up the rip-offs but rather did my best to assign characteristics to them. Then I connected everything with random systems using the generation rules in the Book. Which gave me some cool stuff I wasn’t expecting - which is what it was designed to do IMO.

The Lunatic Fringe (yep, stole that too, from a local radio station - I was a teenager lol). Pretty sure that’s the best subsector I ever made, or ever will make. We had so much fun… then we found Book 6 Scouts and EVERY SINGLE SYSTEM became exponentially larger… I never even touched the Third Imperium until after that 20-year hiatus thing that so many of us seemed to go through.

 

[MarcusIII]

For me, I just don't play in that big a space.

Right. I just whip up a sector here and then customize the worlds I want and select the systems for adventure.