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.

 

[actionman]

I once used the system generation sequence in Book 6 to generate a star system a number of planets, and a mainworld that had twelve significant moons. I detailed them with DGP's World Builder's Handbook. I called it Jewel in the Crown, and thought of adventures revolving around that world and its moons, and different powers trying to control it, its moons, and that lucrative star system. It was perfect for complex adventures without ever having to leave the star system.

I perceive vast settings differently. They serve very well for journey-type campaigns, like the journeys in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, Xenophon's Anabasis, the journeys of Marco Polo, the voyages of Sir Francis Drake, and the journeys of other explorers and adventurers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Imagine a such a campaign that takes a few years to go from the Spinward Marches to the Solomani Rim and back, and all the adventures along the way. When the characters return, they have grown and changed, and had countless adventures. They'll be in a new chapter of their lives. A campaign like this is a significant undertaking, and it requires a ref who is up to creative challenge and players who care and want to be engaged with it. And the time isn't even that big of a deal, because there's not too much difference between a group having four years of adventures in a line going somewhere far away and back, and four years of adventures in a circle within the same sector. They're both four years of adventures.

Vast settings allow places to be different, because they're far enough apart that they don't homogenize. There might be an Astroburgers and a Brubek's in every starport in the Imperial core, but not in Daibei or the Spinward Marches. And as some mentioned previously, vast settings let you do radically different things in different areas without affecting the primary setting. You could have the Fifth Frontier War in the Spinward Marches, while the Imperial core and the Solomani Rim remain unchanged. You can have a star system destroy itself in a system-wide nuclear war, and few subsectors away it doesn't affect people. In the Spinward Marches you can have ruthless border dukes scrapping for every ounce of power, while on Coreward border with the Vargr Extents, the border dukes are stalwart defenders of order and safety.

 

[swordtart]

I limited myself to a single subsector (District 268). Even detailing the main world sufficiently to even cover my player groups needs was months of work (and I have the Tarsus supplement to do a lot of the work for me. The scenarios where the players we railroaded into a situation where the choices were limited ran better and were less work for me and so I think plenty of moving around to new worlds actually makes things easier. Never visiting the same place for more than a week only requires a superficial understanding and it also keeps things fresh.

It's like going abroad on holiday for a long weekend vs two weeks. On a long weekend you learn almost nothing about the the place, you probably spend the entire time in a single location, see a tourist friendly sights, eat some interesting food and learn a few words of the language. That would be easy for a referee to prepare, he only needs to know the weather for a few days (and can just say it stays the same over the entire visit), just invent a few words and dishes to hint at the culture and prep a couple of locations and encounters. You can do that off random tables and players are unlikely to dig too deeply (and can be fended off it they try).

On a two week vacation/scenario you are going to need so much more. Players are more likely to go off-piste, you'll need to start considering local flora and fauna, politics, social structures as the players (at least my ones) start to pick holes in a random eco-systems. The amount of work required is exponentially related to the time they spend as the options fan out wider and wider. I have also found that if there is too much choice the players can end up unable to choose a path. So it is very group dependent.

I love deep immersion and prefer to have all the information to hand and ironically found it harder to use an existing main world setting (like Tarsus or Faldor) than just making it up myself. Rolling on random tables is fine if you are doing it yourself as you weave in the logic as you go, trying to fit into someone else's random rolls is far harder. If I develop areas that the players end up never visiting, I have at least had a little diversion in world building. If that was research of someone else's world then it is less satisfying.

I also find that not having continuity actually helps. If the players stay in the same places (maybe jumping between two systems for an extened period) then they expect to be able to leverage their growing familiarity have an impact on their environment (maybe setting up longer term plans or just buying permanent real estate). If they are there for a week and only return a year later they are less invested and that means less work for the referee. You don't need to track events week to week, you can just say "there was an election since you were last here and attitudes to off-worlders seem to have changed significantly".

If players stay in the same place too long they will want to exert control and the inability to do so for plot reasons may be a frustration.

 

[Vormaerin]

Yeah, that's very much not how I run. The more the players want to exert control of events, the happier I am. Not because they necessarily succeed, but because that's just massive grist for the wheel of my creativity. I'm just one person. Sure, I'm good at creating worlds and stories or I wouldn't have continued GMing for over 40 years now. But it's not like I can think of everything or realize every connection. When players go "aha! So this must be a thing!" or "Hmm, I want to do X and Y with this method" that just makes me go "Oh wow, I can work with that!".

It's when the players are like "feed me the plot, big guy!" that I tend to run out of steam. Not because I can't figure out plots or whatever. It just is like what's the point of it being a game and not me writing a story? I'm very much a 'play to find out' kind of guy and when the players aren't pushing the story too, I'm just finding out what I already decided. Which is boring (to me).

 

[RogerN]

It's when the players are like "feed me the plot, big guy!" that I tend to run out of steam. Not because I can't figure out plots or whatever. It just is like what's the point of it being a game and not me writing a story? I'm very much a 'play to find out' kind of guy and when the players aren't pushing the story too, I'm just finding out what I already decided. Which is boring (to me).

I'm very much in agreement. I feed loads of ideas to he players in the form of news articles, random rumours etc and then see what they bite down on. Occasionally I throw in a "quest giver" type patron but most of the time its free form.

 

[MongooseChris]

The Traveller setting with jump drive is kind of predicated on limited transit speeds. If you could skip all those nothing worlds, you would. Hence, the long travel times between worlds is kind of intrinsic to the game, at least when it comes to the default jump-drive narrative. However... Traveller does purport to be a flexible game system in which you can tell any kind of story you want, with any sort of transportation technology. High Guard even glosses over things like hyperdrive, warp, etc.

So, yeah, change it to your liking. For the strict Traveller grog, it defies disbelief, but frankly, I don't think players care much. They just want a good space opera to participate in.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, Singularity proposes the actual breaking of the jump-drive limits within the confines of the setting. It changes things dramatically.

 

[shirgall]

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.

Because sometimes it does matter.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Yeah, that's very much not how I run. The more the players want to exert control of events, the happier I am. Not because they necessarily succeed, but because that's just massive grist for the wheel of my creativity. I'm just one person. Sure, I'm good at creating worlds and stories or I wouldn't have continued GMing for over 40 years now. But it's not like I can think of everything or realize every connection. When players go "aha! So this must be a thing!" or "Hmm, I want to do X and Y with this method" that just makes me go "Oh wow, I can work with that!".

It's when the players are like "feed me the plot, big guy!" that I tend to run out of steam. Not because I can't figure out plots or whatever. It just is like what's the point of it being a game and not me writing a story? I'm very much a 'play to find out' kind of guy and when the players aren't pushing the story too, I'm just finding out what I already decided. Which is boring (to me).

This is exactly how I run My games too. It is also why most of the games I run are sandbox games within a subsector or smaller, with a few exceptions. My players determine where the game goes. They need to come to the table with a plan for what their characters want. They need to work together during character creation to build a group to have the kind of adventures that they want to experience. Then, they tell me what they are trying to do in the first part of the campaign, and I do the best I can to make sure those possibilities are covered for them. As @Vormaerin , that doesn't mean that they will win. It just means that most of My energy and thought has been along the lines of "If the players do X, how does the world respond?" "Whose goals are they interfering with?" "Whose goals are they inadvertently helping?" etc.

 

[steelbrok]

I went in a different direction for MTU. I want to be able to use all the cool stuff but keep things in a smaller area. I generally stick to Glisten and D268. However, I interpret the Government type in the UWP very differently:

Traveller Government Code No of worlds in Marches 268 G Total (Glisten +D268)

0 – Unpopulated (Denuli/Insectoid) 15 4 0 4

0 – Anarchy (wild negotiations) 37 2 2 4

1 – Corporate (generally human) 30 0 2 2

2 – Vargr 30 3 1 4

3 – Hiver Co-operative 40 5 3 8

4 – Solomani Caucus 55 2 3 5

5 – Geonee Technocracy 41 3 3 6

6 – Aslan captured world 40 4 4 8

7 – Balkanised 38 3 4 7

8 – Vilani Bureaux 34 3 2 5

9 – Direct Imperial Rule (generally Human) 36 0 3 3

A – Zhodani 16 1 1 2

B – Ithklur 11 1 0 1

C – Luriani Compact 9 0 1 1

D – K'kree 4 1 0 1

Red – Droyne 1 0 1

Amber - Chirper 3 4 7

Total Worlds 439 32 29 61

As you can imagine, the leads to a lot more variety and needed quite a different backstory. Another disadvantage is needing a fair bit of reworking if using official adventures. Overall, though, it's fun.

 

[MasterGwydion]

I went in a different direction for MTU. I want to be able to use all the cool stuff but keep things in a smaller area. I generally stick to Glisten and D268. However, I interpret the Government type in the UWP very differently:

Traveller Government Code No of worlds in Marches 268 G Total (Glisten +D268)

0 – Unpopulated (Denuli/Insectoid) 15 4 0 4

0 – Anarchy (wild negotiations) 37 2 2 4

1 – Corporate (generally human) 30 0 2 2

2 – Vargr 30 3 1 4

3 – Hiver Co-operative 40 5 3 8

4 – Solomani Caucus 55 2 3 5

5 – Geonee Technocracy 41 3 3 6

6 – Aslan captured world 40 4 4 8

7 – Balkanised 38 3 4 7

8 – Vilani Bureaux 34 3 2 5

9 – Direct Imperial Rule (generally Human) 36 0 3 3

A – Zhodani 16 1 1 2

B – Ithklur 11 1 0 1

C – Luriani Compact 9 0 1 1

D – K'kree 4 1 0 1

Red – Droyne 1 0 1

Amber - Chirper 3 4 7

Total Worlds 439 32 29 61

As you can imagine, the leads to a lot more variety and needed quite a different backstory. Another disadvantage is needing a fair bit of reworking if using official adventures. Overall, though, it's fun.

Sounds like you built your own fun setting.

 

[Anstett]

It's when the players are like "feed me the plot, big guy!" that I tend to run out of steam. Not because I can't figure out plots or whatever. It just is like what's the point of it being a game and not me writing a story? I'm very much a 'play to find out' kind of guy and when the players aren't pushing the story too, I'm just finding out what I already decided. Which is boring (to me).

This is why I call my game Cooperative Storytelling.

 

[MasterGwydion]

This is why I call my game Cooperative Storytelling.

Yeah. Generally, My players tell me the kind of campaign they want to play, and I do prep work along those lines so I know who or what may oppose those goals, as well as who or what may support those goals outside of the group of PCs. If they tell me they want to find an Imperial Research Station to steal tech from, I design a research base for whenever they decide to go do their heist. Then I file all of that prep work aside into folders broken down by planetary system. That way, if they use it cool, if not, cool. I still have it as worldbuilding stuff for that area for any future needs or future games I may run. (Unless I lose the files in a house fire. That happened twice and I had to start My worldbuilding over.)

As a Referee, I never determine the adventures. That feels boring to me. Feels more like a computer game and less like a TTRPG.