Tell us about the future.
We’re currently working on T5, the fifth edition of Traveller. It’s supposed to be the ultimate, the be all and end all. In a sense all of this stuff we have done for the past 30 years is playtesting on a fine scale and on a gross scale, and all of that activity has been lessons that have helped us structure what we’re finally doing. Let me give you one example. Fire, Fusion and Steel was this vast attempt to show how to use the laws of physics and design rules to create anything you want in the way of equipment. The rules are wonderful reference material, but they don’t give much guidance and they have proven to be less effective than they should be in creating equipment and weapons that we want to use. In Traveller 5, we have thrown that all aside in favor of a series of what we call Makers. We have a Vehicle Maker, a Gun Maker, even a Knife Maker. They are tables to roll on, or to pick from, that end up giving you a wide variety of possible weapons and equipment, that do a wide variety of possible things.
It sounds like 76 Patrons.
That was a lot of patrons, but in that case each patron stood alone. Here’s the difference. Classic Traveller has this advanced combat rifle which is what a lot of soldiers carry. In T5, by looking at how you can customize it, we end up with 82 different varieties of Advanced Combat Rifle depending upon which choices you make, each of which has some benefit, or detriment, with regards to the others.
I don’t think you’ll have much trouble explaining that concept to anyone who plays Modern Warfare 2 and agonizes over the Bling Pro options. So, when is T5 scheduled for release?
So, the people with whom I am working tell me that I can’t say anything about when T5 is coming out because giving timetables doesn’t work. It’s basically in beta, we have a disc of about 550 pages of everything you need to know about making this work in people’s hands now. It’s incomplete, but it’s workable and we are going through and fixing every little detail that need to be fixed, and revising all the things that don’t work as well as they should. That text will support anyone who wants to play Traveller. It covers everything that you saw in Classic Traveller, Megatraveller and the other systems. It’s meant to be a support text for adventures which become rules-independent. So often you read adventures and they start telling you rules in the middle of the adventure to cover things that hadn’t been thought of in the construction of the original rules. We’re really working at making this cover most all of the situations that you’ll need so that you’ll be able to play an adventure without having to have the rules written into it.
What are you looking at doing for the storyline? Earlier, you were saying that some of the reasons Traveller didn’t fly as high as it might have before was because the story elements were not as rigid as was the case in the more successful RPG systems. Is that something you’re looking at addressing as well?
Certainly we are. We have something we call the Epic Adventure system. It’s not complex, but it’s too complex to get into detail here. Here’s how it works. It gives you a series of stages or episodes that have to be resolved. When you have completed your quota of those episodes, you have enough information to do the final resolution of the adventure. It’s possible to play two or three of these adventures at the same time, doing an episode from this one and an episode from that one, and only when you reach the point that you have all of the information you need in order to resolve everything, does the referee carry you into the final resolution. But the players don’t necessarily know that this encounter is involved in Adventure One or Adventure Two.
All they know is that they have to go and collect 15 wolf pelts?
Yes, yes, yes… I think so often that’s what people have to do. It’s so arbitrary, you have to go out and collect 15 wolf pelts. But the example I give is to imagine the solar system, a classic pulp science fiction solar system, and you have to go to the solar power fields of Mercury because the referee knows you have to get something there. If you’re a naval crew, your ship is sent there. If you’re a trader, you have a contract to go there. If you’re a soldier, your orders take you there. You’re under the thumb of the referee who guides you because he is assumed to be competent. So, you do these three or four tasks, visiting Mars, Mercury, Venus and whatever, and once you have completed those things, you are ready to go to the middle game where you have things you have to resolve. And by the time you’ve done that, you have every piece of equipment, every piece of knowledge, every fact that you need to now find the secret jump drive research base that’s going to invent jump drive and you have all the clues that will help them get past the scientific impasse. You participate in that final leap to the stars. But how you get there is resolved by the referee. The adventure is essentially rules-independent, you could play it with Classic Traveller, Megatraveller, or Traveller 5 rules. Traveller 5 is the ideal one because it provides the most detail, but the point is that the adventure is full of adventure and background information for the adventure, not rules. We think it’s exciting because it really enables people to play, and that’s what we want people to do, to play.
