We played our first session of the new Classic Travller campaign in the Tau Subsector. We’re using *The Traveller Book* (1982) for rules. Maybe @wandererbill will occasionally provide us with ideas based on the Traveller 5 books he recently bough. 😄
All in all it went well. We used my provider’s Jitsi instance. I used the *Jitsi Meet* app on the tablet. We rolled our own dice. There was not a lot of dice to roll.
We ran into the question of tech levels: @pfh’s character has Medic-1 and Electronic-2 skills, we’re on a tech level 5 world, and the price list for the Merical Kit and the Electronic Tool Set says it’s a tech level 7 thing. We decided it makes sense that the skills the character learned are still relevant for a tech level 5 world, and that the kits and tool sets are simply appropriate for the level. Treating a superficial wound just takes longer than on a tech level 7 world with a tech level 7 kit.
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Another interesting question was about technology developing. It seems to me that compared to our days, technology has achieved a sort of steady state. The tech available is not limited by research unless you’re at the very top. All the tech is already known, it’s only a question of whether your system can afford it. If the system is poor, or goes to war and impoverishes, the tech level goes down.
People still “know” about it, like people these days in remote areas of the world “know” about high high tech places like CERN, or public transportation that runs on time. Except that it’s far, far away.
– Alex 2021-03-05 07:51 UTC
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There was a supplement for the second edition of Traveller, MegaTraveller, that used that model of technology in Traveller to great effect. The idea is that after the Imperium collapses, interstellar trade becomes much riskier and more expensive - so thousands of worlds suddenly can’t afford or simply aren’t able to buy the replacement parts for their higher-tech devices, and experience tech fallbacks and a general dark age.
By the way, how did you recruit people for your game?
– Malcolm 2021-03-05 08:47 UTC
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I wonder about that Traveller background. Looks like many Science Fiction settings imply a past and glorious empire, a golden age, followed by a collapse. A very Platonic point of view, haha.
Personally, I think it would also work if small groups of settlers arrive, and the colony grows, but they don’t have the means to maintain their tech level. Like people these days preferring a simpler life in the outback somewhere, happy to know that dentists and hospitals still exist if they need them, but otherwise happy to do subsistence farming and hunting. Maybe? I don’t actually know anybody who does that.
As for recruiting: B. sent me an email saying he was interested if I ever started a game; P. was looking for a game on Mastodon; I asked L. whether he was interested since we had talked about 2d6 games multiple times; and finally I sent F. an email because I knew he was playing in a Traveller game already and I had played with him before. Looks like I simply leveraged my existing network.
– Alex 2021-03-05 09:56 UTC