Hi all,
I've been off the list for quite a while, and pretty much
incommunicado for the past four months (after the last turn in the
Traveller PBEM). It's nice to be back, although I'm finding the
digest format annoying - anybody wanna point me at a mail exploder?
Mayhaps there's some way to convince Gnu Emacs rmail to explode it
for me.
The subject of this post, besides saying hello, is the shape
of traveller role-playing. I've been observing different shapes and
styles of campaigns in the last few days since I started receiving the
TML again, and I thought I'd comment and ask for other comments on the
different types of campaigns.
There's "classic traveller", the small merchant ship full or
wandering heroes, roaming from planet to planet and adventure to
adventure much as modern day adventure series heroes wander. This can
be quite fun, but I find it limiting in terms of long-term developments
outside of the player group (making enemies is easy, but making friends
and keeping them is trickier).
Then there's what my fellow gamers back at Pitt used to call
traveller, involving lots of battledress, big guns, and massive
amounts of violence on a personal scale. This fits in well with the
"classic" style of combat, since the heroes usually need to get out of
the star system in a hurry after one of their capers leaves bodies and
buildings sprawled in fragmented heaps everywhere.
The tactics and the violence can be fun, but this generally
amounts to high-tech hack & slash. I'm generally of the attitude that
any sort of campaign that has the potential for high-tech violence
should realistically spend most of their time trying to figure out
ways to *avoid* it, and/or setting it up so that when it finally
comes, it's here an gone in an instant, leaving corpses everywhere,
none of them belonging to the characters who were smart enough to duck
at the right time (what a fun run-on sentence).
There's violence on a larger scale, involving ship to ship
combat, piracy and anti-piracy, and even a minor role in a war,
although in most campaigns the characters don't have the power and
wealth necessary to get really involved (and if they did, they might
as well be playing TCS). Again, fun, but kind of limiting. This
seems to work best when mixed in with other kinds of campaigns.
Occasionally I've seen really fascinating campaigns, for
example the session of Metlay's campaign that I sat in on a year or
two back, and of course the Traveller PBEM (but admittedly, 30-40
players and gobs and gobs of playing time just doesn't happen in
Real Life campaigns). Metlay's campaign seemed to focus a lot on
non-violent (or at least indirectly violent) scheming and role-
playing, which I found quite enjoyable. The PBEM has tons of role-
playing and all sorts of weird things going on in different corners of
the campaign.
I've also seen "merchant prince" oriented campaigns, akin to
the war campaigns only on an economic level. The players quickly
cease role-playing and become involved in controlling their
corporations. I find playing a character more interesting than
playing a faceless corporation, so this doesn't appeal to me much,
but there is some entertainment in doing the economic warfare stuff.
What are *your* opinion? What are some of the more innovative
and interesting campaigns you've seen?
Steven J. Owens
[email removed]