(Michael would like to point out that the only reason he knows anything about new developments in finding exoplanets is this episode of In Our Time—which shoud be available worldwide.)
Here’s our tip jar. (Please email or leave a comment as well; they don’t always tell me when money’s gone in.)
‘I’m Sorry Your Hardback is Obsolete’ or ‘Overwhelming the CPU With My Sheer Magnificence’ would have been wonderful titles for this episode.
I loved the original Traveller 2300/2300AD setting*, though I ignored their Kafer aliens as biologically implausible and invented my own. Also my own weren’t movie-monster killing-machines, so my players could negotiate with them. I think most of the games I ran were for cops and scientists rather than mil sf. The system in its various iterations was perfectly adequate.
I was never a fan of the original Traveller randomness in char gen nor of various aspects of the setting, so I never owned any actual Traveller. Playing a few original Traveller scenarios which were just dungeon crawls in spaaaaace, also put me off.
Roger has said in the past that your PC being second best at something is not fun. I’d add that it is possible to have a Traveller randomly generated PC who is not 2nd best at something, but 3rd best at EVERYTHING.
The Life Events randomness in Traveller is okayish. In that creating a series of past events and working out how other PCs were involved in them is fun. The “reduce your already inadequate stat by 1” or “get penalised in some other annoying way while other spawny gits rolled bonuses and benefits” is not.
Mongoose has a points buy char gen system in the Traveller Pocket Rulebook (2008). I’ve always used that when running Traveller based stuff like Hammers Slammers.
*Edited to add: In that it evolved from the Twilight 2000 setting. But I didn’t like that the more recent edition still wanted the initial starting conditions to be things like a War of German Reunification, which the real world had put the kibosh on. So they invented a dumb reason for Germany to split into East & West again, so their precious War of German Reunification could still happen. (One of the writers once said he was forced to do this because the original designers’ 80s war gaming of the future was sacrosanct).
I often struggle with creating plots for science-fiction games. @RogerBW , what kinds of plots do you employ to give the PCs something meaningful to do besides shoot at things?
And the thing I use in most investigative games including SF: NPC wants to achieve thing X. How are they going to go about it, step by step, and how can those earlier steps interact with things the PCs care about?
After a bit, if my continuing NPCs are good enough, they start generating their own plans, quite possibly not villainous but often disruptive to the status quo.
Within the societies that Our Roger mentioned, I usually employ mysteries, thrillers, and heists (e.g. intelligence operations) as plots to give the PCs something meaningful to do besides shooting at things. That is, I give the PCs a murder, theft, or disappearance to investigate, a criminal scheme-in-progress to expose or thwart, a captive to rescue, or some surreptitious mission to accomplish (such as stealing, planting, or replacing an item in a guarded or secret place, or obtaining secret information). I have got a lot of mileage over the years out of setting the PCs off on an investigation or heist and setting them up to discover a criminal scheme-in-progress during the course of it, so that investigations, heists, and intelligence operations segué into thrillers.
I try to provide that either the motive, the means, or the opportunity of a mystery that PCs might investigate be supplied by an unstated implication of the exotic culture or planetary environment, ditto the criminal scheme-in-progress.
For example, I have lately run an adventure in which the PC had to plant reproductions of the crown jewels of the Empire of Brazil and some forged documents on a sunken spaceship while locals of a low-tech planet were raising it as treasure (and ensure that the treasure-hunters got it home without it being seized by pirates). And one in which the PCs had to investigate the disappearance of the local representative of Human Heritage on a planet where people undergo artificial metamorphoses on certain changes of status (the missing person had stolen the identity of a hated local rival and presented for metamorphosis in her place). And one in which the PCs were hired by Human Heritage to save a certain art collection (or at least, one particular painting in it) from destruction as obscene on a planet where there was a theological struggle going on over whether there had been pornography (or anything lewd) on Old Earth. And one in which the PCs were hired by the College of Archivists to find a missing member — who, it turned out, was engaged in a nefarious scheme to sequester a fabulous mineral deposit, which was considerably complicated by the fact that on that planet only women can own land, but only men can travel.
Such material is of course sci-fi adventure rather than hard SF, and particularly it is planetary adventure (as distinct from space opera and military sci-fi).
I like the idea of an SF campaign that doesn’t involve a lot of shooting. I’d probably just want to use GURPS 4e for it, though.
Regarding the poor-quality index in RuneQuest, if you have the book in PDF form then couldn’t you just load it into NotebookLM? Then you’ve got an index that will answer questions.,
Doctor Who is the game for you if you want SF plots you don’t need shooting to solve. (For Doctor Who values of SF, where actual laws of physics need not apply).
The Hammerheads setting for Cortex Prime is Thunderbirds with the serial numbers filed off, so all rescue missions.
Ashen Stars (Gumshoe) is kind of a Star Trek Next Generation type setting, and treats every ‘episode’ like a police procedural. There’s a mystery to solve, such as a murder, disappearance, political shenanigans, etc.
And I guess you could do Dune which is all political manoeuvring and no duelling.
Traveller 2300’s stutterwarp remains my favorite FTL mechanism. Besides solving the drive-as-kinetic-weapon problem, it’s also just a little weird and sideways solution, making it feel more realistic than handwaving stargates or ludicrous speed.