Solarpunk Traveller #1

 

I have a hard time considering running a Traveller game within the default setting because it is just so unrealistic. As I’ve already mentioned (in my four earlier Traveller posts, #1, #2, #3, and #4), the game is based on backwards-looking science and tries to recreate something like the British Empire in space. It’s fine if you are into that sort of thing, but I want something with more science fiction, less historical.

What do I want? What I am really trying to accomplish with these posts is to motivate someone to write a descent Traveller setting that I can then convince my Monday night gaming group to play, without me having to write it myself. If you are thinking of writing a forward-looking version of Traveller, please feel free to take any or all of what follows and incorporate it into your work. I want to play this game, not write it.

What is solarpunk? Like all fiction genera, solarpunk is ill-defined and means different things to different people, but it tends to cluster around a few core elements. I consider them to be:

Refusing pessimism: Solarpunk is not about accepting that all human existence must be miserable and dark. Instead, people can create societies that are functional and fair. Further, we can create technology that works for the benefit of people.

Sustainable technology: Solarpunk says that humans can create technologies that allow people to have a good life within these functional and fair societies. A lot of solarpunk focuses on renewable energy, but here we are talking about Traveller which assumes cheap and clean fusion power is easily available, so this is less of an issue.

Social equity: In order to have these fair and functional societies, we need to recognize the role of social equity. In my mind, this includes recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of all people. And we also have to recognize that wealth accumulation is a function of the rules of a society, and these are written by the collective will of the people.

The second issue with social equity is that we must recognize the fallacy of biological determinism (which I have posted about here). This becomes an even bigger issue when we realize that at relatively low Traveller Technology Levels people will be able to modifier the genetics of their progeny. So, for example, in my game Rubble and Ruin their are bad people who have intentionally created races of big, low-intelligence humans. Solarpunk Traveller is going to have to address this application of technology.

Do-it-yourself: Lastly is the idea that the ability to create and modify technology does not have to be controlled by oligarchs. Much of the idea that modern technology cannot be modified or repaired is created by corporate entities trying to force people to buy a new device rather than repair an old one.

This becomes critically important when you think about interstellar trade in a Traveller-like universe. In a Traveller universe, there are nearly infinite markets. You do not need to intentionally make a bad product to drive sales. In fact, if you want to sell something off-world, you need to have a reputation for being reliable and repairable.

I argue that DIY in the Traveller universe is the presence of transparency and technological standards. Transparency means that you have to say what things really are. No withholding important information. What is the thing made out of? What are the operating conditions under which it is intended to work? How is it designed and how does it work? And standards imply that others can build things that work with what you have built. If you make an electronic devise, I need to be able to know exactly what power supply it needs. We already do this on Earth. There is just a handful of electronic plugs and voltages that are supplied, and you need to make sure your electronic equipment conforms to those standards.

But more than that in Traveller. All your information technology needs to interoperate. Imagine not being ably to repair a starship because the navigation computer was made on Mora, and they use a different jump drive interface and the computer and the drive cannot function together. Now consider this for every two pieces of equipment that are supposed to work together. Imagine missiles fired from a starship that accidentally swing back and attack the firing ship because the targeting system uses the wrong measuring scale.

The most important thing that the Empire does is to keep the technology from one world able to operate on another. Any reader with a technology development background is likely say, “Of course, that is a massive and wildly important task”, while other readers are likely shaking their head and saying, “How trivial and boring.” In a sense, they are both correct. But most real conflict in a Third Imperium type world will come from conflicts over standards rather than over resources.

===== Getting Started =====

The Ground Rules. What am I keeping from the Third Imperium and what am I letting go?

The Map? Let’s start with the map. It is a silly, 2D hex-based map. I love it. When 2300 came out, everyone I knew loved the realistic 3D star map. Someone had already done the work of finding routes away from Earth that matched the space travel technology postulated by the game. It was great. But at the end of the day, for me, it neither enhanced play or immersion. I accept that some people will want a nice, modern 3D map, but I’m willing to not worry about it.

The Future History? What about the background? I’d like to keep the major events. The Ancients seeded many worlds 300,000 years ago. These scattered worlds have become the home to humans who have spread out across the nearby space. There are other alien races who have also developed space travel, and they are different from humans. That’s all works for me.

The Core Technology? Let’s keep it. Let’s keep the restriction that jump drives take a week to travel, independent of the distance they go. This is a great mechanic and it leads to an interesting situation where travel between human communities is once again long and dangerous. Let’s also keep the important fact that there is no faster way to communicate between worlds than to travel there.

Psionics? I vote no. I was there in the 1970s. Many, many people truly believed that psionics were a real thing and they were just about to become understood. This was a traditional that traced back to the dawn of science fiction. People honestly believed that magic was a real thing that we just didn’t yet understand—but it was coming soon. This hasn’t aged well and I think we can let them go. (As an aside, you find psi powers in all hard sci fi games of that time, Morrow Project, Aftermath, all of them.)

But we are going to need to add a modern understanding of biotechnology. And we will need to modernize the information technology. But those are separate issues.

For now, I think I am going to stop this here. I have a start. The next post will start with what I think a solarpunk Third Emporium will look like—or at least, what issues we need to consider. In till then, as always thank you for taking the time to read this and I always welcome comments, questions, or concerns in the comments below.

Traveller Blog #4. Xenobiology

 

This is my fourth post on “modernizing” Traveller. The others are, here, here, and here. The importent bit is that in the last one I mentioned one flaw with the biology of the game. Namely, that it did not take into account how easy it will become for humans to modify their own biology.

Traveller uses a mechanic called Technology Levels to track how sophisticated a culture needs to be before they can enact certain technology, and the original authors in 1977 thought things like controlling the aging process would be the hardest, so only the most advanced technology societies (TL 15) could do it. It is not something that is just around the corner. And they set uplifting other mammals as even more difficult. Yet, controlling gene expression and modifying our own biology is something that is coming fast on the heals of the information age, more like TL 9 than 16.

As an aside, I think they wanted anagathics to be hard to balance their life path character creation system, but we don’t need to do that today—there are other, easier, ways to balance characters.

There is another element of the biological sciences that needs to be woven into Traveller, xenobiology. As part of my “miss-spent” youth, I worked for several years in the laboratory of Sidney Fox who happened to be a world-expert on the biochemical origin of life. Which, aside from being an inherently fascinating subject, is also central to the Traveller setting. I can’t blog a review of all the details of this field of study, but I will hit on a few relevant points.

How common is life in the universe? Or, why are we looking for evidence of life on mars? There is a concept of the stellar ecosphere (or Habitable Zone) which is a space, shaped as a hollow shell, around a star wherein water on the surface of a planet can exist in liquid form. Life appears to have started on Earth within a few hundred million years after the planet formed—very quickly in geologic time. But here’s the rub. For the first few hundred million years of its existence the sun was burning hotter and Mars would have been in the habitable zone—in fact, the Earth might have been too hot to sustain life.

Now old-school origin of life folks imagined that life forming was a freak event with an almost zero change of happening. Fox’s work in the 1950s and 60s showed that this was likely untrue. In fact, the formation of life might be almost a given on any rock with the right collection of elements that is the right distance from its star.

So to prove this, we need to look for life on Mars. If life started to form on Mars, and then froze, it would mean that life almost always forms on planets withing the stellar ecosphere and therefore we should expect life to form frequently on other worlds. In Traveller, we assume this is true. So within a couple thousand light years of Earth there are assumed to be hundreds of planets that have their own, independent, life.

The History of Colonization. Further, in the Traveller “future history” there are several important waves of expansion. The most important is the work done by the mysterious ancients. An alien civilization, 300,000 years before the game (which is about 2,000 years in the future) took humans and transported them to many other planets, for reasons unknown. They also uplifted dogs to create the Vargre.

The game has several other major and minor alien species. Just in the Spinward Marches there are the Aslan and Droyne, both major races with their own world of origin, and there are chirpers and a few other scattered in various adventures published over the years.

The Biochemistry Problem. If one looks at all the different mechanisms that have been proposed over the years for the abiotic origin of life, I would lump them into two groups. The first answers the question, “How did we get here” and deals with the formation of life on Earth, and the second considers mechanisms for the development of life on other worlds. These latter approaches (I’m looking at you Graham Cairns-Smith) talk about other types of life, silicon, clay, or even non-Terrestrial carbon-based.

Fox’s work suggests that non-Terrestrial carbon-based life could very likely have recognizable proteins. And if you look at the thoughts on the subject from Freeman Dyson (the Dyson Sphere guy, presented here), it is reasonable to think that these proteins would have a genetic structure controlling their replication—but even if they did use sugar-based genetics, the sugar moiety would likely be completely different. This means that all these worlds are going to have a completely different biochemical basis.

A Little Background. Life on Earth is a complex web of biochemistry that creates ever more complex structures from reduced carbon--remember those redox reactions from high school chemistry--living systems burn reduced carbon to liberate energy to create new structures of reduced carbon. Because no process is 100% efficient, we have to burn more reduced carbon than we end up making. We might eat 100 calories and make 10 calories worth of new material.

Life exists as a thin layer coating a planet in a field of energy flux.

And life exists at different scales. Within cells there are symbiotic subcellular structures that were once independent living systems that have found their existence within your (yes, you the reader’s) own cells. There are small blocks of genetic material that form viruses. And their are giant whales that live by filtering microscopic organisms from the water they swim in. And all of this life is busy building more of themselves. The autotrophs (mostly plants) are capturing energy from the sun and reducing carbon dioxide from the air, while the heterotrophs (animals and fungi) are taking apart other things to build more of themselves.

And these systems are more or less specialized. Humans can eat all sorts of things, but not everything. Only certain plants can grow up here in Manitoba, while those same plants will be out competed if they try to grow further south.

And this brings us to the Biochemistry Problem. When two carbon-based biochemistries meet, one is likely going to completely disassemble the other—wiping it from the world. Or, the two will be completely incompatible. Neither being able to extract anything from the other.

So if we want humans travelling from one of the human worlds created by the ancients and living off native life forms, they either have to be eating Earth-based life, or the humans have to be modified to eat it—with just the occasional, weird, “Oh, you can eat that” alien thing.

This is going to lead to an interesting set of worlds. Those that you cannot go to, because you will be eaten—likely by unseen microorganisms—and those that have Earth-based life transplanted by the ancients but modified long ago to fit the new environment. And those where Terrestrial life co-mingles with the native life, each mostly ignoring the other. And those where humans have changed themselves to adjust to the new biochemistry.

Conclusions. As I move towards a vision of a solarpunk Traveller, I think I have all my main issues laid out. (But I am just writing this as a go, it is a blog after all.)

In my next post I want to start talking about life and exploration in a post-scarcity society. We need to consider things like, “What resources are important?” and “Why go to another world?” There will be different types of worlds with different biologys. But this is probably enough for now. As always, thank you for taking the time to read this and (as always) I welcome comments and questions below.

Traveller Blog #3: The Missing Sciences

 

This is my third post regarding the Traveller RPG. It is not a secret that I’m trying to build a case that we need a solarpunk interpretation of the game’s setting. And to get there, I wrote this post as background on the game and this one about how the science in Traveller was “backwards looking”; It is a game that focuses on old, not modern, science.

The two major sciences in my professional lifetime have been Information / Computer Science and Biology. Both are ill-defined, because they are both very much in active development and experiencing rapid growth.

Computation. In a Traveller context, our world has just left Technology Level (TL) 6 and entered TL 7 and in doing so, our world has changed. Every grandmother in the developed countries now has a computer with more computational power than the largest, fastest supercomputer in the world on the year Traveller was first published.

Think about that.

I want to say it was over a decade ago that an iPad had more computational power than the fastest Cray in 1977. And Grandma uses all that computational power to swap recipes with her physical and virtual friends (and pictures of cats).

Traveller considered computers large, complex machines used primarily for navigation and for storing little snippets of information. This will need to be reconsidered.

And our ability to interrogate biological samples has been increasing at a faster rate (here’s a link). What we know about the working of living systems is changing faster than our computers. Now from around the 1980s, when computers became a household appliance, to around 2010—let’s say 30 years—the physical nature of computers changed quickly. People in developed countries were buying new boxes every year or two. You had to. But, somewhere 10 to 15 years ago, that ended. Computers kept getting smaller for a while, until it reached a point where laptops are used as workstations, and handhelds are all you need for day-to-day computation.

Life Sciences. Biology hasn’t reached that “end-point” yet. But we’re moving quickly towards it. My day job is in children’s health research. When a child presents with symptoms of an in-born error of metabolism—which is fancy, medical speak for, “when parents take their baby to a doctor because something seems wrong,” -- it is not uncommon these days to perform whole exome sequencing. A little saliva (or maybe a drop of blood) will be taken and all of the child’s protein coding genes will be sequenced. For about one third of these children, we will immediately get a diagnosis. A diagnosis can be made, which in the past would have taken up to a decade, in a few weeks. For (about) another third, nothing unusual will be found. There is still plenty of work left to be done here.

But here’s the neat part. For the remaining third (plus or minus), we will find what are known as variants of unknown significance, almost always called a VUS. Figuring out if these genetic variants are important or not an area of active research. But the reason I bring this up in the context of Traveller, is because humans and fruit flies have so much of our biology in common, one thing we like to do—if the VUS has certain technical properties—is to make a fly but remove its version of the gene in question, replace it with the “normal” human form of the gene and another group of flies with the VUS form. If the baby is showing motor problems (which is a fancy way of saying they can’t move right), for example, and the humanized fly does not have motor abnormalities, but the VUS form of the fly does, we take that as evidence that the VUS could be negatively impacting the child’s motor development.

The point is that in 2025, we can just add and remove genes from animals (and to a lesser degree, plants) and we can give those genes whatever genetic sequence we want.

In 1977 the power to do this was considered to be so far in the future that in Traveller, only the ancients – with their super advanced and lost technology – could have uplifted a mammalian species. Now, unless someone finds a currently unseen obstacle, I expect this to be possible within my child’s life time. Maybe 40 years, certainly within 80.

Biological Constraints. On Earth, living systems are complex, self-replicating chemical reactions that are able to evolve over time. All living systems trace back to a single, small population of cells called the Last Universal Common Ancestor – Luca. This Luca appeared on Earth just a few hundred million years after the Earth formed, and it’s decedents have been thriving and diversifying ever since.

Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this.

Complex multicellular organisms, plants and animals, create forms of themselves which alternate between different numbers of chromosomes. Mammals will create a sperm and an egg, which are haploid. These two will get together and make a new organism which inherits properties from both parents. This new organism will start from a single cell that divides. As these cells divide, they change the pattern of expressed genes, with this differentiating being an absurdly complex interplay between the genetic code and its environment. Usually, if it is able to secure resources, this new organism will develop into an adult form that can then repeat the process.

Or, to paraphrase, to make a new human a mommy and a daddy both make a haploid form of human, get them together, and that starts the creation of a new person. This new person develops from a lump of tissue undergoing the most complex chemical system currently known in the universe.

The important part, for a science fiction RPG, is that it is relatively easy (at near future technology levels) to modify the initial form of this organism, but very difficult to change it once it has grown.

This suggests that by TL 9, just as humanity is approaching interstellar travel, modifying organisms to meet their environment should be common place. And there is no reason this couldn’t be applied to humans.

So if we were to reimaging the Traveller setting, I argue, we must consider the effects of people being able to intentionally alter their biology, specifically to accommodate the needs of different worlds. Settlers can adjust their children’s metabolisms to accommodate local hazards. That world where everyone needs to wear a respirator mask while outside, not the locals. They’ve modified their lungs 800 years ago. But, it does mean that they may not be interested in travelling to a world where their modified lungs place them at a disadvantage.

And as we start thinking about the effects of information science and biology on the Traveller setting, we have to turn our attention to the development of life on other planets—and how that would effect our starward humans. But that sounds like the theme for the next blog post.

So, as always, thank you for reading this, and please feel free to leave any questions or comments below.

Traveller Blog #2: Science looking Backwards

 

This is Part 2 of my current thoughts on the RPG Traveller. Part 1 is here. Full disclosure, I love this game, I’ve been playing it on and off for almost 50 years. So what I’m about to say is not meant as a criticism or some negative assessment, only a statement of fact.

The science in Traveller is backwards facing, not forward.

In other words, it is looking back at old science and not looking forward to the new. The game was published in 1977, just years after physics reached its, shale we say, “social peak”. In the 1960s if you wanted to be a serious scientist working on the great issues of our time, you wanted to study physics. As the game was flourishing, the world was shifting its focus towards computer science and information technology. Sure you could still have a great career as a physicist. But it was becoming just another science.

I had a brother-in-law who was a little over 20 years older than me. He had a PhD in physics, worked on the space shuttle in the 1980s, but then went into business for himself by the 1990s and spent the bulk of his life running his own roofing company. He was very successful as a roofer; he benefited from his education and experience in the field, but he—like many others—left physics. It had become just a job.

The other main science of Traveller is the one that peaked just before physics caught the public eye, geography. Now days most people think of geography as a subject in school, not an active field of study, and certainly not a cutting edge discipline. And this is unfortunate because geography is, and always will be, an extremely important field of knowledge.

In the late 1800s, geography was a big deal. Humanity was finally gaining an understanding of the physical nature of our world, and who lived where. The peoples of many nations were interested in things like finding the source of the Nile and the unification of countries like Italy and Germany and the development of topographic maps of the major mountain ranges and rivers and just knowing our world.

Aside. I like to say that Lovecraft, writing in the 1920s, was writing just after the Age of Geography. He was writing at a time when the only places left in the world where there might be giant, alien, forgotten cities and civilizations, were in the most remote corners, in Antarctica or the furthest reaches of Africa. But his readers were in living memory of a time when such things could have existed. Our knowledge of geography had been so bad that there could have been hollow mountains in Main topped with undiscovered standing stones—at least when his older readers where young. But at the time of his writing, all that was past. But I think this is part of the enduring legacy of Lovecraft. His writings hinge on an incomplete knowledge of geography.

(Image, ©2017 Peter Saga used with permission. All rights reserved. )

Traveller in play. So Traveller is a game about the interplay of geography and physics set in an imagined far future where both of these disciplines affect everyday life of the characters and the people they encounter.

The physics part of that last statement is easy to defend. The game attempts to autogenerate realistic solar systems (you know, using mechanics from before when the first exoplanets were detected, but still, they try). They have a whole starship construction system with Drive Potential versus Hull Tons and the like, and the formulas for calculating interplanetary travel times.

It is this last bit which ties the game into geography. Traveller starships do not move at the speed of plot. They do not hop characters from one system to another, appearing at just the right time to maximize the drama. Nope. They have a fixed travel time, and it’s slow. Not generation ship slow, but it takes a little over a week to travel from one star system to the next. And you can’t go very far. Traveller is the original hex crawl-centric game. You start with a hex map with systems in maybe half the hexes, laid out at random, and your starships can move from one to six hexes per jump. In the games I played, typically two hexes.

Oh, and one more thing, there is no way to communicate between star systems that is faster than travelling there by starship.

The slowness of travel and communication creates a setting something like the late British Empire. It takes something like seven months to a year for information from the Home Office in the Imperial Core to get to the Spinward Marches, and the same for a response to return. Information can move, and troops can travel, but just not fast enough to replace the local governments.

This is the exact opposite of cyberpunk games. In a cyberpunk world the evil corporation has access to vast amounts of knowledge and can play the characters like pawns. In a Traveller game, everyone is scrambling for information. Everyone is wondering who they can and cannot trust. Everyone need to know the geography of their surroundings. Which systems are aligned with which. Which systems have resources, how much, and of what type. What can they do with all these things.

Geography, not Economics. Traveller tries to say it is focusing on economics. Characters have mortgages to pay on their ships. They are always trying to earn a credit hauling cargo. There are charts for the number of passengers you can find in each system and how much and what type of cargo you can get.

But those things don’t usually define the adventure. It is the geography. Frontier wars breakout and affect hundreds of systems. Evil Imperial megacorps have secret drug production factories on border systems and are selling them to the forces on the other side of that Frontier war. That’s geography, not economics.

Non-late-stage Capitalism. It is kind of funny to me, but just like the British Empire, Traveller is in a non-late-stage Capitalism setting. But the writers were writing from a Capitalist culture that was already in decline. The most obvious (to me) place where this comes up is with technology breaking. There are constant references in the later works about how technology cannot be effectively moved from high tech worlds to low tech worlds. TL 9 people will not pay a premium for TL 15 gear, because it will soon break and be useless.

But there are also TL 16 (above what the Empire can create) items that have lasted for a thousand years.

Even by the late 1970s we were talking about built-in obsolescence. About how manufacturers were purposefully making things that will fail with time so they could sell a replacement. If Traveller had real economics, it would allow that TL 15 cultures could make TL 9 items that would last close to forever.

Last summer, in real life, I got to volunteer on the oldest running steam train in North America. Our group’s Engine #3 was built in the 1880s and has been in continuous service. It went out of industrial service in 1972, when it was sold to the Vintage Locomotive Society. This organization keeps it in service, running on their 15 KM of rail line. (I jokingly tell people I’m into 1::1 scale model railroading.) As other industrial lines were converting to diesel engines, the local energy company (here in Manitoba) used the #3 to run back and forth on one specific line. I believe it would run from our city out to a remote power generation facility and back, moving supplies and personal. It only went out of service as it get to hard to maintain.

Imagine a steam engine made on Mora (the TL 15 industrial hub of the Spinward Marches setting). It’s properly engineered fittings would last a thousand years without maintenance. It would be light and easy to use. If manufactured for remote worlds, it could have 3d-printable replacement parts. If Traveller had real-world economics there would be a flow of useful technology moving from the developed worlds, out to the remote areas, and resources moving back. Companies would be fighting over markets—trying to determine how they could, more cheaply, solve a developing world’s problem. How they could profit from the technology gap between worlds.

Instead, the late-stage Capitalist idea that technology will fail rules all the markets of the Empire. But for this to be true, the manufacturers on Mora have to be purposefully making things to fail. And they would only do this with the hope that they could then sell more. But by doing this, no one is buying their tech.

Conclusions. I’m heading towards a re-imagination of the Traveller setting. One that is substantially more solarpunk. One that thinks about the economics of unbounded markets coupled with the isolation created by long travel times and the lack of instantaneous communication.

But before we get there, we have to think about Traveller’s missing science, biology. And that will be my next post.

Traveller Blog #1. Traveller before the Spinward Marches.

 

So I pulled out Traveller a little while ago and started revisiting the game and its canon setting. I suspect that I have several posts worth of things to say about this old gem of a game, but I’ll start with a little grognardian recollection.

Background. I played Traveller for several years before moving to the Spinward Marches. Traveller was first published in 1977 and it was not too long after when I got my first copy. There is a two year window between when the Traveller rule books are first released (in a little black box full of little black books) and when the most influential and long-lived deep space setting, the Spinward Marches, was published. To be fair, it was probably late 1978 when I got Traveller—so the Marches where only a few months away. But I lived in a remote corner of the world, and I was a poor kid, and they hadn’t invented the world wide web yet, so I didn’t hear about the Marches ‘till about 1981.

Traveller, as written, was designed so that “known space” would be procedural generated. When the group’s ship arrived in a star system, there are rules for randomly generating a string of numbers, called a Universal World Profile or UWP—famously recorded in hexadecimal notation—which describe the physical and social elements of the system. Now days there are all sorts of additional rules which create all sorts of additional details, but back then it was just a few numbers. Planetary population, technology level, Law Level, and Government type defined all the social elements of the world.

As a brief nerdly aside, I was in rural Northern California and what was to later be known as Silicon Valley, the global hub of computers and information technology, was just beginning to develop south of us. So it was very normal for science-nerd kids to lean into things like hex maps and hexadecimal notation—that was what science was like for us. So we loved UWPs and hex maps. Even to this day, graphic artists like to use the hexagon to represent “science”.

Typical play with my buddies would have been for the GM to randomly roll a few worlds, you know, six to eight. And the players—in a Scout ship, we always only had Scout ships—would explore these systems. Since the game was mapped on a hex grid, it was exactly what today we would call a hex crawl.

But it was before the “information age” hit mainstream America.

The coming of the Information Age and TTRPGs. If you want to understand how TTRPGs got to where they are today, I assert (with little evidence) that you need to understand its history and how that interacts with global, real-world, geopolitics. In the 1980’s mainstream America entered the information age. Computers went from being exotic, complex devices that only super nerds understood to common, everyday items that grandma used to find recipes.

Now it didn’t happen all at once, nor did it happen in all corners of the country at the same speed, but it did happen. Before this time, for most people, information was hard to access. If you wanted to know the distance, in kilometers, between the Earth and the moon, you would have to go to a reference book and look it up. If that was something you cared about, you might have the correct book at hand. If not, you would likely need to go to a library. Depending on how obscure your question was, like “What type of polearm would an English soldier use in the 1400s,” the answer might be very hard to find. I don’t think I would have been able to find the answer to the polearm question easily.

Other questions—simple questions about everyday life—often required talking to experienced people. “What store in the next town over would have a copy of Traveller for sale?” “What is the fastest route to drive to that store?” “What if I had to take the bus?” All common questions for which there would be no written answer, and for which you would either ask people about, or just head off and try and find the answer.

This is the real world Traveller was born in. Information is valuable and hard to access. People don’t just know what’s around them. Computers were monolithic machines that were hard to use and only solved complex mathematical problems.

And that’s the way we played Traveller.

My Early Traveller. We would randomly make a small group of player characters. There were never too many people interested in Sci Fi, so it would always be a small group. And this was before the rule which assigns a set of required skills to all the PCs so that they would be able to complete whatever adventure the GM had in mind. Instead, we would make characters who were thrown into a sandbox adventure and the GM had to come up with adventures as we explored.

And that is exactly what we would do. We would set off and explore. Just like in our real world, no one knew too much about the next planet over. The adventurers would make the trip—you were always worried about jumping to a system that didn’t have a gas giant—because then if the world was dry, there would be no way to leave the system and you’d be trapped. TPK for a few bad rolls.

The Spinward Marches Arrive. When I first got a copy of Supplement 3, The Spinward Marches, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. It had 36 subsectors filled with planets and worlds, each described with a few paragraphs, a hex map, and a list of those Universal World Profiles. For me, the logical game was for the group to start on some world and start exploring outward.

At first, the characters wouldn’t even have access to the information in the book, though later it became clear that people would at least know the basics of the worlds around their home. But they would only know what was in the book—a few paragraphs per subsector and a map.

But just a few short, real world years later this would all change. Computers were permeating everyday life. Information was becoming progressively easier to access, and the old problems of knowing what is around you and how things worked, were rapidly disappearing.

Traveller computers. I recall conversations and jokes and whatnot – mostly (I think) in the early 1990s – about the computers in Traveller. The game designers had written specifications in modern, real world units, for computers by technology level. And, as we moved up one technology level in the real world, computers blow away all their expectations. What was thought would take centuries to develop took a few years. At the time of this writing, a typical person has a phone in their pocket which more computing power that original Traveller assigned to the Imperium’s best starships.

After this, game designers stopped using real world units to describe things. This avoids the whole “predicting technological change” problem.

But this does leave us with an odd “expectation gap”. I’m thinking about running Traveller, and if I did, my players would, rightfully, expect that their ship’s computer would contain petabytes of data about every world around them. Maps, satellite images, models of global climate, and close to everything that is known about the life forms living on any given system. And politics and trade agreements and legal systems... In fact, they would likely expect that the computer would have records of everything that our 1970s PC would have had adventures learning. So if I ran Traveller today, I would want to alter the adventures to allow for the modern information age.

But this is okay. It is easy to do and fun. I’m looking at setting my own adventure on the world of Tarsus, which is one of the classic Traveller adventure sites. And I’m having a lot of fun modernizing the world to fit my needs.

But there is one thing and it is going to feed into my future posts. When Traveller was written, we were living in a time when physics was the king of sciences. Everybody liked to worry about planetary rotations, interstellar distances, starship tonnage, “How many tonnes of hydrogen can we get from skimming that gas giant”, that sort of thing.

But the king of science today is biology. (Just look at funding levels if you don’t believe me.) And Traveller’s biology is really weak. So in my next post, I am going to look at fixing that. Until then, as always thank you for taking the time to read this, and as always, please feel free to leave any questions or comments below.

Putting the Hurt on Player Characters: the Early Years of HP

 

TL;DR. OSR style play captures one view of early gaming, but there are others. Here I explore damage systems in the early years of tabletop RPGs. It goes a lot deeper than just hit points and critical hit tables. We take a short look at the explosion of damage systems in the late 1970s and early 1980s including Runequest, Morrow Project, and Fringeworthy.

 Background. While scrolling along my social media feed I saw a Reddit post where an individual thought “hit points were too crude a system” and wondered if there was anything else you could do in a TTRPG. And I thought, “I bet there are people who would be interested to learn about all the neat damage systems people experimented with in the early days of gaming.

This is just my opinion, but I think the global gaming community is highly fragmented and that there are clusters of people who have been quietly playing together for years and that with the rapid expansion of 5e players over the last several years, many people who are new to the hobby don’t know what’s going on in these “quiet little corners”. Of all the problems facing the world today, this is not a big one—but it is one that I can spend a rainy Sunday morning chipping away at.

What follows is my recollection of the key points in the development of damage systems within the corner of the gaming world that I sit in. It is not a scholarly exploration, but rather a first-person recollection of the path I took. It is more nuanced than you might think.

Earliest History. Hit points coming into TTRPGs through wargames. A player would have a unit of soldiers and as it was attacked, they would remove figures from the unit to reflect the damage taken. If there were five soldiers here and two were injured or killed, two figures would be removed leaving only three in play. When non-human monsters and super powered heroes were introduced, they would have “hit points” that would be lost as they were damaged. The figure would stay on the board until all hit points were lost, then it would be removed. (Note also that some early TTRPGs called the characters “figures”.)

My First Bifurcation. Two different ideas on how to make damage more interesting appeared in my life at about the same time. Recall that in the late 1970s, people living in rural communities didn’t learn about things as quickly as they came out, one idea might be older than another, but it still might not reach a kid living in the redwoods before an earlier idea does. But the two ideas are critical hit tables and damage locations.

Crit Tables. Critical hit tables first appeared in my life in the Arduin Grimoire. When a special hit was scored—a critical hit—the player would roll d100 and the GM would read off a table of special hits. These were famously graphic.

What is important here is that it gave a location that was hit, a special description, and bonus damage that should be rolled, along with permanent effects—like three fingers were cut off.  In another part of the country, the folks at Iron Crown Enterprises were devolving the “Law” system. The Law system (Arms Law, Claw Law, and Spell Law) where a complex set of critical hit tables which could be used with “any game system” and would give a much wider variety of damage effects, all carefully tuned to match the weapon or body part used in the attack. This went on to become Rolemaster.

But no matter how complex these systems got, there was always just one pool of Hit Points that damage came out of. In Arduin, you could lose a random percentage of your arm, you will die in 1d3 turns, but you also took an additional 4d6 damage. This contrasts with damage by location.

Damage by Location. As early as 1978 Runequest had the now classic seven hit location system. Each arm and leg was a location, the head (of course) and then the torso was divided into chest and abdomen. Each location had its own armor and hit points. In most versions of this system, a character also has Total Hit Points. It was your Total HP which would determine the HP for each location.

When a character was hit, a d20 would be rolled to determine location. The system originated with people who were familiar with the Society for Create Anachronism (SCA) which came into being in the same town as Runequest, and at about the same time. So, in true SCA style there was a Melee hit location table which was biased towards hitting limbs and a missile weapons table that was biased towards hitting the torso—these biases reflect the reality of the different weapon types. Bows and thrown weapons are more likely to hit you in the torso and swords and axes are more likely to hit your limbs.

This system used “absorbing” armor. So, you would roll to hit—if a hit was scored, you’d roll location and damage. The armor on the location hit would be subtracted from the damage and whatever is left over would be subtracted from both the character’s Total HP and the hit location’s HP. There were effects for what happened when a location went to zero. For example, you would lose the use of a leg when it went to zero, but you would be knocked out if it was your head.  And more rules for large amounts of damage etc.

The Morrow Project. A few years later the Morrow Project took this idea further. In this game, weapons did a fixed amount of damage and what was really important was where you were hit.

The first spreadsheet I ever made was to handle the damage location calculations for Morrow Project. (I still have a hard copy of it printed in dot matrix in my files.) The game was lots of fun and character generation and combat was fast and easy—except for all the calculations for each location’s HP. Once that was done, you were golden.

Aside from fixed damage, the system had another innovation. The human torso was broken into four “zones” based on how dangerous it was to get shot there. Zone 1 was deadly. Right in the center of the torso, nothing to hit but the things keeping a character alive—heart, lungs etc. Each zone had an instant kill percentage based on the damage taken. It didn’t matter how many HP you had, a bullet to the heart would kill you.

Psi World. This was an innovative game that is under appreciated in many circles and so I thought I would give it a little “shout out” here. It had a moderately complex HP calculation system where you would compute the number of dice to roll based on stats and it also incorporated the seven hit locations of Runequest.

One thing to note is that in all (or at least all I can remember) of the damage by location systems, characters did not gain HP during play. You could get better at avoiding damage (with improved parrying skills, for example) or get better armor, but you didn’t really get tougher as play went on. Beginning characters and experienced characters can stand side-by-side in fights and both survive—of course, the experienced characters would have to look out for the noobs, but it was not just “mooks die fast”.

Fringeworthy. A year or so after Morrow Project hit, Tri Tac dropped Fringeworthy. This game pushed “damage by location” to its logical limit. When a location was hit, there was a “damage path”.

If I’m remembering it correctly, you would read Arm 1,3 as “the first 3 HP are flesh, then 6 HP for bone (being the clavicle) then 2 more HP of flesh”. Any damage beyond 11 blowing through and not being counted. The Fringworthy setting was great and well ahead of its time—it was very much like the TV series Stargate. But the damage system was too much even for a simulationist like me. The one time I ran the Fringeworthy world, it was with GURPS rules. It was just easier that way.

Ending Thoughts. I mentioned that the world of TTRPGs is fragmented and that there are all these quiet little groups. Well, Runequest and Rolemaster are still going strong. I saw a new book for it my feed just before I sat down to write this. Morrow Project has followers, and I suspect so does the Law series.

But what is funny to me is that I was always a “damage by location” guy. I played games like Mythras and (of course) Rubble and Ruin. The damage by location system gives a game realism. Stories don’t have to be cinematic, in fact, most stories shouldn’t be. But in my current Work in Progress, something I’m calling Rustic Fantasy, I’ve gone back to total HP and a critical hit table. But with a modern difference. Someone and I don’t know who, but I first encountered it in Chaosium’s Magic World, invented the Major Wound threshold. This idea is that small wounds are just “lost HP”, but a single large wound is treated differently. What is nice about this, is that you still have the feel of real danger in combat—it is not just a Conan-esque, happy frolic at the expense of a bunch of mooks—but it is also simpler to play.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this post and I invite you to post any questions or comments below.

 

Manitoba is a Fantasy RPG Location

Just for fun!

It is currently Fall in Manitoba and this place looks like something out of a fantasy RPG. All that I'm doing for this post is sharing a bunch of photos I have taken over the last month. Most are just from hiking while on day trips from Winnipeg. A couple are from near Riding Mountain (which we did on an over night trip) and a few at the end are just from the weird things I encounter in may day-to-day life.

All photos were taken with my beat up old cell phone.

The idea for this post came from today's visit to the snake pits. Doesn't this look like the entrance to a dungeon?

But notice this detail... the floor of this sinkhole is crawling with snakes.

Here are some more cool places that I think come from a fantasy RPG...

Bonus, I accidently caught a reflection in the window when I took this one and it looks Lovecraftian...

And then we do a lot of 1:1 Scale Model Railroading in Winnipeg--here's a few images from there.

I thought the last few had a dieselpunk look to them.

As always, thanks for read (or looking at) this lighthearted take on Manitoba. Please feel free to post any questions or comments below.