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.
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