Traveller for Star Trek?

Steve Cole, the SFB dude, posted a Q&A to the Mongoose thread. Looks like he's willing to take some fan input on what kinds of things should be in a Trek Traveller RPG.

Hello to you all.

I’m the President of ADB, Inc., and owner of most of the stock. I designed SFB, F&E, FC, SFBF, and other games. I am NOT an RPG player but I have expert RPG people working for me, and they guide company decisions on those product lines. I haven’t overuled Jean Sexton (our RPG manager) on anything, not in a very long time. (I am a registered engineer. I don’t tell my lawyer or my doctor how to do their jobs, and they don’t tell me how to build bridges. It works for us.)

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I have seen a lot of excitement here, a lot of guessing, a lot of bad (mostly old or obsolete) information, and a lot of questions. I will try to convey some information and answer some questions, but I have to say that most of the answers are "We are looking into that and really, sincerely, appreciate your input."

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Nerroth is Gary Carney, a friend and customer, but he’s not a company spokesperson and his views of what products ADB, Inc., does and should do are somewhat… unique.

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The earliest you might see the first book is Christmas, and that's not a promise.

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Will there be room in the PD Traveller core book for the species in GPD4e but not in PD20M, such as the Veltressai and Rovillians; or is it too soon to tell?

ANSWER: It is way too soon to tell. They were in the GURPS book and left out of the PD20M book because the PD20M books (even requiring you to use a separate book) are much longer than GURPs.

At this point, it’s not even certain that the Core PDT book will follow the pattern of the GURPS core book. It may be totally different. (I had always assumed that it would be just a "yank this out and put that in" book but in the last few hours Jean has told me that she needs to discuss this with me at Origins, one of the two weeks a year that she is in the same city as I am.)

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Will the core Traveller/PD corebook include starship rules or will we need to use CtA or SFB to game with ships?

ANSWER: This seems to be the biggest question. The simple answer is I don’t know. The probable answer is yes, because the traveller market is very different from GURPS or PD20M and "the ship is a character" is true of Traveller and not of the others.

Now, remember, I am a veteran gamer but not an RPG player. (Ok, I confess to playing D&D for a year or two about three decades ago.) I look at people who want to fly the Starship Enterprise with a crew of 465 people in their RPG and just wonder what they’re thinking. If you’re talking about "small ships with crews of five or six people" the things that SFB and FC treat as "targets" then I can very much assure you that the SFB/FC system cannot handle that kind of combat. We did indeed include "how you could use your RPG characters in SFB/FC" in the other books, but don’t take that as any indication we ever thought anybody was actually going to do it. I remain curious how you do an RPG where the various members of the ship’s crew actually have something to do during the game, but I am familiar with take a real world military platoon of 20 guys out into the woods (training, not war) and it was fairly obvious to me that they were all doing something worthwhile. I am sure that Jean and Mike West will make that happen.

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Getting Traveller rules for SFU ships is more than half the reason I'd buy the game; it's a "no sale" for me without it. Sorry to be negative.

ANSWER: This is the kind of information we need. I am not in business to print games that I want to play, but games YOU want to play.

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A design system? You want to use High Guard to be able to build the Enterprise?

ANSWER: If they’ll buy it, we’ll print it (and Mike W will design it) but I still cannot understand RPGing a ship with a crew of 450. That said, I just love my little G1 gunboat and think it would be spiffy for this sort of thing, and the published SFU history already says that thousands of them were sold off as post-General War surplus and were used by adventures, prospectors, and traders. I think that some kind of "car wars" customization system would be sweet and if you want it, you’ll get it.

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IMO, it would be a terrible mistake to take the same approach to Traveller PD that has been taken with other PD systems. If the parties involved want it to live up to their expectations and those of the potential audience, the releases must be Traveller RPG supplement first, with the PD/SFU setting as a secondary concern. That means Traveller compatible rules for starships and starship combat within a roleplaying environment; the Traveller character generation system; worlds, equipment and economics based on Traveller.

ANSWER: This is the kind of information we need. I am not in business to print games that I want to play, but games YOU want to play.

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RPG campaigns that were along lines of "Scrappy crew on a tramp Freighter" rather than a more military based campaign.

ANSWER: I might comment that our RPG games (PD20, PD20M, and GURPS) are actually geared for that, not for military stuff.

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Hopefully, something can also be done around deckplans, too.

ANSWER: We have published a bunch of deck plans, mostly of smaller ships. The Free Trader in the core PD book is kinda big (crew of 20-30) but the gunboat in Klingons may be more what you want. The frigate in Federation has a crew of 200 and is more there are pretty art than actual RPG material.

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I'd NEVER consider using SFB. The idea is laughable. I don't have two days to spare gaming out a small engagement which is taking place as part of an RPG story. And none of the board/tabletop options have mechanisms for integrating with RPG characters.

ANSWER: Well, a typical small battle in SFB (one small ship per side) using the kind of ship an RPG group would use (a skiff) would last under an hour, simply because SFB cannot handle that kind of combat very well. A game designed so that a cruiser has 200 damage boxes doesn’t handle and RPG team skiff with five damage boxes. The granularity is just… icky.

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It's important to realise that Traveller has always provided rules for ships. This is the big difference. Neither GURPS or the D20 variants ever had workable rules for ship combat within their core product. Traveller does.

ANSWER: This is the kind of information we need. I am not in business to print games that I want to play, but games YOU want to play.

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As has already been said, ignore what Traveller fans expect, and the line will bomb. You're going to get (or not get) more sales from the RPG segment of the market than from the board gaming market.

ANSWER: That statement is true of any product ever produced for any market, and I cannot imagine why anyone would think that any company with the brain cells to stay in business for 30 years would do something that dumb. Really, I agree with everything you said, but I already knew that.

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I've mixed feelings about PD. On the one hand, I think it's better suited to gaming than 'proper' Trek rpgs because it's based around specialist away teams or 'Prime Teams' that can easily all be the same rank and can all be low rank as well. So you don't get the old conundrum of who plays the Captain and why does he keep beaming into hostile situations?

ANSWER: You are about a decade behind the memos here. TFG did PD1 and did it all for "prime teams" but when ADB did PD, we did it for "be anything you want to be." In GURPS PD (or PD20M or PD20) you can be a prime team, a bridge crew, a family, investigative journalists, or Federation marshals. You can be anything. Rigid military organizations don’t really work for RPGs. [Ok, there is one RPG where rigid military organizations not only work but are required, but none of you have ever heard of it.]

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An excellent example of a fast and simple, miniature-less, character/bridge based starship combat system is RED ALERT for Savage Worlds by Mike Callahan.

ANSWER: This is the kind of information we need. I am not in business to print games that I want to play, but games YOU want to play.

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Ship design I can't see happening. Likewise planets. Not officially anyway.

ANSWER: I can see ship customization being fun. As for planets, I am sure there are no end of "how to design a planet" systems out there. I don’t really care if we refer you to one or copy one; that’s a decision for the designer and line editor, not the publisher, to make.

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Stand alone vs requires another book: I don’t know yet.

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The problem is that ADB doesn't really understand RPGs - hence their view that ship combat would be resolved using SFB, Fed Commander or Starmada, which no-one who really plays RPGs a lot would consider acceptable.

ANSWER: I answered this above.

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I wonder how much ADB is wiling to listen to the market rather than just repackaging the same old thing?

ANSWER: Well, if I wasn’t willing to list, why am I here? And why do I have an expert RPG line editor to tell me what I think?

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I have the impression that Steve Jackson Games shares your opinion, because I was unable to find a print version of the current edition of GURPS Prime Directive, it seems it is only available as a PDF - which would normally mean that the publisher would not expect it to sell well enough to pay for a printed version.
ANSWER: the print version is available on our shopping cart and your game store can order it for you: ADB 8400, ADB 8402, etc.

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The Maneuver Drive is the Impulse Drive and the Rating is SPEED instead of acceleration. Most people have a problem with the acceleration/speed thing anyway and this would eliminate vector movement. I would expand the TL that different ratings come in at a bit so that not every ship can be M6

The Warp Drive is already in the Core Book, just expand on it for various Tech Levels.

ANSWER: I am sooooo glad I have Jean and Mike W to do this for me.

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Steve Cole doesn't really understand RPGs, and freely admits this. That's why SVC has handed over most of the responsibility for the RPG line to others.

Jean Sexton is the RPG line editor, and over the past few years has done a huge amount of work with the line, including editing several books for GURPS, D20, and the conversion to D20 Modern. Those books have been successful (especially the D20M versions).

Mike West is doing the conversion, and he's a long term Traveller player and has even written some Traveller material, so he knows Traveller and what Traveller players expect. He's also very experienced as an SFU staffer.

ANSWER: Allow me to confirm the above.

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...knows for certain "what Traveller players expect". But he's asking for feedback so that's a good sign. I'll remain open minded, but I've watched ADB ignore way too much feedback over the years about what would make the PD releases better roleplaying games (even with Jean as editor). So pardon me if I don't take your word that "the best game they can" will be as good as it should be.

ANSWER: I am not away of any feedback we have ignored. Many people post things on forums we don’t read and somehow think we got the message. If you want us to know something, tell US.

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SFB and FC and Starmada have no room whatsoever for player character skills to make a difference. Not sure about ACTA: SFU since it doesn't exist as yet.

ANSWER: See above. I’m waiting to see what turns up. I’ve always been curious how RPG play can influence what a 600,000 ton starship does.

People might want to check out:

www.starfleetgames.com/documents/Timeline.pdf

and

www.starfleetgames.com/sfb/sfin/general_war.htm

if you are not familiar with the SFU

The quotes of SVC indicate a lot of changes in his thinking, and are counter to comments he made when GPD was first announced... namely, that he preferred GURPS.

SVC is under some serious delusions. And they are one's he's held for at least 18 years, as they're the same broken ones as back on CIS...

"... I still cannot understand RPGing a ship with a crew of 450. "

That's pretty much been his major maladjustment since the 1990's. He really CAN'T think outside the box.

He can't get that a starship of 450 is in essence, run by 3 shifts of 10 crewmen at a time issuing commands, and maintained by 3 shifts of 140 at a time who don't actually operate it. The primary play of Trek RPG's has been most successful focusing on those 10, and not the other 450.

Likewise, in the real world of WWII, the guy aiming the gun is the only one whose Gunnery skill matters; the 10 guys humping ammo don't even learn how to aim the thing.

Most of which can be summed up in 9 characters: "SVC & SPP"

That's not how it's looked from the SFU BBS for the last 5 years, putraack...

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, then.