What I Learned from Classic Traveler
I ran some heavily houseruled Classic Traveler last night. Owl of Scribbles and Horrors wrote a report here. I want to go over a few thoughts I had running the game.
I tend to "over-prep" in many cases. I enjoy the onanery that is worldbuilding, it’s fun to have little freakish cultures float around in your head. However I feel this was the trap that I feel into while running my previous game. I ended up putting in too many background procedures and effects, like having to revise a system for mass combat and warfare that the players would never interact with like, eight times.
Classic Traveler helped throw that out the window.
Originally I wanted to go indepth with the system verisimilitude. While staying within jump-range, I wanted to use Sofhino/AloneInTheLabyrinith's advanced system generator to detail every planet and it's inhabitants. I ended up keeping some elements of the generator, notably the math for generating star-types and moons, I took the advice of Dusk Witch and Ms. Quixotic, stating up only the basics of the mainline planets.
On some planets, most notably less-settled planets, I did come up with some encounter tables, but I made that as a supplement instead of a main focus, rolling those if necessary. After coming up with some patrons on the main planet, we ended up rolling with the punches and having a blast even with such terse fills.
I feel like from running Trav I've realized you only need to prep 3 things for a good adventure: Faces, Places and Random Tables.
Faces refer to important individuals: settlement lords, lone wizards, job patrons, etc. etc. Having some basic freaks within a location helps set up the idea that a location does have inhabitants rather than being a blank slate with talking heads. Giving a basic descriptor and what they want, rather than going in too deep with facial dimensions and motivated backstories, creates a springboard of who wants what and various motives around a locale.
On the topic of locales, Places refers to set points of interests on any scale: Cities, landmarks, districts, etc. Coming up with a basic idea of where the adventure happens without going on about epic decals lets the world be build up without having to chisel and slave away on hexfills. Starting to see a pattern?
Finally are Random Tables, which are just what they say. Patrons, Rumors, Random Encounters and the like. With some random stuff you can roll up stuff on the dot if needed and keep the game flowing without being pin-pointed to certain objectives. This takes the form of stuff like travel encounters in ODnD or law checks in Trav, things that don't derail the flow of the game but rather help add beats to it where not much is happening.
It seems Traveler truly is good for the soul
okay thats it go home.