There are many reasons why this is the case and I could go on at some length enumerating them. Rather than do that here, I'll simply say that Traveller's main virtue is that, in its classic form, it's a versatile, easy to use set of rules that gives a referee nearly everything he needs to create his own planet-hopping sci-fi setting and keep it going for years. When I called 1982's The Traveller Book "the perfect RPG book" a few years ago, I meant it.
Even so, Traveller's approach to science fiction is quirky at times. There are numerous lacunae in its rules, such as, for example, the lack of laser pistols. While that particular omission never bothered me – I had Star Frontiers for that flavor of sci-fi – there was one area where I did feel as if Traveller had dropped the ball: robots. Until the release of Book 8: Robots in 1986, Traveller had no official rules for robots. Indeed, outside of the warbots employed by the Zhodani, there was scarcely a mention of robots at all within the canon of the game.
I felt the lack of robots in Traveller very keenly. At the time, I felt robots were an important, if not essential, aspect of spacefaring science fiction. Consequently, I was very happy to see Jon Mattson's article in issue #64 of Dragon (August 1982), "Robots – Mechanical Sidekicks for Traveller Players." In just six pages, Mattson provides fairly complete rules for designing and using robots in Traveller. His rules take inspiration from similar design sub-systems in Traveller, such as the starship construction system. This works to their advantage, since players of the game should already be familiar with the general framework on which he's riffing.
Obviously, a six-page set of rules cannot cover every possibility. There are plenty of areas that probably deserve expanded treatment (like the use of robots as player characters) or additional options beyond those Mattson includes. However, that's a minor criticism. The genius of the article is not that it's comprehensive, but that it provides a structure from which a referee could work in his own campaign. Because there was nothing comparable in GDW's materials, this was a godsend, which is why the articles remains a standout for me in this issue of Dragon.
So useful did I find this article that it achieved a status reserved only for a handful of others: I photocopied it and included it in my GM's binder. Like a lot of gamers in those days, I had this large binder in which I kept my notes, hand drawn maps, character sheets, and other papers I felt important enough to carry around with me, like Xeroxed copies of articles from Dragon and other gaming magazines. I regret that I no longer have that binder, if only to see what articles and other bits of ephemera I deemed valuable enough to keep inside it.
Another reason "Robots" looms large in my memory is the full-page artwork that accompanied it – by Larry Elmore, no less! I think the illustration supports my contention that Elmore was better suited to science fiction than to fantasy. (It's also an inadvertently ironic piece in that it depicts large numbers of human workers involved in the manufacturing of robots, which fitting, given Traveller's own occasionally quaint notions of technological development.)
My first issue of JTAS, #5, had a brief note on an alternate system for generating power plants for robots using the system contained in some earlier issues of that periodical, so I was aware of a semi-official robot design system for Traveller before I saw that issue of Dragon. It wouldn't be until I got hold of Best of the Journal Volume 1 that I would finally see that article, or series of three articles, though. Once I got it, I treated it as my canon method of designing robots and ended up ignoring the Dragon article entirely.
ReplyDeleteMore comprehensive than the much earlier robotics article in The Space Game #15 from 1978, which only had three pages to devote to the subject and was mostly a listing of stat block for nine types of rather specialized designs, three of which were warbots. It's also got some oddities that really limit the concept, like expecting Asimov's ludicrous Three Laws of Robotics to be in effect for non-warbots (good luck with programming that mess when Traveller's tech levels back then didn't allow true AI before TL17). Robots are explicitly NPCs, although they're allowed about as much pseudo-personality as a Star Wars droid so at least some aren't simple machines. Not TSG's best work, but it was the magazine's first Traveller article ever and possibly the first third-party Traveller rules article ever published - '78 was pretty early.
ReplyDeleteTook GDW till 1986 to do a Robots book for the LBB edition, which wasn't any great shakes either.
Still feels ironic that Star Frontiers core box included both robot and planetary vehicle rules that LBB Traveller only got in later books, while completely leaving out spacecraft until over a year later when Knight Hawks dropped. Very strange to have looked at the competing game you're trying to muscle in on and prioritize things that way.
Stop me if you've heard this one: Gamma World is probably my favorite RPG. but I haven't played it in years (or as often as D&D), It's everyone's intro after joining the GW groups on FB or discord. Would not be surprised if there were others that qualified for that "I married D&D but my true love was _______"
ReplyDeleteI've been running a Traveller campaign now for about two years, essentially using just the LBBs as the rules set, and have found the Book 8: Robots to be way too complicated for my needs. I barely look at the thing. I just wing it and use UPPs for robot stats.
ReplyDeleteI bought that issue, just for that article. It's definitely odd that Traveller didn't incorporate robots early on -- certainly its fictional inspirations had them. To be a bit snarky, I will suggest that there was no obvious way to shoehorn robots into the WWII military sim that all GDW products wanted to become, so they got omitted.
ReplyDeleteThere are no robots in the original Foundation books, or in Dune, two obvious inspirations for Traveller, so there is that. I am actually blanking on prominent robots in space opera at the moment. I'm sure I'm missing some biggies. (And ignoring the elephant in the room: Star Wars.)
ReplyDeleteThe nameless Robot from Lost In Space, which was immensely popular in the decade before Traveller first came along.
DeleteRobby the Robot from Forbidden Planet in 1956, which was still showing up in TV cameos for two decades and some change afterward.
Maria's gynoid duplicate in 1927's Metropolis.
Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951.
The Stepford Wives, whose film came out in 1972. On a less serious note, the Fembots of Bionic Woman and Six Million Dollar Man. Also the Venus Probe from that IP, and several other android duplicates.
Marvin from Hitchikers' Guide, which dropped in 1979.
Robots were also major elements in about half of everything Isaac Asimov ever wrote, and a considerable percentage of the full body of scifi from the pulp-era onward.
And those are just the big ones that even casual fans of period scifi could have been at least somewhat aware of. There are thousands of lesser literary and cinematic examples, and quite a bit of them appeared in the military scifi sub-genre. See all of Keth Laumer's BOLO stories - and recall that one of the Keith brothers (who wrote so much of the best Traveller material) was writing BOLO novels in future years.
And like you said, all of that ignores Star Wars entirely, which also spawned legions of ineptly-made knockoffs with various sad affects at emulating the droid protags.
Sure, but looking at stuff pre-1977, there are actually a lot fewer robots than you would think. Lensmen had no robots, and robots are a very minor part of Niven's known space. Robots are sort-of part of Worlds of Null-A, but pretty much in the background.
DeleteAsimov's robots from that period (Caves of Steel and Naked Sun) are arguably important, but neither of those books is particularly Space-Operish.
I'm just saying, GDW's decision to push off robots to a later supplement isn't as radical an idea as it might first appear.
Every example I cited comes from before 1977, barring Marvin in 79. Asimov started writing robot stories in 1940 and continued to do so for the rest of his life. Robots have been a part of scifi since the term was coined following RUR, and before then there were "mechanical men" and other automatons.
DeleteAnd why does 1977 matter anyway? Traveller was influenced by decades of science fiction media, not just stuff from the period right before it was published. For that matter, why insist on space opera sources (which Niven definitely isn't anyway)? Traveller's trying to be hard scifi a lot more than space opera, or at least to cleave closer to (say) H Beam Piper than Doc Smith.
Well, 1977 matters as the publication date of Traveller. GDW can't really have been inspired by Marvin when he doesn't show up for another two years, unless they are playing a very different kind of science fiction game.
DeleteAnd while I'm playing perhaps too fast and loose with the term "space opera", the kinds of literature that inspired Traveller, the books that had space adventurers travelling through interstellar distances for exploration, diplomacy, and trade, don't really have a lot of memorable robot characters that I can think of. Asimov's robots pretty much stuck to the solar system until much later in his writing career, and RUR and Metropolis were strictly earthbound.
@Dick McGee: You wrote "Traveller's trying to be hard scifi a lot more than space opera, or at least to cleave closer to (say) H Beam Piper than Doc Smith."
DeleteI don't know that that's the case. Remember, this is the game (in both Classic and Mega editions, but not after that) that assumes space piracy is viable and that space marines will fight them in boarding actions with cutlasses and revolvers while wearing powered battle suits. The rules go to great pains to make this a legitimate situation that can occur. That seems to be pushing toward a "Doc" Smith-like setting pretty strongly. Of course, there are many other influences as well, but given the actual rules and the things Miller has said in interviews I really don't think that the initial impulse was to look very strongly toward "hard" SF. That was mostly something that the fans pushed.
That said, I will agree that Piper is by far one of the two strongest influences on the game, the other being Tubb's Dumarest Saga.
I haven’t read any of the Dumarest saga, but I don’t recall robots playing an important part in Piper’s works. Some background appearances, sure, but nothing where they displayed any sort of autonomy or self-direction or AI. Heck, the “Cosmic Computer” was just a big mainframe.
DeleteI WANT to like Traveller. I really do. I played it in 1982 or so for a semester at school. But my today players call it "Spreadsheets and Spacemen" and say "I don't want to play a middle aged retired guy who needs to work to pay his starship mortgage, that sounds too much like real life", and their really not wrong. Traveller is a 'finicky' game, with a lot of built in assumptions (no robots until 1986, as you mentioned above) and subsystems.
ReplyDeleteDon’t feel bad. I LOVE Traveller and have nearly everything printed for Classic Traveller but you’re right. It’s clunky for a modern game. I’m currently kit-bashing my own version. I think “FTL: Nomad” comes closest to a modern Traveller.
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