Back in the halcyon days of Google Plus – the only social media platform I've ever really liked – I floated the idea of starting up an open-ended, multi-group Traveller sandbox campaign set in a single subsector of space. For those unfamiliar with a subsector, here's an example:
Each hex represents a week's travel time in a starship outfitted with a Jump-1 drive. So, to travel from Regina (hex 0310) to Forboldn (hex 0206) would take two weeks – one to jump into either Ruie (hex 0209) or Hefry (hex 0309) and another to jump into Forboldn itself. Of course, Jump-1 is the least powerful form of jump drive, with others rated as high as Jump-6, the number being how many hexes it can travel in a single week. In my example, a starship equipped with a Jump-2 drive could thus reach Forboldn from Regina in a single week. And so on.
The relative slowness of interstellar travel is an important part of what makes Traveller the game that it is, regardless of whether the setting is GDW's Charted Space or a homebrew one. Since there is no faster means of communicating between star systems, information travels at the speed of the fastest ship available, much as did during the Age of Sail on Earth. This means that interstellar governments either have to delegate authority to local worlds or risk making decisions based on intelligence that may be weeks or even months out of date. This set-up creates a fun dynamic that's very conducive to adventure.
It also presents a bit of a problem for the kind of campaign I proposed on Google Plus. My idea was that I'd have several different groups of player characters operating within the same subsector, each starting on a different world. Their actions would be independent of one another and, unless they were significant in some way, they'd probably never even know about what the others were up to. However, I had hopes that, over time, each group would have sufficient impact on the worlds of the subsector that there'd be reverberations that could be felt elsewhere.
The difficulty was timing. If, for example, one group of characters, acting as mercenaries, helped overthrow the planetary government of Roup (hex 0407), word of that would travel slowly throughout the subsector. Depending on where the other groups of characters were, it might be some time before they heard of it. Furthermore, suppose one of those groups was adventuring on a single planet for weeks of real time, but only a few days of game time. They'd very quickly fall out of sync with the others, creating a timekeeping headache for me as the referee, since, as we all know, YOU CANNOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.
It's not an insurmountable problem, to be sure. Gary Gygax does provide some genuinely helpful advice on how to manage groups engaged in different activities at different times within the same campaign in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Nevertheless, it's still a lot to juggle in a way that allows regular play to proceed without interruption. If all the character groups spent no more than a single session on each world, this would be easier to manage, but that's unlikely to be the case. I don't want to enforce an artificial limit like "You must complete your mission on this world in four hours of play or else you must leave" to achieve the kind of campaign I want to run, but that seems to be the simplest way to achieve it and that's disappointing.
Am I missing something obvious? Is there a good way to referee an open-ended sandbox campaign with multiple character groups acting independently of one another without either artificial time limits or having to coordinate several out of sync timelines? If so, I'd love to hear about it.
I think the question of interstellar communications needs to be on the table, if you have different groups working simultaneously at different but linked objectives. Can they alert each other to complications and be able to improvise changes in plan? Are they all blocked off from one another and forced to stay on a pre-selected path?
ReplyDeleteWhen you say "on the table," what do you mean? There's no FTL communications in Traveller. Unless a message can be sent by ship, news cannot travel faster than, at most, 6 hexes per week and even that's unlikely, as Jump-6 ships are rare and unusual.
DeleteI think the only way to manage it would be to run the campaign with groups that are able to separate in-character from out of character knowledge.
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ReplyDeleteIf I recall correctly x-boats have jump-6, which covers most of a subsector. I'd personally release a subsector newsletter once a week and accept that a few players may know things they're characters wouldn't. The main for synching multiple groups that I've seen is"time jail," if a group plays out four weeks in advance, mark four weeks ahead on a real world calendar as the next time those characters are available and the players can use alternates in the mean time. I don't see the point of having several groups if they're going to be so out of sync time wise that they can't reasonably react to each other's actions.
ReplyDeleteX-boats are J4, which still covers most of a subsector, but they operate on specific routes; off those routes, messages are carried by Scout/Couriers (J2) or merchants (mostly J1, some higher) as and when they are available.
DeleteIt's never (to my knowledge) been stated how frequent the x-boat service is on each route - daily? weekly? somewhere in between?
I can think of two things that will help. First, put out lots of rumors and news items of dubious quality and authenticity. In the age of sail, news and intelligence reports were often sketchy and erroneous. This will help smooth over minor continuity errors - unless two groups interact with the exact same NPC or widget or what have you then any discrepancy can be attributed to misinformation.
ReplyDeleteSecond, feel free to fast forward time as needed for the group that spent a lot of real, but not game time. Again, the problems faced by real people in the age of sail should be an inspiration. Weather, political problems, unexpected financial issues, illness, wars, fires, and other challenges came up with unbelievable regularity! Maybe one group is quarantined to their ship for six weeks or something breaks down. Either way, you should be able to keep your groups reasonably synchronized as long as they are cool with this kind of thing.
This doesn't do much for you if group A kills and NPC in the past who was interacted with by group B in a game session that occurred earlier in real time, of course. But I suspect that kind of thing could actually be pretty rare in a true sandbox. Hopefully the character's own personal goals don't overlap to that degree.
Seems to me I read an article back in the day called Real Time Traveller. What you did was, you played the events of today on today, and if things proceeded to the next day, you had to wait. I think it was for solo games, but it could be expanded to a large campaign. Play begins on a specific date, such as 1125/001 (or whatever; I don't really remember the timeline.) And then the date increments by one for each day that passes. (Note that this actually makes you care about what happens to your character during a jump, because you can't just handwave the duration.)
ReplyDeleteSeems like that could work, if everybody can abide by the same framework.
But what happens when an hour into a four hour time slot, you've started a jump to another world?
DeleteAnd it still doesn't solve the group that takes multiple sessions to game out a few days on a world.
I think using 1 to 1 time would be ideal. It takes a bit of grtting used to but can definitely be successful.
ReplyDeleteI had multiple play by post groups (and one VTT group) playing in my Wine Dark Rift setting at one time. In fact, the play by post group ended up having one of the VTT players - who played a side quest because he was the only player present - as a passenger.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I had was a group timeline, and I tracked the progress of information.
Mostly though, there was almost no interaction between groups.
Never found a good fix for this sort of thing myself. Maybe there's something to be derived from Fifth Frontier War that could help, though? That game modeled the communications delay issue by forcing each task force to plot its movement (or lack thereof) several turns in advance, adding another (future) turn to the end of the plot as each (current) turn was executed. You could only re-write a sequence of future orders if your TF encountered a situation that gave them more current knowledge - either by stumbling into an enemy or by rendezvous (planned or otherwise) with friendlies who were more up-to-date). There was also a heavily-abstracted system where more skilled commanders didn't have to plot as far in advance as others, representing a mix of intuition, willingness to alter plans on the fly, and better coordination with recon and intelligence assets.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that will help roleplaying much, but maybe there's something to be mined from it. 5FW was overly complex and fiddly, but not a bad game overall once you got used to it. I'd rather play the Sathar Invasion strategic game in Knight Hawks again any day, but my couple of outings with 5FW were at least interesting experiences.
The Traveller setup seems especially bad for a multi group campaign. What works best IME is when most adventures take only a few hours of game & real time, and most time is downtime, running at 1:1 time between sessions, with game time mapping to the real world calendar. Then groups can adventure independently and not get in each other's way. A city, dungeon, or small scale wilderness works best for this - anything where an expedition takes a few days at most, and each session ends with downtime.
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