Last week an extremely offline friend of mine decided that he wanted to start a scifi open table using Traveller. Now I had heard of Traveller, knew of its reputation, even bought the Core Rulebook when update was released last year and then never actually opened it but had never actually played it. So suffice to say I was interested and said that I’d join. Before we had even finished character creation I knew I was hooked and needed to run this for my home group. Flash forward to a week later, I have played in three sessions of my buddy’s game and ran a try-out one shot for my own group.

Skills and Versatility

I’m always a sucker for a good skill system. I have a few favorites and for a while 3.5’s was king to me with Call of Cthulhu’s coming in second. Traveller has changed this. I am changed and can never be the same again after experiencing the way in which Traveller handles skills.

Not tying a skill’s usage inherently to anyone one characteristic allows players to approach a situation in so many different ways. It is both crunchy and allows for the way something is roleplayed to influence the character’s chance of success. For example, the Travellers need to get into an exclusive club that they don’t have the money or connections to gain access to, a player could decide to lie to the bouncer (Persuade using SOC) or intimidate them (Persuade using STR) depending on what characteristic gives them a better chance of success. This excites me probably too much as someone whose main system has been D&D for too many years.

I also simply just love them math of the system. 2d6 has a curve to it that I’ve always found appealing (you’ll find most of my tables to be 2d6 tables). Keeping bonuses low means that doing math at the table never takes too long. And I could probably gush for hours about the rules for determining how long tasks should take.

Everything Else

What else do I love about Traveller? Well frankly most of it. As a fan of procedural generation in tabletop games and someone who is fed up with bespoke handcrafted character creation, I cannot get enough of the character generation system. The setting just hits all of my favorite scifi tropes, especially the shades of Dune and Firefly. Let’s just say I think I’ll be running quite a bit more Traveller this year.