Is the setting half full or half empty…?

For the past several months one of Dawn’s side projects has been trying to put together a game of Traveller, one of the most venerable and yet relatively obscure tabletop role-playing games out there. A science-fiction RPG almost as old as D&D but one that only the “hardcore” gaming crowd might have heard of, much less played or refereed.

Why is that? Well, perhaps because if someone has heard of it, the thing they might have heard would be its most infamous feature which is that your character can die during generation, just by virtue of a bad dice roll or two. You also may end up waaay off the mark from where you imagined being. I will be a naval officer! Well no, sorry, you failed to get into the Academy. University? Nope, a war started and you got drafted into the Marines, where after a few terms you got dishonorably discharged with no benefits after losing a leg in a botched mission. Okay fine, maybe I’ll just try being a security guard… no? Feckless scavenger it is, then… oh yeah and I’m old enough now I have to roll to see if I start feeling the effects of age.

The modern ruleset foregoes insta-death in favor of debt, injuries and enemies as bad outcomes, but preserves the random element and also discourages just going into the adventure as a fresh-faced 18 year old since you won’t know how to do most things, and trying to do things without at least a bit of knowledge is brutally penalized. But who knows what’s going to happen when you start accumulating those terms (each of which adds 4 years) and the dice start clattering?

It feels rare to come out of chargen under the age of 30 and with any appreciably amazing skills, particularly because the game actually starts skills at a rating of zero, meaning you don’t take the minus 3 penalty I mentioned above but don’t otherwise get any bonus to your roll. Also all your ability scores are rolled on 2d6 and you have to get a pretty high roll to even get a +1 out of those.

Now all of this may sound absolutely horrible and unfun, especially if you had your heart set on playing a dashing space pirate only to see that all come unraveled before the game even starts. But I think a reason Traveller persists and is played to this day is that Traveller is meant to be far more Alien or Firefly or Cowboy Bebop science-fiction than Star Wars or Star Trek. It’s not meant to be “heroic” and you might not even be that good at your job, or any job. You’re not out to fight evil or save the galaxy, no time for that when you’re literally trying to figure out how to make enough money to pay the next installment of your starship mortgage. More likely than not you’re going to be a crew full of losers and outcasts whose best years are behind them and whose childhood dreams are in tatters after being put through the wringer of cold, hard reality.

Pursuant to the title of this piece, it’s a “glass half-empty” setting (riffing off the glass of water metaphor) – a pessimistic universe where the odds are stacked against you and it may be triumph enough just to be able to continue putting food on the table or even continue to get up in the morning.

Maybe that’s another reason why it’s not as popular as D&D, since despite all the aliens and starships and such it still might feel just a touch too much like real life to satisfy the needs of escapist power fantasy. Why would you spend all day playing a character having to find work to pay bills when you have bill paying at home?

Good question. Why read (or in my case, write) Zombie Ranch, which is also a glass half-empty setting full of the crushing weight of money issues and governmental/corporate corruption where the working folks are constantly getting the short stick?

Well, maybe the sci-fi trappings are just enough distance to experience the (unfortunately) familiar with some amount of schadenfreude or even actual enjoyment rather than depression. One of the definitions of comedy after all is tragedy that’s happening to someone else. And I’ve always found it easier to root for, say, Hawkeye to succeed than Superman.

Perhaps it’s as simple as noting that when you’re down on your luck, just breaking even can feel like victory. And we relate to characters that keep on going in spite of what seems at times to be a hostile environment.