RPG Philosophy--Traveller and Capitalism

As a game, Traveller is best known for its character creation system.  Most games, modelling themselves off of D&D, build out the character as it is at the time play begins.  In other words, character creation determines how strong the character is right now, what abilities he or she has right now.  Traveller, instead, pioneered the "life path" system.  After rolling up some basic stats, the player moves the character through a series of "terms"--four year chunks of time starting at age 18 in which the character takes on a particular job and develops new skills and abilities.  At the end of each term, the player making the character rolls to see if the character is promoted within that career, and rolls to see whether the character is allowed to continue in that career into the next term.  If the character is kicked out of the career, or wants to go pursue something else, they have to roll to see if they qualify for the new career--otherwise, they have to be a Drifter or submit to the draft.  After a while, the player decides the character is done, and the remaining product is ready to begin the story.

Traveller has gone through a number of editions, but the one I am most familiar with is the version produced by Mongoose Publishing, a UK-based company.  And I can report that, at least in that version of the game, character creation is super fun.  You might start out with a general idea of what sort of character who want to make ("a ship's pilot"), but you will end up following along the twists and turns of the this person's life via the dice rolls.  I just made a ship's pilot as an experiment, and he ended up being part of a cadre of close friends from the naval academy, having a spouse, having a enemy as a result of uncovering a criminal plot on the ship he served, barely surviving cryogenic cold-sleep travel, and leaving the service to pursue his fortune out of frustration that his low social status was hindering his career.

But the more interesting element is the way that this character creation process immerses you in the fundamentals of the setting of Traveller.  And those fundamentals are, reduced to a single word, capitalism.

The Third Imperium, the default setting for Traveller, is an example of neo-feudalism in sci-fi a la Dune.  But once you dig in to the actual political structure of the Third Imperium, you quickly realize that unlike Dune the nobility are not land-owners, at least not in any meaningful sense.  The Third Imperium does not own or even control the planets that make up the Third Imperium, and each planet has its own independent form of government.  What the Third Imperium controls is the space above the planets, and by virtue of controlling space it controls interstellar commerce.  The nobility of the Third Imperium are a mercantile nobility, working in conjunction with interstellar mega-corporations to ensure that commerce continues to flow.  Individual worlds are allowed to govern themselves insofar as their system of government does not affect interstellar commerce; if it does, then the Imperium will not hesitate to intervene and restructure a planetary government to something more palatable.  All of the local representatives of Imperial institutions on a given world--the recruiting centers for the Imperial military and Scout Service, the taxation arm, etc.--are all clustered at the Starport, which is not subject to the laws of the planet, only Imperial law. 

The Third Imperium, then, is far less like the Middle Ages in space than it is the British Raj in space.  The Third Imperium exists in order to allow everyone, and by "everyone" we really mean the mega-corporations and other connected entities, to make money.  While the Emperor and the Imperial family has great formal powers, this is backstopped by the fact that the family is shareholder in basically all the major mega-corporations.      

But, you, the protagonists of the story, are probably not such movers and shakers.  The default campaign concept for Traveller is that the player characters are independent operators of a tramp freighter, making their way across a section of the Third Imperium.  You probably don't own your own ship outright, but instead have to make mortgage payments to the bank or some patron.  You might take on passengers, and have to deal with their complaints and problems.  You might become a cargo broker, and make use of a very robust trade system in the game to try to arbitrage goods between planets.  Or, you might decide to be a smuggler or a pirate, and meet your obligations through less than legal means.

All of which is set up by the character creation system.  You are probably going to exist character creation with a handful of "ship shares"--a small interest in a ship, forcing the group to collectively finance the rest.  You might luck out and have one of the players get a full ship, but you are still going to have to deal with significant maintenance costs, which will eat into profits.  If you have suffered injuries in the course of your pre-adventuring terms, you can treat them, but it is likely to cause you to have medical debt that you must pay back.  The default game play structure is to try to make your way in the Imperium, in your ship, pay off your debts, and get rich.

This construct is probably the biggest criticism of Traveller as a game.  Yes, one of the great benefits of tabletop rpgs is that you can do whatever you want in the context of a particular game, but the default model of play acts as a kind of gravitational pull on the way the game is played.  And the gravitational pull in Traveller is toward something like an adventurous small business simulator.  If someone comes to games in general and tabletop rpgs specifically as an escape from their normal life, Traveller might be too close to real life to fill that role.

But, there is a flip side to this coin.  Traveller's world is deeply relatable, perhaps the most relatable far-future sci-fi setting.  Star Trek, for all of its familiarity for us from its ubiquity, portrays a world that has a wholly different set of economics and politics from that which we have experienced, and that means that the life that people in Star Trek lead is radically different from ours.  Maybe more to the point, another game we are going to talk about in this series, Eclipse Phase, is really about exploring what it would be like to live a different way in a different set of social and cultural mores.  Traveller, I think very intentionally, is trying to present our world, our lives, but with space ships.  Traveller is about being a small part of some large machine, a somewhat marginalized part of that machine, but making your way.  There is a relatability to Traveller that makes it accessible, both as a play experience and as a fictional product.  

I think, ultimately, this is why Traveller has endured so long in the rpg space, and maybe more to the point keeps getting resurrected after the original publishers fade away (which has happened more than once).  Traveller presents your life back to you, with the adventure dial turned up a few notches.