Quote from: Cranewings;410461I feel like the more you dive into the specifics of commerce in an RPG, the harder it is, for me, to be immersed because it just isn't realistic no matter how hard you try.

That is because it is just a game, designed to simulate a fictional reality and not Real Life itself.

This is something that happens a lot with Traveller (any version), while it is designed to be fairly realistic within its hard science fiction candy coating - it is not Reality and that causes a regular series of cries that "Traveller just isn't realistic enough!" Usually from someone who has some experience in the field that they are saying Traveller doesn't represent well enough. There is a planetary scientist out there who regularly weeps and wails loudly that Traveller world design and star system design is not realistic enough, and it is amusing that he has not come up with a better system while many less credentialled affecianadoes of the game have to suit themselves.

Thing is, for a game its pretty good at being realistic while still being flexible and playable. As a college level course on a subject other than Science Fiction Gaming In The Far Future, it is woefully inadequite. If you are buying Traveller to use as something other than a game, then you are already fucked in the head. At best, it could be used as an entertaining basic teaching tool if so applied to be that but overall Traveller is still just a damn fine game.

I hear ya.

Quote from: Cranewings;410484I hear ya.

And thank you for not thinking that I was "calling you out" on this. Your post just provided the perfect springboard for my own.

I actually worry about this sort of thing with the Science Fiction game I wrote / am writing (very part time). I don't have much in the way of commerce rules, and the magic system makes it closer to Final Fantasy than The Forever War, but there is a lot of tech.

Terahertz Ray Goggles, a full page of type 8 font radar rules, three ways of cooling laser rifles... I'm no physicist, I'm google smart, so I'm sure anyone that actually knows about this stuff would tear it apart.

I was just trying to give it enough depth that casual gamers could feel like there was something behind it. I imagine they did the same. Writing science fiction is hard.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;410476Nonsense! There's no such thing as "just make a roll." You have to roleplay it! And while you're doing that scanning, who's watching out for other prospectors with big-arsed mining lasers ready to jump your claim? Who's swabbing the decks?

If my buddy can turn a 20-second GURPS combat of 5 characters vs 12 gargoyles into a two-and-a-half session epic, I can certainly make your mining last months.

Or you could just adventure. Up to you.

"Breaking the setting" is just another way of saying, "but I was just playing my character." It's an excuse for being a cocksmock.

Not on my watch, little man, not on my watch.

I welcome my ebil aussie overlords with welcome arms and lasers fully prepared to shoot down the claim jumpers.

I could point out this sort of breakage could be discovered by accident.

It was pointed out to me, and referenced in my OP, that one principle of Traveller's 'default' assumption is that you can't really make enough money, in the long run, doing trade to pay for your ship, thus you will take on dubious missions for sweet sweet cash to keep your midlife crisis... er... starship up and running.

Now, sometimes that dubious adventure will be less than profitable, at least on the surface. I know, for example, that in the Gurps Trav game I played in we wound up 'dealing' with some terrorists who had taken the 'flight control' hostage (well, my character was a mercenary, so there was good reason to be hired for that...).  On  the individual scale the pay was nice, from the standpoint of running a ship it was equivilent to searching the couch for loose change.

If we'd turned down that 'adventure hook' we could have spent the day or so out there finding rocks.  There is a better than 60% chance of finding 100k+ tons of ANYTHING.  Even if we never decided to make a career out of it, a single 'session' worth of mining could, theoretically, pay off our ship, and even if we had to abandon our claim, it would certainly pay a couple of months worth of mortgage and maintenance fees.  

Even if not pursued to the 'setting breaking' extreme, it can certainly put a wild spin on the typical topography of the average traveller campaign. Instead of squeezing out a few percentage points of profit per ton of cargo you are losing a few percentage points of profit per ton of cargo, on a bad day.

I'll try to put up a longer post covering some of the crazy that's been running through my head re:traveller for the last couple months that led me to this amusing diversion of point.

JFTR, I think the only thing that would "break" traveller would be messing with the jump drive and communication rules.

A week per jump and limited jump distances makes the imperium what it is, it makes the traveller setting what it is. It makes the governments in traveller necessary.

Changing those would break traveller.

Adding high level nanotech, the ability to replicate things might hurt the setting, but not break it.

Transhumanism? Cybernetics? AI? As long as the travel and communication rules remain the same, they would not break traveller.

As to getting rich, or at least making a decent living off of asteroid mining, hey it's gotta happen so so many people wouldn't do it. it should be possible to get rich off it, but not easy.

So.

On advice from the Mongoose Guys, I got the Beltstrike Adventure for Mong Trav to see if it did, indeed patch any holes in the mining rules.

I get the impression that the dude who suggested it (who was, in fact, the dude working on getting it print ready or something) took my criticisms to heart and 'expanded' the mining rules just to make me happy.

This is, sadly, not a good thing.

Don't get me wrong, the addition of the 'Belter' lifepath, and a writeup of a 'Platform miner' (btw: 5000 dton ship only processes 200dtons of ore per shift. A 10 dton mining drone averages something like 12 dtons of ore. Can you say 'bad investment'?  I kid! Sort of...) are both welcome additions that could have easily been slipped into the Scoundrel book rather than make us purchase an adventure to get rules.  Also: The belter Lifepath breaks with the traditional pattern of 'three sub-paths per' that I had grown to expect was universal. There are FOUR sub-paths, one of which is 'researcher', which makes my head hurt.

But that is neither here nor there.

Expanding the mining rules, or 'How not to respond to customer feedback':

First its nice to see that the Mongoose people read the same Wikipedia articles I do.  No, that is not a thinly veiled critique.

No. The problem here is that for every notional expansion they managed to break something.  I welcome the addition of the 'exotics' table to tell me what I find when I roll for an exotic result. Thank you. Now lets work on not formating random bullet points into the middle of the table, m'kay?

Also: The addition of a line explaining that you roll percentage of 'ore' seperately from size of asteroid is welcome, though not exactly hard work.

However: not only did you NOT address how to divide up multiple types of 'finds' in a single asteroid, you actually REMOVED the dtonnage for half your asteroid results (literally, 8+ you just get its classification as a small or large planetoid and its diameter...). You still roll for a Percentage of that Dtonnage, mind you, you just don't know what that is.  Its nice to know that we could hollow it out and fill it with millions of colonist/miners/factory workers... but how much ore did we haul out in the process?

The formatting of the tables is the worst, just sort of crammed together like. Still, at least we have a purpose for the prospecting skill, but that and the exotic results tables are, almost literally, the only expansion of the mining rules.

Now, however, we can read about all those fancy metals that can be mined. Without any rules based context, mind you.  Since I can look up in wikipedia a list of all these very real ores this isn't exactly great. Bauxite? really? So nice to know I can get bauxite when I mine an asteroid. Now, if ONLY THERE WAS SOME FUCKING WAY TO ROLL FOR BAUXITE!!!!

Really. They 'expand' the value table, believe it or not. Now you can determine that 'dense material' (the 'valuable' you actually roll for...) is STILL 50,000 credits (FUCKING GOLD, MANG!), but that Iron is 400 credits and nickel-iron (I think, fucking sloppy formatting) is 1000credits a dton. But still no way to actually ROLL those results.  Hell, a copy and paste from any fucking edition of Traveller's trade goods table would be just as informative, if not more.


Then, at the end, we get a discussion of claims and claim jumping and a nice 'rule' for selling off those mega-asteroids (I'll sum it up: You get 7+1d6 % of the value of all the ore, or ten percent if yer lazy, if the GM doesn't try to claim that several trillion mass tons of metal is worthless to Corporation X to mine... see above discussion of why this is important. Selling even one decent sized rock will net a party of adventurers plenty of money to buy a ship outright, and NOT bog the game down into the minutae of hauling ore for the rest of their lives).

Problem with the entire claims/claim jumping rules. Not that they are 'bad' rules, per se... I mean there be built in adventures and the like right there, but that they are based on a purely terrestrial concept of mining.  You have to get a prospectors license, file the claim, mine it within x number of years....

or, you know, you take advantage of the fact that space is faaking HUGE and you just... you know... GO AWAY from all the beaurocratic nonsense and mine the shit out of some rocks somewhere where no one is there bugging you.

Let me put it too you thusly: Why don't we ever hear of 'Gold Rush' era mining in Europe? Could it be that an organized bunch of humans have been combing the dirt in the region since the bad old days and its all found/claimed/mined out?  If some schmoe finds gold in the dirt in Bavaria its probably 'junk' from some king's burial hole. Now, if someone finds gold in 18th century California, where the natives still think flint knapping is a valid enterprise... chances are its because there is a fuckin' huge ass vein of the shit under your feet, and its time to get digging.

Ditto belt mining. I imagine that all 1.9million or so asteroids that make up the main 'belt' in the solar system have been picked clean AGES ago by the time of the Third Imperium. People move out, away from all those rules and regulations to find places where they can make their fortune without spending it on paperwork.   The point, my friends, is that space is FUCKING BIG.  Inconceivably so (and that word does mean what I think it means, if you know what I mean).  No matter how many alien polities we come up with, there will STILL BE MORE SPACE!!!!  

Sorry. Pet peeve.