Never Played Day Ten: Traveller 2300/2300 AD

[james_davis_nicoll]

Number ten in my hit-list of cool RPGs that I never actually played: from GDW, Frank Chadwick, Timothy B. Brown, Lester W. Smith, and Marc W. Miller's Traveller: 2300, later renamed 2300 AD. Despite the first edition's title, T2300 had nothing to do with GDW's flagship science fiction roleplaying game. Instead, it was a sequel to Twilight 2000. Three centuries (which the company gamed out) was long enough for humans to recover from the Twilight War, although not long enough to replace the nation-state and empire with something less pugilistic, develop star flight and explore the nearer stars, where it did not take too long to encounter aliens, peaceful and otherwise.

T2300 had many interesting features: alien aliens, an attempt to provide a hard SF RPG, and most notably the Near Star map, which did its best to provide a three dimensional map of the stars within 50 light years of the Solar System. It also had ... issues, from the confusing product name to playtest/proofreading issues that meant that _as written_, nine in ten characters were permanently comatose. Thus the 1988 second edition, renamed, polished, and expanded.



As I recall, GDW even allowed people with the first edition to swap the original box set for the second edition rather than making them pay for the same game twice.

The big background event was an ongoing war between humans and the alien Kafer but near space was a big place and it was possible to run games in regions of space unaffected by the war.

Alien races proved fairly common in our neck of the woods. In fact, there were enough for rather disquieting patterns to emerge. Common pathways for technological species included self-extermination (near miss for humans and Eber, success for the Little Guys and maybe the Medusae as well), and domination by a more powerful species (the Song, the Xiang, and the Ylii, with the Klaxun an edge case because humans had only just discovered the stone age aliens). Humans and Kafer were avid empire builders, keen on dominating other species [1]. Although humans were not aware of the fact, neither humans not Kafers were the most advanced species around: locally, that was whatever created the Pentapods, and on a grander scale there was something building dimensional bridges between the core of the galaxy and the outer arms.

The system was well supported, although the quality of the supplements was a bit hit or miss. Later on, GDW stitched on cyberpunk elements in an attempt to keep up with fashion.

We never played the system as written but we did use it for a locked room murder mystery IN SPACE, and a campaign, both using the HERO system.

1: It happened that humans had characteristics that inflamed Kafer paranoia, so there would have been conflict regardless of empire building.

Comments

[theresawright]

*_as written_, nine in ten characters were permanently comatose.*

Little details like this may be why, while I know people who love the setting, most people I've met who play 2300 AD use a different ruleset.

[(Anonymous)]

"It also had ... issues, from the confusing product name to playtest/proofreading issues
...
As I recall, GDW even allowed people with the first edition to swap the original box set for the second edition rather than making them pay for the same game twice."

I bought this and was very displeased when I found out it was not Traveller at all (this was pre-web and it was new so I had no way of knowing). After looking at it, it did appear to be the end state of a different game. This also angered me, because I would far rather have had *that* game, to play out myself, than the one I actually got.

Unfortunately, in order for people to make the exchange for the new edition they would have to know about it, and this is the first I've heard about it 8-)

This was the game that stopped me from buying GDW stuff unless I had a specific recommendation from someone I trusted, or I could read it at the store. I think I picked up a few Megatraveller books when that came out, and that was it. By the time they went under, I didn't even notice.

Wow, I'm still angry about it. Funny how that works 8-)

Riderius

[ffutures]

A system I wrote for without ever actually running it - The French Lieutenant's Connection, a mini-adventure for GDW's Challenge magazine in which the adventurers are asked to help a Clouseau-like French officer deal with some minor travel problems involving an orbital tower. Really can't remember many details now, pretty sure GDW never actually paid me for it.

[estrevan]

Absolutely the strangest thing about it for me was the (mostly offstage) resurgent British Empire, complete with aristocracy. One of those things Americans seem much keener on than either the Brits or their more recent victims. The aliens were mostly very good, though.

[james_davis_nicoll]

What made it especially weird is the UK lost something like 90 percent of its population in WWIII.

Be happy I didn't get to Space 1899.

[jreynolds197]

There's a series I'd like to see: "RPGs that are Extremely Problematic". Ah well. Thanks for the list.

[dewline]

And this French Empire?

[(Anonymous)]

I was on the same mailing list as Loren G Wiseman (apparently he died in 2017) in the late 90s/00s and IIRC it was due to the person controlling the British doing extremely well during that history gaming they did to advance the timeline from Twilight 2000.

/Patrik H

[roseembolism]

I've heard about the historical gaming of a Poost-W.W.III game of Diplomacy, but I'm really suspicious that the end result was something that would look like the early-mid 19th century.

I mean we know how SF fans are about space nobility and space empires. Like France happily deciding an emperor would be better (as well as Africa happily deciding to be colonized).

[dewline]

Yeah, that's a bit on the disturbing side.

[roseembolism]

Ah Traveller 2300: you can tell a lot about what a game is about by the equipment list; in this case that it was published soon after the movie Aliens. Pages upon pages of guns, especially rifles that resembled the ones for Colonial Marines. Hell there was a two-page spread for missile launchers. I think the weaponry section was five times larger than the character creation rules.

(And meanwhile, the hand computer had a stunning 1 MEGABYTE memory.)

Related to T2300s military bent was the fact that ground soldiers got more skill points than anyone else in the backgrounds. I really got the feeling someone hated astronauts on the design team, given how few skills they were given.

Interestingly, back in 2012 some did a revision of the star maps using more current star data, and it turns out that a lot of the paths in the three arms are. Further apart than the 7.7 lightyear range of the Stutterwarp.
http://evildrganymede.net/wp/2012/02/13/stellar-mapping-2300ad-near-star-map/