Sir Poley

Here's a few issues with the built-in sheet:

1. Traveller doesn't use hit points. Instead (like Numenera, and other RPGs), damage reduces ability scores directly. The built-in character sheet doesn't have a good way to differentiate current ability scores vs. maximum ability scores.

2. Similar to D&D, ability scores grant a die modifier to skill checks. When ability scores change, so does the modifier. Unlike D&D, ability scores in Traveller can change every round. The algorithm for calculating the modifier isn't immediately obvious, so this has to be looked up every time someone takes damage.

3. Weapons and armour tend to change more often in Traveller campaigns than in D&D campaigns because many weapons are illegal on many worlds (see Post I). However, each weapon (particularly ranged ones) come with quite a lot of information associated with them, as in addition to any special rules they might have (and many do), they have damage, heft/recoil, ammo, rate of fire, and range modifiers at various distances. Armour isn't as complex, but is still annoying to change frequently.

4. As a sci-fi game, a lot of gameplay comes from neat gadgets PCs can purchase. However, space for equipment on the main character sheet is tiny.

5. Character creation involves going through several four-year terms. This generates a ton of information, but the default character sheet relegates this to a tiny corner.

My homebrew character sheet uses the following solutions to these problems (don't print these screenshots, PDFs will be available below):

1. Each ability score now has much more space, and separate boxes for the modifier, the current number, and the maximum number.

2. To solve problem #2, the table that converts ability scores to modifiers is printed directly on the sheet.

3. Instead of making players copy down the many, many numbers associated with each weapon, I made playing-card sized cards for each weapon in the book and have space on the character sheet to paper clip them in. When weapons change, it's as easy as swapping a card. Armour gets an extra mini-card for ablative or reflective overlays.

4. There's much more room for equipment on my character sheet, made up for by shrinking the Skills section. Traveller characters tend to only have a few skills, so they can write in the ones they have, rather than listing all available ones.

5. The entire back page is for character creation information.

A few things that came up since creating these character sheets that I ought to fix for a later one:

· The blank section for "Weapons" should probably have "unarmed combat" stats on it.

· There's no space for recording Rads a character has absorbed

I'm not an artist by any means. There's no question that my character sheet could be prettier. But (for my purposes anyway), it's much more functional than the one that comes with the book.

I'll include download PDFs of the weapon and armour cards, and the new character sheet, below. Margins were determined based precisely on what my printer could print, so YMMV.

Traveller Character Sheet

Traveller Armour Cards

The issue is as follows: Traveller ranged and melee combat is realistically balanced (which is to say, swords simply don't compare to laser guns). Traveller also lacks “sci-fi remedies” such as lightning swords and laser whips and whatnot: with the exception of the stunstick, melee weapons are pretty conventional renaissance or medieval era swords and so on. None of this is exactly a problem, but it's a little weird that, during character creation, there's quite a lot of emphasis on getting fancy swords and the Melee skill, especially Melee (Blade). A lot of career options dangle Melee (Blade) in front of players in a way that means it seems like it ought to be useful, but, on its face, isn't.

There's a little note in the rules that cutlasses and so on are popular boarding weapons because it reduces the chances that a stray shot will damage a ship's component, but there's not really any clear rule or system for how that would play out beyond occasional GM fiat. In practice, I'm pretty sure that if the party tried to rush a pirate ship through the airlock with cutlasses, and the pirates were willing to scuff their own ship and thus had shotguns, the results would be fairly predictable.

(At some point I might create a houserule to handle that (missed ranged attacks roll on a table of spaceship damage or something)).

It's fine to say "in this science fiction setting, combat is done with guns. Bringing a sword to a gunfight is anachronistic and suicidal." Most science fiction, Star Wars aside, takes this approach. But if that's the approach Traveller was going for, then… why are there all these rules for melee combat? Traveller, unlike, say, D20: Modern, isn't a spinoff of a fantasy game with a bunch of vestigial fantasy-genre-stuff. These rules were put in for a reason.

A related issue (again, not exactly a problem) is that laser weapons are vastly more effective than conventional firearms (unless the enemy has Reflec, though text in the book (and equipment of default NPCs) indicates that this is supposed to be a fairly rare item). Laser weapons are also more expensive, but the price of both are trivial compared to the amount of money Players will be dealing with in the trade system. So… why are there all these rules for conventional firearms?

The answer: because guns are illegal, laser guns, doubly so. On a shockingly large number of planets, anyway. Shocking to someone from a D&D background, anyway, where the expectation is that if a weapon is written on a character sheet, it's pretty much always available.

Law Level Table, Mongoose Traveller (2008) p.176

Each planet has a Government code, and a separate Law Level Table tells you which items are banned by which type of government. Most governments restrict weapons. The two most important for our purposes are "Weapons" and "Techology" (because a lot of powerful weapons are only available at advanced TL’s, also). I went through each weapon in the book and penned in the "Law Level" it becomes illegal at (this should have been in the book to begin with). The result is that nearly every planetary government restricts laser weaponry (Law level 2+ by Weapon, 3-7 by Technology, depending on the weapon in question). Some, but not all, restrict conventional firearms (Law Level 4-7+, depending on the weapon, and by around 5+, by Technology), but virtually none restrict melee weaponry, whether by restricting Weaponry or Technology. I had to make a pretty arbitrary few judgement calls (I decided any weapon with autofire, plus the extra-deadly gauss weapons, counted as "assault weapons," for example). Now, when the party goes to a planet's surface, I tell them the restrictions that planet places on weapons and technology (”Weapons Law 2+, TL13+,” for example), which they compare to the number printed on their weapon cards (see the upcoming Post II), and then they tell me if they're complying with the law or smuggling their weapons in. I have these numbers written in my notes on each planet in my GM binder.

The result of this is that there are huge stretches of the galaxy where sword-and-board fighting is prevalent (ruthlessly enforced by police who are equipped with controlled weapons), while boarding actions, which are an anything goes "wild west," are dominated by ultra-lethal laser weaponry. I know that this is the opposite dynamic  to that noted by the text on boarding actions and cutlasses, which is a discrepancy I haven't yet been able to resolve. Nonetheless, it does leave a niche for both styles of fighting.

What do I mean by interface? Imagine if Traveller was a computer program. The interface would be the information displayed on the screen, while the actual rules of the game are what goes on in the background. Traveller's rules, so far, are rock-solid. The basic core dice mechanics are fast and easy, and the game's many elegant systems for procedural generation allow nearly endless gameplay with only sparing need for GM-added "spice."

What isn't elegant is the way some of these systems are presented to the GM and the players. Thus far, I have isolated several systems (many of which are quite entangled with each other) that could benefit from a more polished interface to reduce friction during play (i.e., avoidable times when the game grinds to a halt and something has to be looked up, calculated, found, remembered, etc.). They are:

Trade (namely: calculating purchase modifiers, number of passengers, amount of available freight, legality of various goods)

Character Statistics (namely: character sheets, weapon and armour statistics)

Spaceship combat (namely: tracking spaceship position, responsibilities of individual crewmembers, tracking computer programs)

I'll start with trade because it is, I think, one of the most overwhelming systems in the game on its face, but also one of the most crucial to keeping the Traveller "loop" going. It's also part of what makes Traveller so unique.

To buy cargo, a character must make a Broker skill check (easy), adding a modifier based on the value of that trade good on the current planet (easy), and compare it to a little table that converts that into the price, as a percentage, of the good's value (easy, with a calculator or smartphone). For example: to buy Basic Machine Parts, a player must roll 3D6 + 2 (the PC's Broker skill modifier) + 4 (a bonus because the goods are cheap on the current planet). The roll is 17, which a table on page 164 tells you means Basic Machine Parts can be bought at 65% of their value (normally cr. 1000/ton), or cr.650 per ton. Great. Easy enough, right?

Wrong.

The reason this can be incredibly slow is because the price modifier based on the planet's characteristics—the number that encourages the players to explore the galaxy—is a real headache to calculate on the fly. It is calculated from the following sources:

First, look up the Trade Good on the table on page 165.

 Look at the Trade Codes of the planet in question (on a handout the GM generates and gives to the players at the start of the campaign)

 Determine if the Trade Good is illegal on this planet. This is found by:

Comparing the planet's Government Code (on the handout) to the Government Table (on page 175) to see if a category of goods is restricted

If it is, debating for awhile whether "Advanced Weapons" are considered "Heavy Weapons" or "Portable Energy Weapons" (i.e., make a judgement call)

Comparing the Law Digit for the item from the Law Table on page 176 to the Law Level of the planet to see how illegal it is

Find the highest number in the Purchase DM category related to these Trade Codes, unless it is lower than the number calculated in step 3, in which case, use the number in step 3 (and the PCs are now smuggling! This is cool because now you can have police chases and so on.)

Find the highest number in the Sale DM category related to these Trade Codes and subtract this

Sum all of these numbers. Repeat for each trade good purchased.

Looking at all of those steps probably convinced at least some of you to swear off Traveller altogether. But here's the thing: this is incredibly slow to calculate during play, but after the galaxy is generated, these numbers never really change. Barring exceptional events in the campaign, an Industrial world will continue to be Industrial from start to finish. My toddler was unusually chill last week, so I spent a few hours making an Excel spreadsheet that crunches this once, and only once, and spits out this table for my star cluster:

Each four-digit code along the top corresponds to a labelled hex coordinate on the star cluster map they have (i.e., a settled planet).

This table presents each planet's numerical stats. There's a lot more that goes into each planet (it's weird cultural quirks, important NPCs there, maps, etc.—you know, worldbuilding stuff) but this table is what the players need for the game's rules. Different types of survival equipment available are rated for different atmosphere numbers, for instance, and different bases provide different services. I know "Gas Giants" aren't really bases, but I didn't have space for another column for them.

I'll admit this was a slog to put together. I like spreadsheets more than most, but even my eyes glazed over a few times doing this. I also had to make a few judgement calls on what items were restricted at various law and government levels. It's also possible it contains significant errors; my spreadsheet grew more complicated than I was able to understand (and thus debug) by the time it was done. Still, it works for now, and I'm not willing to change it. It wasn't more work than, say, drawing a dungeon map, and it'll last the whole campaign. I made similar tables for determining passenger and freight availability. If I ever go back and tidy up that spreadsheet so that it’s useable for others, I’ll post it.

Now that that math is done, it stays done. I gave the players this, printed on cardstock, at the start of the campaign, and they never need to know how much work I saved them.

 Buying and selling stuff now isn't any more work than any other skill check: it's a dice roll, plus a modifier on the character sheet, plus a circumstance modifier. It's quick, it's easy, it's frictionless.

Money as Character Power

This paradigm is the one most familiar to 3.x veterans such as myself, and is the direct result of allowing magic items to be purchased freely for money. This allows players to invest money in their character's powers and strengths in the same way they do with skills and feats. There is a slightly different set of constraints on how money is spent than skill points (which is to say, the party must find a city), and may be further restrictions still (such as 3.x's limitations on the most expensive items that can be bought in each size of settlement), but at the end of the day, players can pretty much buy whatever they have money for.

In essence, if a player can convert currency into better stats, damage, armour, etc., then in your system, money is character power and should be treated as such. The GM should keep a close eye on how they hand out treasure and quest rewards, as too little or too much money can easily result in difficulty balancing encounters. Third edition D&D came with a table stipulating how much money each character should have at each level (the (in)famous "Wealth by Level" table) and balanced monster CR based off of this assumption. In my younger years, I GM'd several campaigns in which I restricted purchase of magic items because of campaign setting reasons (it was a low magic setting, or the party was far from civilization, or whatever), and then was shocked as the party struggled against ethereal monsters or monsters with damage reduction, yet with CR far below their level. Additionally, such restrictions won't affect all characters equally—a 3.5-era sorcerer, for instance, can operate just fine despite absolute poverty, while a fighter will really feel the lack of a level-appropriate magic sword. Monks, despite not using weapons or armour, are ironically among the classes most dependent on magic items because of their dependency on multiple ability scores.

Determining whether your system assumes money as character power may not be immediately obvious, but as a GM, it is crucial that you find out. D&D's modern-era spinoff, D20 Modern, does not use money as character power, as you can't simply buy better and better guns as you level up—once you've realized that the FN 5-7 pistol and the HK G11 rifle are mathematically the best guns and you've bought them (which you can easily do as a first-level character), you're set for the rest of the campaign. However, D20 Modern variant campaign settings, such as D20 Future and Urban Arcana, do allow you to directly convert money into character power, as the reintroduction of D&D-esque magic items of Urban Arcana and the "build your own gear" gadget-system of D20 Future allow unlimited wealth to be converted to unlimited power.

What to Watch as a GM: Ensure a steady trickle of monetary rewards that increase as the players level, realize that players will be increasingly antsy to reach town the more treasure they have, keep an eye on any game-provided wealth-by-level suggestions, and be wary about player-driven "get rich quick" schemes and item crafting systems. Be very cautious about allowing a PC to borrow money from an in-world bank or other lender, as they could quickly invest that money in magic items and destabilize the game balance.

Advantages: Combing through books to find perfect magic/sci-fi items is very appealing to some players, and it allows the GM to dangle money in front of his or her players to hook them on adventures.

Disadvantages: Can lead to very hurt feelings (and huge game imbalances) if a character is robbed/disarmed in–game, as it is functionally equivalent to erasing a feat from their character sheet. Further, the game can break down very quickly if there is a wealth disparity among the party, as there are more than simple roleplaying repercussions to playing a "rich" or "poor" character. Some players find this system "video gamey," and others feel that it overwhelmingly encourages players to steal everything not nailed down.

Best For: Combat-heavy games in which a "build" is important, high magic/soft sci-fi settings.

Money as Narrative Power

When money sees its most use bribing officials, hiring mercenary armies, building castles, or funding large-scale operations of any kind, money in your system directly converts to "narrative power." Players can use cash to influence the game world and the direction of the story, but not necessarily to deal more damage in combat (or heal more, or buff more, or whatever). This is where D&D 5e tends to get to after low levels (see "Crossing the Streams" for more on this). Many gritty, film noir-esque stories rely on key characters being dangerously in debt and are called to adventure by motivation to pay off said debt. Depending on the details of the campaign world, however, Players might stop caring about money entirely if it doesn’t directly relate to the plot or some kind of scheme.

What to Watch as a GM: If you come from a legacy of "Money as Character Power" games, you might have to remind yourself to loosen your grip if one or more characters seems to be accumulating "too much" money. Just because money doesn't have direct applications in combat and adventuring doesn't mean it isn't an important game resource—be sure to provide opportunities for players to use their money to solve problems, or else they'll quickly ignore it entirely.

Advantages: Allows a host of narrative options restricted by "Money as Character Power" games, such as managing businesses, organizations, or fiefdoms. Allows a wealth disparity between party members with only moderate issues. Additionally, allows stories involving borrowing and lending money without breaking balance in half, and overall can feel quite freeing.

Disadvantages: Can still cause problems if one PC is notably wealthier or poorer than the rest, depending on the players themselves, as they might end up driving the story. Unless finances are baked into the plot, using money as a reward is unlikely to garner much interest on behalf of the players.

Best For: Gritty realism, power politics, games that will eventually result in characters becoming lords/ladies/CEOs/etc.

Money as a Skill

In some ways, this is the exact opposite of "Money as Character Power"—when money is treated in your system as a skill, players have to sacrifice combat power in exchange for wealth. For instance, in the Fate-based Dresden Files RPG, if a player selects Resources to be one of their better skills, they are consciously giving up choosing, say, Weapons or Fists as a good skill. In such a system, a character's wealth is abstracted, and largely unaffected by major purchases or sales. Similarly, monetary quest rewards are pretty much off the table unless similarly abstracted.

This system strongly encourages huge disparities in wealth between party members, allowing rich and poor characters to solve problems equally well, just in different ways.

Note that "Money as a Skill" doesn't just mean that purchases are handled by skill checks, but rather that the wealth of a character is as core, internal, and untouchable as their other core stats, like Strength, Agility, etc. D20 Modern uses a system similar to skill checks to handle finances, but a character's Wealth score fluctuates hugely when they buy or sell things, so doesn't entirely fit in this paradigm.

Sometimes these systems do away with money altogether, such as the mecha rpg LANCER, which exists in a post-scarcity world entirely without money. Equipment is earned by getting progressively better "licenses," which authorize PCs to replicate increasingly powerful weapons and mecha shells.

What to Watch as a GM: You'll have to find ways to motivate players without monetary rewards, and be sure to find opportunities to reward players who invested in their "money" skill, either through narrative or scenario design, just as you would ensure to place a few traps in every dungeon for a rogue to disarm.

Advantages: Allows (and, indeed, almost requires) large wealth discrepancies between characters, and greatly reduces bookkeeping.

Disadvantages: Tends to be highly abstract, which can lead to a mismatch of expectations (such as if players start looting bodies to sell, with absolutely no mechanical impact, or being unsure if "+5 wealth" is middle-class or Bezos-class).

Best For: Narrative games without much focus on accumulating wealth and treasure, but in which money still matters.

Money as XP

This is the oldest of all old-school approaches, and in many ways the logical extreme of "Money as Character Power." When money is used as XP, acquiring gold directly leads to characters increasing in level. Sometimes this requires spending the money (i.e., donations to charity, training, or spell research resulting in XP gains), while other times, it only means acquiring the money (in which case, you have to answer the question of what players are to do with all this accumulated wealth after its primary purpose—giving them XP—has been achieved). This approach has largely been left by the wayside, and many modern players will discount it out of hand, but I'd encourage you to stop and think about it: we already accept that fighting more powerful monsters and overcoming more difficult challenges lead to greater XP and greater material rewards, so why not cut out the middleman and just say the material rewards are XP? One caveat is that, even moreso than with "Money as Character Power," this can result in PCs doing anything to get their hands on cold, hard cash—but, conversely, by removing (or downplaying) combat XP, it can also result in encouraging peaceful or stealthy approaches to solutions. This would lead into a whole conversation about when and how to give out XP, and what behaviours this decision encourages around the tabletop, but such a discussion is outside the scope of this essay.

This system works well for GMs that want their players to be treasure-hungry, like in Money as Character Power, but don't like the inevitable proliferation of magic items that results.

As with "Money as Character Power," under such a paradigm, GM's must keep a close eye on PC's pocketbooks. Taking away their treasure, either through in-game theft, a rust monster, or similar, will lead to frustration and hard feelings. Similarly, anything that lets players turn a profit without adventuring, such as item crafting or simply by getting a day job, could destabilize the game unexpectedly—many systems specify that only treasure found while adventuring counts towards XP, though determining what counts as "while adventuring" can be something of a headache (albeit not an insurmountable one). Additionally, this system strongly discourages wealth imbalances between PCs, as they directly result in some PCs being higher level than others.

Given how out-of-style this is in tabletop games, it's perhaps surprising that several modern video game RPGs  fall into this category in the late game. In Skyrim, for example, after I'd bought the best weapons and armour that could be found in shops, future resources went into buying all the world's iron and leather to grind up my Smithing skill again and again, giving myself easy levels.

What to Watch for as GM: Same as with "Money as Character Power."

Advantages: Eliminates post-battle XP calculation entirely, encourages players to avoid direct confrontation, and gives players a very strong monetary motivation (which can also be a disadvantage) without resulting in a high-magic world.

Disadvantages: Can strike some players as unintuitive, and strongly encourages desperate treasure-hunting (which can also be an advantage).

Best For: Games involving treasure-hunting and exploration.

Money as Oxygen

With Money as Oxygen, money becomes something that players need a steady stream of just to survive. Maybe they're deeply in debt, have to make rent payments, have to maintain their equipment, or just have to feed themselves. The reason for their regular thirst for wealth might be narrative (rent, debt, etc.) or mechanical (equipment maintenance, etc.) in nature. In Traveller, a huge source of motivation for the party is just trying to keep ahead of mortgage payments for your starship. Money becomes the same as food, water, and air—a vital necessity that you simply always need more of.

With Money as Oxygen, players constantly have to eye their dwindling bank accounts and do cost-benefit calculations before accepting a mission, or else disaster could strike. This is a very, very different genre from "Money as Character Power" or even "Money as Narrative Power," as it rarely results in the party spending their money on anything other than survival. Unless they really hit a gold mine, they won't use money to upgrade weapons or armour, or to buy land and power, because doing so runs the risk of starvation/bankruptcy/etc.

This probably isn't the paradigm to use for most D&D-esque campaigns, as it can (and should) result in players actively avoiding heroic archetypes—if survival depends on a paycheck; the crusade against evil is someone else's problem.

What to Watch for as GM: This paradigm is bookkeeping-heavy, so make sure the players understand that from the get-go. Also, anyone expecting "Money as Character Power" might find themselves frustrated by their ever-dwindling resources. Make sure you have a very good handle on the math of the players' survival (that is, exactly how many gold pieces/dollars/credits they need to survive a week) or you might accidentally underpay them and lead them to ruin. Not that this shouldn't happen; it just shouldn't happen by accident. If you accidentally give them too much money, feel free to timeskip ahead several months until they're broke again, or dangle another moneysink in front of them, like a one-of-a-kind, now-or-never opportunity to buy a shiny magic item or spaceship upgrade (dipping judiciously into Money as Character Power).

Advantages: Makes the players feel poor, desperate, and downtrodden.

Disadvantages: Both the players and the GM have to keep a very, very close eye on finances in order to maintain tension. If paired with a mechanical system that doesn't result in substantial character progression from XP (such as skills, feats, etc.), then players can feel stuck and lacking motivation.

Best Used For: anything that can be accurately described with the words "seedy underbelly."

Money for Nothing

We've all played games in which money is straight-up useless. In many Zelda games, for example, like the classic Ocarina of Time, monsters drop rupees all through the game. In addition, there are secrets, hidden chests, and puzzles that pay out rupee rewards as if the game thinks they would make you happy. After the first hour of the game, it becomes blindingly obvious that there's no point to this money, as the things you would buy (arrows, sticks, bombs) are just as freely dropped from monsters and bushes. Many other video games hit this point after the early game as well (like Diablo II, where monsters continue to drop thousands and thousands of gold throughout the game, but there's nothing worthwhile to spend it on).

I personally can't see any advantages to this system, as I don't think it's chosen by design.

Crossing the Streams

Of course, few games fall strictly into one of the above categories, and most aim to do two or even three, which can lead to some common pitfalls. For example, the 3e splatbook the Stronghold Builder's Guide allowed players to spend tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of GP on elaborate castles and mansions. These was very cool, and the rulebook is one of my favourites from the edition… but I've never seen it used in actual play, because any player who did so would find themselves handicapped for the remainder of the campaign, as they hadn't invested their gold in magic items, as the system requires you to. (Again: the math of monster design in 3.x assumes and requires that player characters gain magic items at a set rate).  

Some of the paradigms play nicer with each other than others. For example, many variants of "Money as XP" practically require a secondary output for money. Unless the XP is only gained by spending the money, all of that accumulated loot has to go somewhere—typically either into magic items (Money as Character Power) or into strongholds (Money as Narrative Power). Games that have large-scale battle rules (which, I've been told, ACKS does, though I haven't played it firsthand) blur the lines between Narrative and Player power, because the castles and hirelings a player buys actually do something, mechanically, though they typically don't help you in an actual dungeon. "Money as Oxygen," similarly, may require temporarily dipping into another paradigm to bleed off surplus money from the party to keep them permanently poor (something Traveller does gracefully by allowing incredibly-expensive spaceship upgrades).

The Full Plate Threshold

The Full Plate Threshold: once the players have bought the most expensive item available to them, the nature of money permanently changes.

One very common dynamic is for games to have Money as Character Power in early levels, and transition to another paradigm (or fall into Money for Nothing) at later levels. This is particularly common in video game RPGs, where after the early game, nothing anyone sells in stores is of any value whatsoever (or if they do, the price is trivial), yet despite this, monsters continue to drop thousands upon thousands of gold. If these games have a multiplayer aspect, players usually settle on a rare item as the de facto "currency" for trades.

This is also the dynamic that results when the sale of magic items in D&D-esque games is restricted, as in early levels, players save up to buy half-plate to replace their breastplates, warhorses to replace their feet, composite bows to replace their shortbows, and so-on. Once the most expensive upgrade has been bought (in D&D, the last character to make this transition is typically the fighter, as the best mundane armour available is a steep 1,500 GP in 3.x and 5e—a friend of mine dubbed this the "Full Plate Threshold" after my 5e paladin bought full plate, and we all suddenly stopped caring about gold), money is no longer convertible to Character Power. At this point, which can happen between level 3 and 7 depending on character class, system, and GM generosity, the nature of money in the campaign will change. This could result in the widening of scope in the campaign, as players invest in land, armies, and castles, or it could result in money piling up like in Diablo or Final Fantasy, totally meaninglessly. Similarly, many campaigns that start with "Money as Oxygen" can escalate into "Money as Narrative Power" as players finally hit the jackpot, and no longer need to worry about maintenance/mortgages/etc.

As a GM, handling this transition can be tricky. If it sneaks up on you without realizing (many 5e D&D GMs might not know (because they weren't told), for instance, that the nature of money changes dramatically the second someone buys full plate), they might suddenly find their players disinterested and bored around the table even though seemingly nothing else has changed. Their adventures are just as gripping, their monsters just as scary, their dungeons just as unique... but the players seem to be just going through the motions If your system or campaign doesn't have an endless supply of increasingly-expensive bits and baubles for players to buy, you're going to have to manage this transition, whether you want it or not.

Wrapping Up

There is no objective "right" or "wrong" way to handle money in an RPG, but some methods definitely work better for certain genres than others, as changing the "rules" of money in your campaign will massively change the feel and pace of the game. On the same note, be careful of follow-on effects from changing the rules: simply saying "magic items can't be bought," without making any other changes, will lead 3.x campaigns into a series of very predictable roadblocks (weakening martial characters, unevenly and unpredictably increasing encounter difficulty, and potentially eliminating motivation to go on some adventures) that you have to have solutions to. Similarly, adding a "magic item store" to a system not initially designed for it, such as D20 Modern, can lead to massive imbalance and weird behaviour. For instance, due to bizarre math, even relatively powerful magic daggers fall below the threshold at which rich characters lose wealth points in that system, making them literally free, while buying an unenchanted, off-the-shelf AK-47 (which is just above that same threshold) permanently drops the wealth bonus of any character. This leads to the system incentivizing any problem that can be solved with thousands of +3 Daggers being solved with thousands of +3 Daggers in a way that neither GMs nor (I assume) game designers intended.

The Many Random Encounters of Traveller

Traveller really takes the concept of random encounters and runs with it. Just in the core rulebook, there are random encounters for…

-          Encounters during space travel (with different sub-tables for travel near a space port, in settled space, wild space, and so on),

-          Encounters on foot in a starport, rural area, and urban area,

-          Encounters with the law (that is, random legal complications tables for accidentally or deliberately breaking laws on strange new worlds)

There are also several 'honorary mention' tables that interact with the random encounter tables, such as:

-          Random asteroid and random salvage tables,

-          Random passenger tables,

-          Random "bounty hunters come to repossess your ship if you didn't pay your mortgage" tables

-          Full random monster generator tables—this one is particularly impressive. When an alien 'animal' is encountered, rather than having hundreds of pages of animals, it seamlessly moves into generating a fully-unique animal on the fly

-          Random patron tables (these are truly in-depth: they generate who your patron is, what you're asked to do, random targets for your mission, and even who the opposition is).

-          A random piracy table (unfortunately buried in the spacecraft chapter, not near the table where pirate encounters are rolled), that provides inspiration for just how the pirates manage to get the jump on the party and what they want.

-          Of course, special mention goes out to the procedural subsector generator which is a full chapter in the book, in which the DM can generate the entire setting for the campaign.

What's impressive about Traveller isn't so much the volume, or even the quality, of the random tables, but how tightly they're tied into each of the other game's systems

Space Encounters

As Traveller is a game primarily about space travel, I'll focus on the Space Encounter table.

Sorry for the janky photo; I don't have the book on pdf. (Traveller Core Rulebook, 2008, p139)

This table is rolled on pretty much whenever the DM feels like it (the rules say: "roll 1d6 every week, day, or hour depending on how busy local space is. On a 6 […] roll d66 on the table below"). Many of these results tie in to subtables (any result of salvage, collision, mining, trade goods, or patron has additional rolls), but the photo above contains the most important part of the space encounter system.

Compare this table to the one from D&D's Manual of the Planes I used as an example in my series on wandering monsters:

Manual of the Planes, 2001. p. 151

Now, obviously, D&D's encounter table here is for an explicitly dangerous place—literally Hell—but the only result you can roll on the table that doesn't ­immediately move to combat is "72: Mercane trading mission." Thus, any time this table is rolled, there is a 99% chance of initiative being rolled.

Traveller's random encounter table marks its "unavoidable" encounters in bold (typically they're ones that immediately start a battle or some kind of dangerous phenomenon like a collision), though "patron" is also on there. There are only 7 results that are bolded this way, and only 6 of them are explicitly dangerous. Some of the non-bold rolls can result in battles as well depending on the party's actions, but there's no assumption of violence.

This is representative of most of Traveller's random encounter tables: they're not, by and large, random battle tables, but universe simulators. Depending on the context of the adventure, this means the random space encounter table could mean one of a number of different things. For example:

-          If the players are pirates, this becomes a random pirate target table. Most of the results are unarmed NPC ships that would be perfect targets for piracy. However, some are police or military vessels that would cause real problems for the party.

-          If the players are blue-collar miners and salvagers, this becomes a random treasure table, where the various derelict, asteroid, and salvage options become possibilities for work.

-          If the players are in trouble (suffering from a medical emergency or a mechanical failure), this becomes a random rescue table, where you get to find out who answers your distress beacon, and what their intentions might be. Additionally, the tables tell you how long it takes for rescue to arrive (for example, in lightly inhabited space, you have a 1-in-6 chance every week that a spaceship shows up. At that point, you're running up against hard limitations of fuel reserves on your ship as to whether life support will give out before rescue arrives)

-          If the players are simple traders, this table is a random flavour table, mostly adding a bit of flavour to the world while only occasionally having major impact on play.

"That's all well and good," you say, "but what does this have to do with tables?"

Encounters and Mortgages

Even with the bank taking most of the party's trade profit, without close attention to random encounters, the 'trade loop' can quickly turn into a 'roll dice and watch numbers grow' game. In a single iteration of the trade system, a lot of random encounters are rolled:

-          A Space Encounter in the origin system while flying to the 100-diameter limit (you can't safely use Traveller's FTL drives within 100-diameters of a planet),

-          A Space Encounter in the destination system while flying to the world from the 100-diameter limit (in the case of a mis-jump, which lands you far from the target world, this can use the more-dangerous less-settled options on the encounter table),

-          A Legal Trouble Encounter check upon docking with the new spaceport,

-          One or more Spaceport Encounter checks while in the spaceport and picking up cargo.

-          One or more Random Passenger rolls if passengers are picked up

That's four or more rolls on random tables just going from one planet to another. This means that what might otherwise seem to be a straightforward (and therefore boring) trading game becomes, in practice, a series of minor adventures and close escapes full of danger. Remember, any time a pirate is encountered, there's a real possibility the players will be forced to jettison their cargo, which typically represents all of their accumulated wealth. The stakes are very high.

These high stakes also provide motivation for your players to accumulate wealth beyond simply keeping the banks off their backs: ship-scale weapon systems are very expensive (in the millions of credits), but even one or two upgrades to a basic ship can give the party a huge leg-up against non-player ships (who usually fly unmodified ships lifted directly from the book).

Encounters and Patrons

Virtually every random encounter table has a one or two entries that result in the party meeting a patron, which, as I described in the second part of this series, are the keys to adventure in Traveller. Math isn't my strong suit, but back-of-the-napkin calculations suggest that around one-in-five trips between worlds will involve a run-in with a patron, and thus the start of a classic-style adventure. Note that while the book does provide tables to generate patrons, it really isn't practical to do this on the fly. What this does mean is that, as DM, when you have a free afternoon or just a couple of hours, you can create and queue up your own patrons in advance and trust that, at some point, the game's procedural universe simulation will put them in front of the party.

Encounters and Character Creation

Traveller’s character creation system is different. So different, in fact, that it can be tempting to cut it out altogether and replace it with something conventional.

The rulebook recommends that, if possible, patrons should be drawn from the PCs' existing contacts and allies. I don't think it explicitly mentions this, but hostile encounters should also often include the PCs' existing enemies and rivals. This ties player characters' backgrounds directly into the action of the game's 'present' timeline. In addition, it's actually much easier as DM to pull out a character that you already have in your rolodex sometimes than come up with a new, characterful pirate captain for each random encounter.

Missing Legs

Unless you really know what you're doing, Traveller runs a serious risk of collapsing if any of these four legs (mortgages/trade, patrons, character creation, and random encounters) is removed or seriously modified. Unfortunately, the game doesn't make this clear in any particular way, which is why my previous DM (who, again, is very good) struggled visibly with his two campaigns.

If you decide mortgages won't be a major aspect of the game, you have to remove or severely nerf the trade rules, or your party will be rolling in cash almost immediately. Because the trade rules are the primary motivation to move around (and thus, roll random encounters), you have to come up with another reason for them to do so. (Note that it's possible, during character creation, to be loaned a Scout Ship without having to pay mortgages on it. As DM, you should consider disallowing this, or at least be aware of the implications if this reward is rolled)

If you decide trading won't be a major aspect of this game, you have to find another way for the party to make money (lots of money) or they simply won't be able to pay their mortgage. You also have to find a reason for them to travel from place to place, or they won't be able to justify the cost of fuel, crew salary, and other expenses. The  game will run serious risk of defaulting to jumping from one patron job to another. This isn't inherently bad, but it's a lot of work for the DM, and, at some point, becomes a railroad of quest-to-quest with no other real alternative. You're also cutting off the party from meaningfully interacting with the spaceship upgrade system—there's pretty much no other way to raise the millions of credits needed to buy extra laser turrets and stuff for their ship.

If you decide patrons won't be a major aspect of the game, you might find that the party never leaves their spaceship. Skills other than those related to trading and spacecraft operation will never be used, most of the equipment chapter and the encounters and danger chapter will be left unread, and those wild and unique planets you spent ages generating before the campaign will go completely unnoticed.

If you decide Traveller's character creation is too unbalanced and ought to be replaced by a point-buy system, you might struggle to weave the players' contacts, rivals, allies, and enemies into the campaign (if they even have those), and you might miss out on having hired NPCs running around on the spaceship. This in turn means that there's many fewer opportunities for roleplaying during travel. Additionally, your players might then operate with the expectation that Traveller will have anything resembling game balance, and, as such, be frustrated by the game's hugely uneven random encounters.

Brief Overview of Character Creation

Traveller's character creation is weird, and it was the first thing house-ruled away by my old DM—and I can see why.

Traveller character creation is a minigame of sorts, in which you first generate ability scores (much like in D&D), then pick a career. You make a stat check to qualify for the career, one to 'survive' the career (more on this later), and one to advance. Every time you qualify for the career and/or advance, you get a random skill or stat boost from a table related to your training. In the Army and Marines, for example, you're very likely to get combat-related skills, while as a Merchant you're more likely to get something like Broker or Admin (which tend to be more useful, surprisingly).

You also roll once on a life event table, in which your character might fall in or out of love, make friends or enemies, study abroad, and so on.

You then advance four years in age and try again, and continue for as long as you want. If your character gets too old, they start suffering physical ability score consequences, though these can be bought off with semi-legal anti-aging meds, the consequence of which is starting with high amounts of medical debt.

Rolling to Survive

If you fail a survival roll, you're permanently expelled from your career (but can start another one), and often suffer major debilitating injuries in the form of sweeping permanent ability score damage, though this can be bought off by going deep into medical debt. It's technically possible to die in character creation if your physical ability scores are reduced to zero in this way, in which case you would start over. For that to happen, the player would have to decline treatment—basically, they're making a choice to give up and start over. This is a kind of extreme "safety net" against playing truly worthless characters, I suppose, though I haven't seen it happen yet.

Why is this Good Again?

This way of creating characters is shockingly different from any that I've seen before. The character that you end creation with might not have any resemblance at all to what you sat down and intended to create, which was a huge source of frustration, as a player, in my last two campaigns. It's more common than not to, for example, come up with a concept for a dashing space pilot and end up with a 98 year-old-that-looks-34 white-collar office worker who's got a laundry list of grievances against various corporations who have fired him over the years.

When I've seen this system work well, it's because players went into it with different expectations that they would in D&D. For a D&D campaign, you usually come to the table with a more-or-less fully-fledged character concept, then roll stats (or point-buy) and fill in the boxes. In Traveller, it's more like spinning a wheel and seeing what you'll get.

For the kind of campaign that Traveller assumes, however, this is perfect, and here's why.

First, it sets the tone of the campaign. Traveller is very different from most D&D-esque RPGs. It doesn't provide any guidance for or benefit from, for example, balanced encounters. By creating mechanically unbalanced, unpredictable characters, it is telling the players from the start that there are sharp edges to this game and they have to stay on their toes.

Second, it generates crucially important NPCs for the campaign. Those life events—and some fail-to-survive rolls—often create allies, enemies, rivals, and contacts: NPCs that are guaranteed to be met during the campaign. The book provides tips to the DM to ensure that these NPCs have access to spaceships, as they can be found on the random encounter tables. But here's the fun bit: the Player will be just as pissed at their rival, Captain Morgensen (or whatever) as their character is supposed to be, as he was (according to the events table) instrumental in getting them fired from their career as a space scout. By generating these characters during character creation's life-simulation, it gives them a real, emotional connection that leads to a lot of fun during play. These NPCs can easily function as Patrons (which, as explained in part 2, are the keys to adventure), or can provide paths to Patrons.

Third, it has the potential to start the characters massively in debt. The clear optimal path in character creation is to pay off any injuries by going into medical debt, and chug analgesic anti-aging pills like they're Skittles in order to keep advancing down your career paths, or start new ones. As explained in part 1, Traveller's 'loop' functions best when the PCs are swimming in as much debt as possible. The more debt, the more motivation to travel, and thus the more space pirates and space dragons and space princesses and whatever that they'll meet.

Fourth, it familiarizes them with the setting. The book provides quite a few career path options to the Players, and uses the same to generate its NPCs. Thus, just by reading through the career path options available to them, Players learn a lot about the world of Traveller and the kinds of people they might meet, without having to read lengthy setting handouts or pages and pages of lore or anything like that.

Fifth, it creates gaps in the party's expertise, which encourages hiring NPCs. It's virtually impossible to end up with an adventuring party that can cover every skill required to operate a spaceship, for example. This encourages hiring NPC crewmembers to fill in those gaps, which really helps make Traveller 'work'. A lot of the party's time is going to be spent on their spaceship, so the more people who are on there, the better from a roleplaying standpoint. Also,  

That said, it's not perfect, as…

There Are Some Real Limitations

Mechanically, the main issue that's come up with Traveller's character creation is that it's entirely possible for the party to be missing one or more vital skills, or for a character to be lacking something that would be key to making them 'work'. Traveller's basic dice mechanics harshly penalize untrained skill checks compared to attempting even slightly-trained ones, and some roles can't be easily filled in by NPC crewmembers. If your character never rolls to learn the Gun Combat skill, for example, they'll more likely than not miss every attack they make in the whole campaign. The party can overcome this by hiring marines, for example, but the player might still be bored every time a gunfight starts.

This can be mitigated by, say, letting that player control their hired NPCs in combat directly, but as the game doesn't really provide a lot of guidance for who plays hired NPCs (the DM? the player that hired them? The party as a whole, by vote?), the DM and player will have to come up with their own solution. Since they might not even realize that there is a problem that needs to be solved, this can easily lead to traps (for example, if the DM assumes full control over hired NPCs, many battles will lead to the DM just rolling checks against himself/herself over and over in front of an audience) that generate frustration.

Mechanics aside, there are some narrative implications for character creation that might strike many Players as quite weird. Most D&D Players default to making their adventurers whatever their races' equivalent of early-20s is. Sometimes there's an old wizard thrown in to spice things up, but I'd say 9-in-10 characters I've seen are 'college-aged.'  

Traveller strongly rewards old characters. Sometimes very old. Don't be surprised if the average age of the Traveller characters is the same as the summed age of all of your Players. This isn't necessarily bad—immortal, eternally-young sci-fi characters are kinda neat—but it's also pretty limiting, and may not be within the Players' expectations. If a Player wants to make a character who's a young hotshot just starting out, the rules will punish them severely. They'll have virtually no skills, no money (or debt!), no ship shares (units that track ownership of the spaceship), and no NPC connections.

Making it Work

I'm not going to change these rules until I'm more familiar with the system, but my gut says that many of the game's skills (such as Computers, Comms, and Sensors, or the two skills that govern two different, but similar, kinds of environmentally-sealed armour) could be consolidated to reduce the odds of a missing skill torpedoing a character. I also think flexibly passing back and forth control of hired NPCs between the DM and Players will solve a lot of problems, but deciding on the fly who is in control in a given scenario will probably take some experience as a DM. I’m vaguely aware that there’s a second edition of Mongoose Traveller, which may have done some of these things, but I haven’t played it and as such can’t comment on it.

I think for a satisfying experience, you have to make it clear to your Players not to try to build their characters to a pre-imagined concept, but rather come up with a concept as they play through their character's life. Also, tell them upfront that, in this particular sci-fi universe, anti-aging technology has allowed for the rich and powerful to stay eternally young, and that they can expect to have already retired from one or more full careers before the campaign even begins.

Patrons

Patrons are, essentially, adventure hooks. The 'default' premise is that an NPC offers to hire the party for a job (the reward for which is scaled to the PC's spaceship's cargo hold, so is always competitive with trading for money making). The job rarely goes as planned, and the patron is rarely on the up-and-up, so various twists and turns are ensured as the party attempts to complete the job. These jobs usually require putting the trade 'loop' on hold and doing something else (in fact, they're virtually the only incentive to get out of your spaceship) and are basically the gateway to all gameplay that doesn't involve trading, pirates, and FTL travel.

"Patron" is literally entry in Traveller's random encounter tables, which provides a way for them to enter the campaign, but it's also the kind of thing that can easily just be included by the DM, regardless of what the table says.

Traveller comes with a handful of pre-made patrons, plus tables for generating your own, though I think, as implemented, it's actually the weakest part of the game's procedural content generation, as the ones provided aren't tailored in any way to the subsector involved. Additionally, each one could really use several pages of additional information (for example, "First Lander Thu, Miner," comes to the party to ask them to investigate attacks made on his nomadic asteroid mining clan…

…and that's really all the guidance the DM gets. Investigating an attack like that is way beyond my ability to improvise in real-time at the table. I would need maps, descriptions of supporting NPCs, clues, red herrings, space stations, and who knows what else to run that around the table.

So this is a case where, as a DM, you kind of have to roll up your sleeves and do traditional RPG-esque prep: writing adventures, mapping derelict space stations, planning mysteries, and so on. This obviously takes a lot of work, so you can't easily have dozens and dozens of these up your sleeves. This is why I like to pad out my Patrons with…

"Patrons"

Like everyone else in the world, I saw the Mandalorean this year, so had bounty hunters on the mind. I realized the need for a quick and dirty Patron-replacement (as, again, Patrons are a lot of work that I'm just not up to these days beyond very sparingly), so introduced the concept of a "bounty ticket." This is my first Traveller "house rule," though in many ways, it's more like a campaign setting quirk.

Pictured: bounty tickets. Each is the size of a playing card, and I keep them in a little folder intended for holding magic cards and stuff.

Bounty tickets are Player handouts. Nothing generates excitement like passing around a paper handout. In-game, they're essentially wanted-posters that are faxed directly to the spaceships of bounty hunters and travellers as they're issued (meaning that I literally pull out the card and give it to the players as, in-game, it prints out on their ship's bridge). These involve much less prep than patrons (most of my Bounty Tickets are literally "go here, beat this guy, bring him/her back to this location"). For most of these, I don't have any DM notes other than the card itself (they usually give enough game information, like location and spaceship classes, that I can make up the narrative stuff on the fly). A few more complex ones have a few lines of notes in my binder about twists, secrets, ambushes, etc., but I mostly keep it pretty minimal. This isn't necessarily a recommendation, it's just something that I know about myself as DM: I'm pretty good at making up NPC personalities on the fly, but not names (I once ran an urban fantasy campaign in which I had five NPCs named "Frank" or "Frankie") or stats (except in D&D 3.5 specifically, because I was very cool in high school and as such have the text of that game imprinted onto my immortal soul).

I really went paper-crafts crazy the other day and made a bunch of little handout cards (some with emails to the PC from their contacts/rivals, some with stats for various commonly-occurring spacecraft and stuff. I was about to print out a little card for each weapon in the rulebook before I made myself stop). The other relevant ones are 'encounter cards,' which are basically pre-generated random encounters/events that are a little more complex than the ones that result from the table. These are written with an audience of me in mind, so use shorthand and skim over bits that I know I'm confident improvising around the table.

None of these are technically 'patrons', but all serve the same purpose of injecting hand-made content into the game's procedural content generation to keep things fresh.

Reward-Scaling

Crucial to making Patrons (and "Patrons") work is scaling the rewards correctly. Contrary to most of my DM instincts, this means erring on the side of too much money rather than too little. In D&D, too high of a reward leads to characters that get too powerful, while too low of a reward can be easily compensated for by the DM later with more generous treasure. In Traveller, the prize for doing the task has to be higher than (or at least comparable to) what the party could make doing trading in that same amount of in-game time, or they literally won't be able to afford going on the adventure. The book recommends something like 1,000-2,000cr per ton of cargo on the PC's ship per week of work needed, which is a good starting place, but I'd add even more if the job requires space combat (as damage to spaceships can be very expensive, and worse, time-consuming, to repair). That's why the rewards for my bounty tickets are quite high; most of them involve risking the PCs' spaceship to achieve.

In my experience, there's so many ultra-expensive things in Traveller for PCs to waste/spend money on that you shouldn't overly worry about giving them too much money all in one go. Meaningful spaceship upgrades are in the millions of credits, and there's almost always something on the ship that can be improved, so that money will leave their pockets soon enough.

Patrons and the 'Loop'

Patrons (which are, by default, encountered simply through travelling) add a sub-loop to the Traveller gameplay 'loop'. They lead to adventures (which can include anything: Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles…) but that ultimately deposits the party back in the core loop, ideally with their wallets padded with a huge cash reward (which will quickly be taken by the bank).

Essentially, this is how you include anything in a Traveller campaign that can't be easily generated on a random table. Unlike in most other RPGs, this is more like a spice, added sparingly, rather than parmesan cheese, which is eaten in a 1:1 ratio with the noodles underneath it. (You guys do that too, right?). The 'loop' provides enough fun around the table while running on autopilot (DMing players zooming about the subsector mostly just involves rolling on and adjudicating the results of random tables) that you can afford to be very sparing with prep-work on Patrons.

A Bit of Background

I've been involved in two Traveller campaigns in the past as a player (both with the same DM), and am currently DMing a third. All of them are using Mongoose's first edition. I've never played any other edition of traveller, and know almost nothing about the history of the game. I don't know which mechanics are unique to this edition of Traveller and which have been around for decades.

In the campaigns in which I was a player, I think the DM was continually frustrated with the rules of the game. He wanted to run a tight, story-focused campaign and picked up Traveller assuming it would be, essentially, D&D in space. For his second campaign, he chopped out huge chunks of the ruleset and replaced it with homebrew ones, removing space travel and Traveller's quirky character creation entirely. This worked for the game he wanted to run (he's an extraordinarily talented DM), but I think we all came away feeling pretty lukewarm about the actual rules.

Bored out of my mind in lockdown, desperate for anything to shake up the daily routine, I picked up the copy of Traveller that had been sitting on my bookshelf, untouched, and skimmed through it. In a mood of "I'll humour this weird rulebook," I followed the random subsector creation chapter to the letter, creating a surprisingly-well fleshed out chunk of space to play around in.

It was then that I realized I'd never actually played Traveller. So I dragged my partner along in an experiment: let's play Traveller, exactly how it is described in the book, no matter how flat-out insane the rules seem to be. I will only consider houseruling or changing a rule once we've both figured out what it's for. I learned a ton in this experiment, so, during my kid's naps (oh, right, I have a daughter now, that's where I disappeared to, Internet), I'll write about what I've learned.

(The Carlia Subsector. Not pictured: along with this map is a LONG word document describing the atmosphere, gravity, population, tech level, cultural quirks, government, etc. of the main world in each of these systems, plus a huge table of the price of dozens of trade goods on each planet. These, it turns out, are crucial game aids. I'll get into them later.)

Traveller, I've learned, is a table held up by four legs: Finances, Character Creation, Patrons, and Random Encounters. If you remove any of these legs, the rest of the game stops working. Following them, as described, gives you a rip-roaring swashbuckling adventure of fighting pirates, escaping bounty hunters, smuggling, jailbreaks, and all that good stuff you want in a campaign—but it happens spontaneously. I'll get into it more in detail, but for now, we're going to talk about finances in Traveller.

Yes, the Game Is About Mortgage Payments

The central driving mechanic of Traveller is making mortgage payments for your starship. The assumption is that the player characters are part-owners of an FTL-capable starship that's more expensive than any one person, or any ten people, could ever afford outright. The game (thankfully) provides a quick way to calculate your starship's mortgage payments (something like the value of the ship/240 per month), and for all of the example ships in the book, gives them to you pre-calculated. In the case of my solo campaign, my partner owed the bank a whopping 500,000 credits a month for her Corsair. For scale, that's the exact same price as the single most powerful gun in the game (the "Fusion Gun, Man Portable"), owed monthly. In D&D terms, she had to raise the equivalent of a +5 Longsword every. Single. Month.

(In addition to mortgage payments are smaller fees: life support (i.e., food and water), crew salaries, fuel, and ship maintenance, but the mortgage is by far the largest single expense, so that's what I'll focus on).

I started my partner out with a fueled up and fully-crewed ship (we used pre-generated NPC stats from the middle of the book for her crew, plus an NPC who was generated during her character creation, which I'll get into later). Character creation started her with 10,000 credits, and I told her she had until the end of the month to multiply that by fifty times.

Debt Leads to Trade

The fastest way by far in Traveller to make money is to interact with the very well fleshed-out trade rules. Each spaceship has a certain amount of tons of cargo it can carry, and each world has a list of trade goods for sale at various prices. So the clear way to raise that 500 grand was to speculatively buy trade goods, pick up passengers and freight, deliver mail, and so on. These rules are generous; by stacking modifiers, it's possible to reliably quadruple your principal every time you reach a new planet (which happens every week).

I think my old DM severely nerfed the trade rules (he also didn't enforce mortgage payments, leaving them on the cutting room floor like D&D's Encumbrance rules) due to this seemingly-unbalanced generosity. Again: the best gun in the game is 500,000 credits—so how on earth can a system that lets you make hundreds, even millions, of credits by trading stand?

Well, it turns out, the bank simply taking 95% of your player's earnings every month severely dampens potentially-snowballing nonlinear growth, so my partner and I never saw the kind of wealth explosion that looks inevitable from the rules as written, despite her scraping together everything she could do maximize profits. In all the time we've been playing, despite having already made millions of credits, she actually hasn't been able to buy a gun better than her starting laser pistol, or, in fact, any armour at all. I'll get to why in a moment, because the most important thing about the trade system is that…

Trade Leads to Travel

Garden worlds sell cheap food. High-population worlds buy food for a high price. High-population worlds sell manufactured goods that are in high-demand on non-industrial worlds, and so on. In a quest to maximize profits, the party was locked into a continual tour of the subsector I generated earlier, constantly moving from place to place. Staying put for any length of time meant letting time trickle away (time that could be spent raking in cash for crippling mortgage payments), so that wasn't an option. What wound up happening was that the party went on a self-guided tour of the subsector, stopping in at colourful worlds I'd generated earlier. This happened entirely without me, as DM, having to dangle bait in front of the party the way that I always have to in D&D. Travel is good, because…

Travel Leads to Conflict

I've already spoken at length on the subject of random encounters here, but Traveller really builds the game around random tables in an elegant way. Every time the party jumps from one world to another, there's a chance they'll get waylaid by pirates (the rulebook has a fun, albeit hidden, 'pirate table' that describes different tricks and hijinks that pirates use to attack). 'Pirates' in Traveller are spaceship owners unable to pay their mortgages by legitimate means, so turn to piracy. The fact that the party is always carrying their life savings in trade commodities whenever they travel around makes them a prime target for piracy, and leads to combat with stakes beyond "fight till everyone's dead." The pirates aren't orcs, and don't want to kill the players for no reason. They want to take their cargo and get away as quickly as possible, suffering the least damage as possible, and the players want the opposite. Thus: pre-combat negotiations, tricks, hijinks (my partner, carrying a cargo of "domestic goods," chose to have her crew throw individual toasters out of the cargo bay each in different directions to ensure that the pirates had to engage in lengthy EVA-missions to catch them each, thus allowing her ship to escape without suffering damage).

Traveller's starship battle rules are fun (and integrate into boarding actions that results in player-scale combat), and are triggered primarily just by moving around. Conflict is fun by itself (that's why combat rules are most of the rules in most games), but in this context, have the added advantage, as…

Conflict Leads to Tradeoffs

It became clear to my partner after her first run-in with pirates that her ship and crew were under-gunned. While buying powerful weapons and armour is trivially cheap compared to the amount of money she was raking in through trade (most weapons cap out at a few thousand credits, and she was moving hundreds of thousands a week), actually getting her hands on some was another matter.

Good weapons in Traveller are advanced ones, which have a high-TL (tech level) rating. These weapons are only available on high-TL worlds (each world has a TL rating generated in subsector generation). Making a detour from trading to buy 'adventuring equipment' wound up being an extremely costly endeavour, taking the party weeks out of the way of the most profitable trade route. The closest world in which these weapons exist also outlaws all weapons (various laws are generated procedurally as well) which means engaging in black market smuggling (which is fleshed out in the rules) and risks run-ins with the law.

Compounding this problem was that her Corsair took minor damage in the combat with the pirates, and the nearest world with a shipyard capable of repairing the ship was different from, and out of the way of, the high tech world with fancy fusion guns. Also, getting the ship repaired meant that it would be in drydock for days or even weeks, which incurs an opportunity cost of almost a million credits that could have been made during trade…

Tradeoffs lead to Debt

In her case, she wound up getting her ship repaired, forgoing arming herself and her crew, and skirting dangerously close to bankruptcy kicking her heels as her ship was patched up. There isn't an easy answer to what she 'ought' to have done, which was fun as hell. Further, as a DM, I wasn't annoyed that she was 'messing up the plot' by staying put (or frustrated that she wasn't going to my elaborately-plotted narrative that would occur when she tried to buy black market weapons) because there was no plot. Everything that came about emerged procedurally.

The 'Loop'

The beating heart of a Traveller sandbox campaign is this loop:

Without DM intervention (or Patrons, which are sort of procedurally-generated adventure hooks), this loop can sustain a campaign pretty much indefinitely. What this means as a DM is that any DM-interventions (i.e., adding in pre-written adventure hooks or encounters or whatever) can be attached to any of these steps to allow it to come about during play. It also means that if you don't have any pre-scripted content (to choose an example completely at random, let's just say your hypothetical one-year-old threw your notes in a toilet) you can just sit back and let the loop above take care of providing entertainment.

To bring this back to mortgages, if your players don't have the threat of having their spaceship repossessed by the bank hanging over them like the Doom of Damocles, then the whole system breaks down, and the DM has to do all the heavy lifting of providing character motivation to go explore new planets.

Foreshadowed Encounters

Let's start with the Into the Living Library Wandering Monster table, as seen in the On Wandering Monsters series—the one that looks like this:

This type of table will work as-is for overland encounters, though of course you would change the specific entries depending on the current biome (i.e., instead of a Gelatinous Cube, you might have a ferocious Owlbear). We don't need to use the version that includes traps, because traps tend to be a feature of dungeons, rather than wildernesses.

How Many Entries?

This is a tricky question. More entries on the Random Encounter table isn't necessarily better, as it increases the odds that a given monster is encountered before it has been foreshadowed. It also increases the odds that a heavily foreshadowed Owlbear attack leads to an encounter with a Giant Badger.

I would say that the number of entries you want to put in depends on how much use you expect the region to get. Four rows is probably the minimum you can have in a viable chart, but I wouldn't go higher than eight unless the entire campaign is set there. If you feel the need to include more monsters, instead try splitting the region into sub-regions with different tables, each with four to eight entries.

Remember that since each row has five filled in columns (plus a blank one), it will take at minimum five Random Encounter checks to see every piece of content created per row. If you only call for one encounter check per day, then a four-creature table will give you a minimum of 20-days of adventure without the party discovering everything. If an area becomes more important to the campaign than you'd first anticipated, you can always increase the size of the table later.

Adding Non-Combat Encounters

If the region we're describing is close to civilization, we want the party to have a chance of bumping into a caravan or passing pilgrims or the like. This is where we can afford to cheat: friendly encounters don't need to be foreshadowed, because they act as foreshadowing for each other. Once you've found some farmers heading to market, you definitely won't be surprised if, the next day, you meet some lumberjacks.

The bottom row or two on your Random Encounter table can (if this region represents a fairly civilized one) be made up of encounters with NPCs or other elements of civilization, each in their own cell, whether or not the column is "ENCOUNTER" or "HINT" or whatever. For example:

An encounter with lumberjacks might be nothing more than a friendly wave, but it might also be an opportunity to ask for directions, barter for some food, or, in the worst case, desperately ask plea for help. An encounter with the caravan or peddler might prove particularly fruitful as an opportunity to buy or sell goods.

Summing it Up

That's all I've got for now on this subject! Here's a summary of what I've found so far:

If you want to have Random Encounters in your game but have struggled to make them 'work,' you'll likely need to tweak the resting/recovery rules in order to add a dungeon-like resource management layer of tension to these encounters.

One solution is to require real comfort and shelter to perform a long rest, such as a wayside inn or a house with a welcoming host, but otherwise leave the resting rules unchanged.

Once you have made this tweak, you can either use a conventional Random Encounter table, or something like the Wandering Monsters with Foreshadowing tables as described in my On Wandering Monsters series.

Long Rests Must be Prevented

The main reason why dungeons are gripping is because it is very challenging and dangerous, if not impossible, to attempt a long rest without losing substantial progress (that is, leaving the dungeon).

If we change the rules and/or assumptions to prevent long rests between Random Encounters, just as they are impossible to use between Wandering Monster encounters in dungeons, we can replicate the same resource-conservation and increasing tension effect. So let's try and find a simple, elegant tweak to the rules that gives us the desired behaviour.

"The Gritty Realism" Approach

The Dungeon Master's Guide has an optional rule that touches on what we're looking for:

Gritty Realism

This variant uses a short rest of 8 hours and a long rest of 7 days. This puts the breaks on the campaign, requiring players to carefully judge the benefits and drawbacks of combat. Characters can't afford to engage in too many battles in a row, and all adventuring requires careful planning.

Dungeon Master's Guide 5th Edition, 2014. p. 267.

While I think the goals of this rule are the same as ours, I don't think this is the solution for us. If you tell the party they need to stay put for 7 days to gain a long rest, I can guarantee that they'll be tempted to just bring 8 times as many trail rations and stop for a week after every single battle. This puts too great a conflict between meta-rewards and the narrative, as breaking for a week after every day of hiking is hardly heroism. This houserule also prevents the use of short rests in the dungeon, which harshly penalizes martial characters for reasons described in my Wandering Monster series.

If D&D doesn't provide variant rules that serve our purposes, it's time to turn to other sources of inspiration, such as....

The "Skyrim" Approach

In Skyrim, resting requires a bed or bedroll. These are only placed sparingly in the world, often requiring stumbling into a wilderness campsite (which rewards exploration) or staying at an inn (which are few and far between).

Obviously the bedroll solution is right out, as characters carry bedrolls around with them—campsites in D&D aren't static elements to be discovered, they're items on the inventory sheet. Requiring a bed could work, but it provides a number of problems. Putting myself into the shoes of a Player, I can already imagine the arguments I'd use against the GM who imposed this rule:

What about pre-historical civilizations that didn't use beds? Did they simply never heal their injuries? This makes no sense.

What if I just drag a bed around with me?

Okay, but what if it was on a wagon?

What do you mean my RV wagon can't make it up the mountain pass? I'll go around. I don't care that it takes six months more. The Druid can forage for free food.

Even reasonable, non-disruptive players would end up asking these questions, and I think with this rule we'd simply be trading out one set of detrimental incentives (that is, to simply nuke every enemy with every spell and then take a nap) with another set (those listed above). What if instead of simply a bed, you need something a little more intangible? Such as…

You Need Comfort

All of the problems of the above involve lugging a bed into a context that doesn't typically have beds, so what if we say you need the full context? A few years ago, I hiked the West Coast Trail, an adventure which took my group seven days. I can guarantee that sleeping on a 'bedroll' in a tent is not as relaxing or rejuvenating as sleeping in a real bed. It's not just the sleep, it's the food—there is a world of difference between perfectly-nutritious 'trail rations' and a burger. Part of this is psychological, which doesn't mean it should be discounted—many of the in-game benefits of a long rest are mental (recovering spells, for instance), not physical. By the end of our hike, our bodies were in shambles. We had blisters, bruises, cuts, sunburns, and we smelled terrible—all this despite 'resting' every night, often for substantially more than 8 hours. But one shower, an unhealthy amount of pizza, and a night in a bed later, we felt miraculously cured—much like an adventurer does after a long rest.

So what if, without a certain degree of comfort and security, any length of rest simply counts as a Short Rest?

Let's break down some elements of comfort that seem relevant to a fantasy adventure:

Good shelter—something more than just a tent. A house or inn is ideal, but particularly hospitable cave will do. These locations are few and far between, and may be popular rest stops for other travelers (thus discoverable by asking around in town), or are already the lairs of monsters or bandits.

Hot Food—Specifically not 'trail rations.' Something baked, cooked, boiled, or fried over a fire or stove.

A Comfortable Bed—More than just a bedroll on the rocks. It can be a real bed, a cot, a pile of hay, or the like.

Hygiene—Clothes have to be washed and hung out to dry, some stubble might need shaving (depending on race, gender, culture, and preference), and bodies need to be cleaned. Soap is preferred.

Safety—The characters have to feel safe as they rest. Simply being safe (such as posting a watch and avoiding encounters) isn't enough; actual relaxation must be possible. If the party has to take substantial steps to ensure their physical safety, then it doesn't count as a long rest.

The goal here is that when the party spots a roadsign inn ahead, the wizard says "thank god, a hot bath." Sprinkling roadside inns and friendly farmsteads along the road is something the GM can control, so the difficulty of overland travel can easily be adjusted by increasing or decreasing the rate of pit-stops.

Narratively, this approach fits with much of D&D's source fiction. Think about Bree, Rivendel, Beorn's house, Lothlorien—adventures in both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are punctuated by breaks at memorable pit stops, before which, our heroes are quite ragged. This narrative element is entirely lacking in D&D, as, from a mechanical standpoint, whether you're sleeping in a five star hotel or out in a rainy night, all rest is equal.

There's still a few cracks to work out in this system—for instance, as Milo is fond of pointing out, Prestidigitation negates the need for showers and laundry, players will devise means to dragging beds out with them, and rangers will start bagging deer to replace their trail rations. Also, we don't yet have an elegant solution allowing long rests before dungeons, but I think it’s a start.

My approach to Wandering Monsters in dungeons—which you can read here—won't work for Random Encounters travelling overland because of the nature of resting and healing in D&D. Wandering Monsters represent battles of attrition that wear down spellcasters faster than fighters, and also provide a simple way to simulate an entire ecosystem without using a single iota of the GM's brainpower. However, if the party has the opportunity to rest between every single Random Encounter, they quickly become a waste of time for the reasons mentioned above—the party will blow all of their powerful, limited-use abilities, then simply heal to full before the next battle. Victory is both free and assured, so the GM might as well save everyone some time and roll on a random-XP table every day of travel.

But before we decide to 'fix' Random Encounters, we have to know why they exist in the first place.

Note: For the purposes of article, "Random Encounters" refers to monsters, NPCs, and other stuff stumbled into in an overland journey measured in days, while "Wandering Monsters" refers to monsters, NPCs, and other stuff stumbled into in a dungeon crawl, typically measured in minutes or hours. I believe this is the terminology used in D&D itself, though the phrases have always been used interchangeably in my gaming group, and maybe in yours too.

Why Bother?

I believe that every game mechanic was created for a reason. Not all of them were necessarily well thought out, or solve the problem they were intended to elegantly. For some, like Wandering Monsters, the reason is long forgotten, but the mechanic lingers, leaving people scratching their heads and simply houseruling it out.

Random Encounters are one of a slew of mechanics, such as Wandering Monsters, Treasure Tables, and Rumour Tables, that involve the GM secretly rolling on a secret table to determine a result that they could just make up by themselves and no-one would know—a practice which, I believe, has become increasingly popular. GMs will build bespoke treasure hoards and encountered tailored to the party, rather than relying on a random generator. There's nothing wrong with doing this, and if it works for you, go for it, but there's a reason all those tables and random generators exist in the first place.

The first, and most obvious, is that procedurally generating content makes the GM's job easier. It's much easier to roll some dice and be given an answer than to come up with one yourself. This makes GMing, which is already an intimidating role, much more accessible.

The second, and most controversial, is that procedurally generating content makes the GM into a player. Neither the GM nor the players know what will happen when the dice hit the table, so both are holding their breaths in suspense. The GM, now, is on the side of the players—worrying that a powerful monster will be generated, hoping for good treasure, and so on. This can reduce the sometimes adversarial nature of the relationship between GM and player, because both players and GM know that the GM isn't punishing the players by having them stumble into a dragon's cave—the game did that to them.

The third, and most subtle, is that it means the PCs aren't the centre of the universe. When every encounter isn't custom-tailored to the party's exact level and makeup, the entire nature of the universe changes. This gamey-seeming mechanic can actually enhance verisimilitude by realistically populating the world with "too hard" and "too easy" encounters. Much like with Wandering Monsters, a cleverly built Random Encounter table can simulate a thriving ecosystem without diverting any of the GM's precious attention.

There are a few other benefits to Random Encounter specifically, as well. They can make long journeys actually feel longer than short ones, and give an incentive to find faster methods of travel. I've seen many players scoff at buying horses or hiring ships to travel, because it doesn't actually matter how long it takes to get from point A to point B in-game. Regular Random Encounter checks makes travelling on horseback a substantially safer proposition. Additionally, character classes that are experts at wilderness survival, such as rangers and druids, might be given more opportunities to shine. Rangers in particular need every advantage they can get.

So What Do We Do About It?

The problem lies not within Random Encounters themselves, nor in resting per se, but in the interaction between them. This leaves us three options: give up, change the encounters, or change resting.

Give Up

If we just get rid of overland encounters altogether, the problem is solved. This is a perfectly acceptable solution—it's the one espoused by Vaarsuvius earlier—and it's basically what I've been doing for years as GM, just like I gave up on traps and Wandering Monsters.

Of course, it comes with a heavy set of downsides. Wandering Monsters, as I mentioned in my On Wandering Monsters series, have a slew of mechanical and narrative benefits. Abandoning traps means unfairly shafting the Rogue and de-clawing the dungeon. Abandoning Random Encounters can make overland travel, a staple of the genre, bland and uninteresting—and can shaft the Ranger and Druid, both of whom are supposed to be "good at" travel in the way that Rogues are "good at" dungeons. A good Random Encounter system, similarly, should be able to spice up overland travel, if we can just get it right this time.

Change the Encounters

Given that they are only encountered every few days, the party will be going into each battle fully-charged and rearing to go. This means that the only way to give the battle any stakes is to massively ratchet up the difficulty of the monster, such that it accounts for the party's entire daily complement of abilities. We could also greatly increase the rate of wandering monsters such that there are six or seven every day, rather than one or two, but the thought of how many real-world hours would be spent fighting monsters to simulate even a week's travel makes me ill. Either of these approaches make every Random Encounters into a life-or-death battle to the bitter end, which isn't what I'm looking for as a general solution, though it might work in some cases.

Change Resting

Generally speaking, taking long rests in dungeons should be discouraged, if not prevented outright. A single 'delve' into a dungeon is a resource-management game of judiciously expending spells and hit points in order to overcome obstacles. Overland journeys have no such restrictions, allowing healing between every encounter, thus eliminating much of the "resource management" aspect of the game.

The short rest/long rest dynamic in 5th edition D&D is a good one, and one baked into every level of the rules, so changes made to it should be with a light touch. When tweaking things for overland travel, we don't want to 'break' other aspects of the game, like dungeon crawls or murder mysteries.

If we think of the journey between town and the dungeon as one "day," from a resting standpoint, then we can replicate the "whittling down of spells and hit points" effect that makes dungeon crawls work. We can keep Random Encounters short and sweet, because there is no longer any pressure on each individual one to challenge the party, but rather, to whittle away some of their precious resources. There's a lot of specifics to work out, but I think this is the approach that will work best for a typical D&D campaign.