Travellin' Man

[stoutfellow]

James Nicoll just posted a retrospective on the old SF role-playing game Traveller. That brings back some memories of my own... When I was a student at Chicago, I got involved in a D&D group. At one point, our GM suggested we try out this new SFnal answer to D&D; we were all game for it, so he set up a scenario and let us loose.

At the end of the first session, our party was aboard a submarine, hiding from the Imperial Space Navy, who were hunting us on charges including poaching, assault (several counts), hijacking, kidnapping, trespassing on government property, theft of government property, destruction of government property, and extortion. We were, in fact, not guilty of poaching. We meant well, though...

(The GM later suggested that we had gone into a game set in civilized places with the mind-set appropriate to the barbarism of D&D. Nicoll's pet phrase for D&D adventurers is "murder hobos". (I think that was Nicoll, at least.))

Ah, me. Haven't played any of those games in decades; video games are a poor substitute.

Comments

[graydon]

There's a lot of Traveller scenarios to be had out of the realization that if you're sufficiently annoying, the Imperium will show up. And the Imperium is vast beyond comprehension, so you have no idea what will show up.[1]

It's definitely a different mindset.

I'm not sure "murder hobo" is original to James; I know I've encountered it elsewhere.

([1] To the point where this has layers; the players can be much more concerned about the secret psionic psychologists bent on curing them than the Navy, so, ok, you're a thoughtful GM, have the Navy send someone who spreads a rumour the Navy is using the players to develop a connection graph of the local criminal element, because the Navy doesn't want the secret, etc., getting too much success and thus budget.)

[stoutfellow]

Well, I'm fairly sure that Nicoll's journal is where I first encountered it. There's probably a variant of Zwicky's Illusion of Recency operating - the frustratingly common linguistic tendency to interpret "new to me" as "new".