You know what? Let’s not clip counters yet, because I have more to say about Traveller. One of the biggest problems we had with it as kids was figuring out what it wanted us to do. Please see the document below as an example. Study it carefully because there will be a quiz later

This is from Book 4-Mercenary. It describes a “dream ticket” of a job you could sign on to as a newly minted space soldier of fortune. 50 million CR reward to essentially take over a world. You obviously wouldn’t get all fifty, but success obviously means riches. So?

I hope you studied hard for the quiz. Did you pass? I hope so, because here are the answers. Look at the highlighted parts of the document below. As soon as we read this, we were like, “how do we do that?” We are part of a reinforced battalion. We need to fight 60 divisions? How?

That question works a couple ways. First of all, how do we physically resolve this? We have rules for man-to-man combat. On starships. There is no Traveller: Land War in Asia module. We have these (both of which came out after Mercenary, btw):

None of that helps. Some 13-year-olds who were simultaneously into the Europa series looked at that and were like, “is there some game we can buy that could resolve this?” Our only conception of this kind of warfare on the tabletop looked like this (thanks to BGG for the pic):

So we had no way to play this out. Fast-forward THREE YEARS after Mercenary, and we get Striker: a ruleset for 15mm Traveller miniatures. It is designed by Frank Chadwick of Europa fame, so it’s gotta be legit.

This presents its own problems. (a) we have nowhere near the money to start buying and painting tons of new miniatures, and (b) it isn’t even at our scale. Look at this direct quote from the rulebook. A rulebook we are reading to figure out how to do battalion/division combat.

So if it is “unlikely” that even a battalion is gonna be on the map, how would a division even work? Thanks a lot, Frank.

So we were stuck. But remember back a few posts ago where I said the question worked a couple ways? How to resolve it is only one of the ways. The other way is, “how does a reinforced battalion, even if it is 3-4 tech levels higher than the enemy, defeat 60 divisions?”

And that was problem number two. We even went so far as to draw up a map of a central country (the “Lovrenyi” mentioned in the ticket text) and make all kinds of war plans. How do you surround 60 divisions with six of your own? You’d have to be a cartoonish version of this guy.

But that was precisely the point. It didn’t make sense on its face. Just like a bunch of rag-tag rebels defeating a militarily invincible Imperium by finding a secret exhaust vent that makes a base blow up and then somehow they win even though there are still 1000 battlecruisers.

That’s what we couldn’t see, because we were constantly evaluating it as a quantitative exercise, just like War in the East or Tobruk or whatever we had on the table at any given moment. The book gave us an order of battle. Therefore, we had to use it.

It never occurred to us that it wasn’t our problem to solve. It was the GM’s problem. If it truly was a suicide mission, that wasn’t really worth making into a story. At least, an ACTUAL suicide mission wasn’t, where the players all died. But what about a suicide mission where...

... you figure out that it’s suicide, and take the money and outfit a battalion and then use extortion to get extra help, in the form of payoff to some country’s government. Or you get there and you find the politics such that you can form an alliance with another country?

Or even more offworld help? Or maybe the quality of the enemy troops is bad? Or more politics? It’s a background for a role-playing game, not a staff exercise at the Imperial War College. It’s about telling a story, and that’s on the GM to take the framework and make it possible.

What we had was the possibility for a running story of Hammer’s Slammers, with us as grunts and the GM giving us all kinds of colorful NPCs. The setting allowed for some cool combat, but even cooler story. Too bad we didn’t see it then. Can’t wait to see what Harold dreams up.