In part 1
of this series, I described how Mongoose Traveller’s
spaceship mortgage rule becomes the drive for adventure and action in a
spacefaring sandbox, and the ‘autonomous’ gameplay loop that follows.

In part 2,
I talked about how Traveller’s Patron
system gives the DM a tool to pull the party out of the 'loop’ and into more
traditional adventures.

In part 3,
I talked about Traveller’s unique
character creation system, and how it supports the previous two systems, and
how to avoid some of the pitfalls that I’ve seen in play.

In this
part, I’ll talk about how each of these three systems interacts with, and in
fact, relies upon, Traveller’s random
encounters.

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.

If you decide random encounters won’t be a major
aspect of the game, you might find that the party never meets a patron, never has
the opportunity to engage in piracy, never has any trouble watching their
credits climb and climb indefinitely, and never has much motivation to make
money (and thus, go on adventures and travel around) beyond paying off their
mortgage.