Freelance Traveller

#32: Regular if not Frequent

I mentioned last time that we lost two of our number from the once-every-other-month session in the pub where we’re playing through The Traveller Adventure. As all but one of the players also attends a once-a-month book group that we hold on the intervening months, I didn’t think much about the pace of play. Only one of the players has any experience of Traveller or even role playing, the rest are work colleagues whom I’ve inveigled into playing just by going on about Traveller for so long. I think they just wanted to satisfy curiosity as to what I was on about and then found it wasn’t so bad after all! Or at least, “it keeps tc happy so we can put up with up it” and “it’s quite social around a drink or two and a meal”. I’ll take anything.

It wasn’t until surprise was expressed on the Traveller Mailing List about being able to hold a group together over such an occasional, if regular, game. It has been eighteen months or more now – nine sessions – and you could probably just about say we’re half way through the published text. Although, as I wrote in my last Confession, I was keen to at least put some ‘wandering’, as directed, after the ‘First Call at Zila’ chapter. However, I knew this couldn’t be too endless or we’d never get to the climax of the adventure.

Our long-time Traveller fan would like to play a bit more regularly and I could probably live with once a month, but the others are very happy to keep it casual and relaxed. I’d rather they played occasionally than found it too demanding and gave it up. Book group used to be once a month for about seven years until some of our number found the pace a bit demanding. (I can proudly say I’m the only one to have finished reading every book we’ve tackled across a decade. Even if I’ve hated some.)

Anyway, for various reasons, the evenings we can actually run Traveller are fairly limited. It pretty much has to be a Thursday for a start. It needs to be at least a couple of weeks away from the book group night. A new university term was about to start when all but one of our number would be frantically busy. So it was with some reluctance that the only night we could get together meant that our star archaeologist couldn’t make it. Postponing would mean a couple of months wait and that just felt too long. Then the week before, our glorious Captain had to duck out and I thought again about postponing.

I hate letting them down and them missing out. And yes, there’s probably a tiny bit of ego in there as well. But in the end the remaining four and myself had a good evening and I still think it was better to keep the structure of our regular sessions and perhaps give a hunger for next time!