Freelance Traveller

Social Skills in Traveller

by Jim Vassilakos

This article originally appeared in Alarums and Excursions #526 and is reprinted with the author’s permission.

I’m in a bit of a loop regarding a question that, strangely enough, involves roleplaying games. It has to do with getting a game system to facilitate roleplaying while at the same time encouraging the creation of socially-adept characters, such as journalists, lawyers and diplomats. In a nutshell, it seems to me that since combat must be precisely codifiedI suppose combat could be resolved by GM fiat, or there could be a group vote, however, dice in conjunction with critical hit and fumble tables (or the like) are particularly useful, as (IMHO) one of the things that makes an RPG an RPG are the random occurrences that nobody can control, which can occasionally take the story in surprising directions., social skills must be similarly codified so as to be made useful in terms of impacting the plot, but that once you do this, this codification ends up mechanizing interactions that are better handled through dialogue.

For example, Mongoose’s edition of Traveller has a social skill called Deception. As one might expect, characters can use it to lie convincingly. Any character can tell a lie, of course. It’s just the case that those with the skill are better at it. For example:

Player: I go to the prince.
GM: There are two guards at the entrance to his chambers. They’ve got these really ostentatious uniforms, super-colorful, with ribbons and little decorative wingsIt’s a post-decadent society, so this doesn’t surprise any of us..
Player: I laugh. My character wouldn’t be able to help it.
GM: One of them glares at you. “What’s so funny?”
Player (in his character’s deep Russian accent): “Your pretty little wings. They make you look like an overgrown chicken.”
GM: “Did you come here to see the prince?”
Player: “Of course. You think I came to talk to you?”
GM: “Let me check to see if he’s in.” The guard opens the door a crack and then shuts it again. “He’s busy.”
Player: “Aw… what the matter? I hurt your precious feelings?”
GM: He rests his hand on his sidearm. So does the other. “You want to take this to the next level, asshole?”
Player: Ah... shit. Korvek says, “Look, I’m just teasing, okay? I’m sure when you joined the palace guard, it was because you thought by wearing a uniform you’d get laid more. Chicks dig uniforms. So you decided to ignore the wings, and over the years, you gradually forgot about them, except for every time you get reminded by some asshole like me, and it pisses you off, which is fine. I can respect that. But if you don’t let me through to see the Prince, who do you think is going to get in trouble? You or me? Don’t think too hard. This is not a trick question, my friend.” I’ve got two points in Deception. (The lie here is that Korvek has no basis for saying the guard will get in trouble, but the guard doesn’t know that. Will he chance it?)
GM: Roll.
(The player rolls. It’s a fairly high number.)
GM: “Just to get you out of my hair…” The guard opens the door.
Player: “I’ll waste no more of your valuable time. That way you can get back to your Victoria Secret commercial.” Korvek laughs and strolls into the prince’s chambers.

I may have embellished a bit, but this, roughly speaking, happened at a Traveller game I attended this past week, and, needless to say, I enjoyed it. Korvek’s player, Jason, is one of the few players I’ve seen who adopts an accent for his character. I did this last time I played Traveller, but this time I decided to play it straight. Accents can feel a bit goofy after a while. But watching another player use an accent for his character’s dialogue and pull it off with such flair was humbling.

Perhaps I should back up a bit.

Last month, in one of my comments, I mentioned that I’d been invited to a game, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on account that my “tribe” seems to me vanishingly small. The reasons for my feelings on this can be gleaned in that essay on Charisma I wrote roughly a year agoSee “Charisma in AD&D” in A&E #513., wherein I talked about what I view as the difference between roleplaying and rollplaying and about how D&D’s evolving skill system encourages the latter while discouraging the former. I fingered Charisma as the prime culprit.

Traveller doesn’t have a Charisma statAlthough, it has Social Standing which sometimes factors into social situations., yet despite this, it has quite a few social skills, and it had them prior to AD&D playtesting nonweapon proficiencies in 1985Non-Weapon Proficiencies were what AD&D called skills. See Oriental Adventures, page 52. If you were playing 1st edition Traveller when it originally came out (1977), in terms of social skills, there was Administration, Bribery, Gambling, Leader, Steward, and Streetwise. Book 4: Mercenary (1978) added Interrogation and Recruiting, Book 5: High Guard (1980) added Carousing and Liaison, Book 6: Scouts (1983) added Broker, and Book 7: Merchant Prince (1985) added Legal and Trader. In short, there were plenty of social skills, but back then, resolving tasks in Traveller was somewhat haphazard. There were a lot of specific rules that were basically guidelines for GMs to fill in the blanks. For example:

Streetwise: The individual is acquainted with the ways of local subcultures (which tend to be the same everywhere in human society), and thus is capable of dealing with strangers without alienating them. This skill is not the same as alien contact experience. Close-knit subcultures (such as some portions of the lower classes, trade groups such as workers, and the underworld) generally reject contact with strangers or unknown elements. Streetwise expertise allows contact for the purposes of obtaining information, hiring persons, purchasing or selling contraband or stolen goods, and other shady or borderline activities.
Referee: After establishing throws for various activities desired by the characters (such as the name of an official willing to issue licenses without hassle: 5+; the location of high quality guns at low prices: 9+), allow streetwise as a DM. If no streetwise expertise is used, impose a DM of –5.

Each skill had different parameters on how to set the target numbers and dice modifiers (DMs), so you had to be pretty familiar with the rules or you’d end up taking a lot of game time trying to figure out how to wedge a peculiar situation into a particular skill’s rubricWhat’s the target number in order to find a midget hooker?. And sure, the player could just throw the dice, but it was often more fun to roleplay this stuff out, so as a GM, I’d acknowledge that a player had streetwise and try to make useful suggestions to help them find whatever it was they might be looking for, not that I have much contact with the underworld, but I’d seen my share of crime movies.

In any case, the whole thing had to be played out, at least in shorthand. We could speed through it, but buying or selling illicit goodies created opportunities to establish relationships with the various NPCs along the way. In my view, at a minimum, the first meeting between a PC and any potentially recurring NPC should be played out in detail as well as any scene that includes an unlikelihood upon which the plot turns. This sentiment, of course, could easily result in an hour or more of roleplaying just to unload some contraband.

All this roleplaying tended to give the PCs an assortment of contacts, at least for as long as they stayed on the planet. Even more importantly from my point of view, it gave the GM an assortment of NPCs through which to push or pull the PCs, effectively pushing or pulling the plot. In short, the story could switch from finding a buyer for some illegal goods into something much more nefarious. It all depended on the GM’s imagination and how “loose” he or she was in terms of allowing the characters’ interactions to direct the plot, rather than the other way around.

Strangely, despite the fact that Traveller used skills well in advance of AD&D, it didn’t get a unified task resolution system until 1985See Travellers’ Digest #2, page 6., and this wasn’t widely adopted until 1987They put it in on page 9 of Megatraveller’s Players’ Manual, perhaps to make sure it would be read by players, rather than sticking it in the Referee’s Manual. In other words, combat had always been well-enough defined that combat-related skills were actually valuable, but until 1987, noncombat skills were more difficult to use, and the situations where they could be used were less common and usually involved lower stakes, so people tended to favor combat-oriented characters, since it was generally more fun to play a badass PC than one who’s a really exceptional steward.

In any case, the Mongoose edition of Traveller now includes even more social skills, such as Advocate, Deception, Diplomat, and Persuade. So, given today’s rules, the above scene could have been replaced by:

Player: I’ll use Persuade to bluff my way past the guards.
GM: Roll.

In a way, I suppose, this flexibility is a good thing. But my concern is that roll-playing will often crowd out roleplaying by virtue of the fact that there are these very general social skills on the character sheet that can be applied to a wide swath of social interactions. On the other hand, I also see the value to this. Some people are better liars than others. Some people are better at persuasion. I can imagine a PC who’s maxed out Deception and Persuasion to such a degree they can essentially talk their way out of (or into) nearly anything. It reminds me of a movie I never sawCatch Me If You Can (2002).

Also, I can understand why a player and/or GM might want to shorthand this stuff to the extreme, because the plot doesn’t have anything to do with, say, insulting the guard. Actually, whether or not it does depends on subsequent events. It might have an effect. For example, the guard might be a long-time friend of the prince and so could influence his thinking about the PC. Or the prince might say, “I’m sending Charles along to keep an eye on you. You’ll treat him as a member of your crew… as a fellow officer. That way, I’ll be sure to be kept apprised of what’s really going on, as opposed to trying to read between the lines of whatever reports you deign to send.” That might have been a good move on the part of the GM, as the insulted guard would have instantly become an important NPCOf course, given that I don’t know how the crew was selected, who’s to say the royal family doesn’t already have a spy onboard?.

In my experience, the longer the interaction, the more likely events will take a life if their own. If dice get in the way of a scene, even one that’s being roleplayed exceedingly well, there’s the risk of cutting things short. You end up with an outcome, but you’ve lost all the other possibilities, whatever they might have been. That, in essence, is why I’m against these social skills that so many roleplaying games now have. At the same time, however, without useful social skills, you end up with a party of characters more heavily tilted toward combat, and that’s not good either.

The irony is that we’re playing characters who are more socially skilled but at the expense of actual roleplaying. Again, this is not to say that dice and roleplaying can’t co-exist or that some randomness isn’t a desirable and perhaps even necessary facet of RPGs. All I’m saying is that social skills mechanize and thus potentially crowd out roleplaying in situations that should be resolved through dialogue and perhaps the occasional hidden roll of the dice by the GMSee my article in A&E #299.

The reason I find all of this a quandary is that, at least in the 70s and 80s, it was exceedingly rare for players to decide to play journalists, or lawyers, or, say, diplomats. Those were typically the NPCs, whereas the PCs were the ones running around with the big guns, and so I like a system that encourages players to play characters that are primarily noncombatants. How do you do this without including rules that put these non-combatants on an equal footing with the combatants in terms of being able to reliably influence the plot? That’s the question that has me in this loop.

In any case, the good news is that I was pleasantly surprised by the Traveller game. We’re playing the Pirates of Drinax campaign, which I knew nothing about going in. Most of the players had already generated characters during the previous session, so I selected one of the NPC crewmembers the GM had generated, a lawyer with a criminal past who was mainly competent at some of these soft skills I mentioned earlier.

The one thing I found lacking was an explanation for why we were on the crew. Why was my character hired in the first place? I suppose I should probably suggest something to the GM. Maybe my character is a shyster lawyer who gained the confidence of one of the members of the royal household or one of their advisors. Or maybe, the GM suggested, he was representing the interests of people the royal family was persecuting back on his home world (a captive government), so he ended up in jail due to politics rather than misdeeds. This, of course, begs the question of why they would then trust someone they’d imprisoned, allowing him on the crew.

The mission is sort of messed up, and it’s even possible that we’re all cannon-fodder. Basically, the king wants us to do piracy against his neighbors, so the neighboring worlds will reach out to him for protection. He wants to bring them under his umbrella and reunite his kingdom, which splintered long ago due to decadence and war with the Aslan. If he could achieve this, he’d stand a good chance of getting recognized by the Imperium and perhaps ultimately become an imperial duke. Of course, if people find out he’s funding pirates, that’ll become a lot less likely. Hence, this whole operation is rather hush-hush. Personally, I think he’s taking a reckless course of action that will likely end up biting him in the ass. If we get captured, and an interrogator administers some truth serum, a lot of beans are going to spill.

The King’s son, the prince, seems more levelheaded. He’d prefer that we go around as emissaries, helping bring the kingdom back together through diplomacy and building mutual trust, but the king’s daughter, the princess, wants us to cut a swath of blood across the subsector, inspiring fear and a desire for more centralized rule. We’ll see how it goes, but so far, I’m enjoying the group as well as the political background, even if I find it a bit difficult to believe.