Retrospective Review: Traveller 2300 / 2300AD

When it's over, when it's done
Let it go
- The Bangles, Let It Go

Third in the sequence, here's a look back at 2300AD, which I ran for some two decades, first in its own universe, and later using other settings, most notably the Official Traveller Universe.

The game picks up the setting of Twilight: 2000 and advances it 300 years, with humanity now recovered from that war and exploring systems within 50 lightyears of Earth, interacting with half a dozen alien species as it does so. As part of game development, GDW staff took part in a strategic wargame, playing through that 300 years as the rulers of countries, and this shows through in the detailed politics and history of the setting.

Core Mechanics

Roll 1d10, apply modifiers, meet or beat a target number to succeed.

Where it went a bit strange was damage, which required you to roll for hit location,  then deduct the toughness of the armour from the penetration value of the weapon, then roll against the remainder to get a type of wound whose severity depended on the hit location, with different wound types inflicting different penalties on future actions. I could see what the designers were trying to do, but it was a lengthy and complex process.

The Editions

Traveller: 2300 (1986). The game appealed to me for several reasons, chiefly that Traveller's technology was - apart from jump drives - rooted in a 1970s worldview, and a decade later SF and actual technology had both moved on; Traveller: 2300 felt like the future in a way that Traveller no longer did, and as extra materials were released that felt more true. Using actual 3D starmaps also helped - I remember during one session taking the players outside and pointing into the sky, saying "You're now moving from that star to that one". However, this edition had two major problems. First, while it used a variant of the DGP task system from MegaTraveller, it neglected to change the target numbers to reflect the use of 1d10 rather than 2d6. Second, there was no method for improving skills or characteristics once a PC mustered out, although it wasn't much work to add one. (The second edition would correct both of those, although the self-improvement mechanism only addressed skills.)

2300AD (1989). This fixed the problems with the first edition, added lots more background information, and changed the title to avoid confusion with mainstream Traveller. The tagline changed from "Mankind discovers the stars" to "Man's battle for the stars", perhaps to reflect that the published adventures largely focused on the war against the Kafers in the French Arm. There was more detail on aliens, which for the most part actually felt like aliens rather than people in animal suits with a zipper up the back.

2320 AD (2007). This version was an alternative setting for Traveller20, which I never saw, bought, or played; it came out around the time I was starting to move on from 2300AD.

2300AD (2012). Another alternative setting, this time for Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition. I know it exists, but that's all I know.

As you can see, the setting hung around for decades after the game engine passed out of general use, and there seems to be a consensus that it should now be treated as the variant Traveller setting it was originally taken for.

Pros and Cons

Credible and internally consistent setting, especially the colony worlds and the technology, with built-in factions, politics, and aliens. The setting had four major areas by the end, each suited to a particular type of campaign; Earth for cyberpunk adventures, the French Arm for military ones, the American Arm for law enforcement and criminal scenarios, and the Chinese Arm for those wanting to pit themselves against a transhumanist terrorist conspiracy.

The star system and world generation systems hold up surprisingly well even today, although recent astronomical observations show that a lot of stars aren't where we used to think they were, and if you use the latest locations the trade routes get seriously mangled.

Good rules for NPCs, with four different levels of combat competence and card draws for personalities. I carried on using those for a long time after I stopped playing the actual game.

Complex and time-consuming character generation. This had good points, such as the basic skill levels every member of a career began with and the option to take a second career before starting play, and bad ones, such as the strange way skill points were spent during character creation, which was not the way skills were improved in play. It was also entirely possible to create PCs who had no languages in common with the rest of the party, which could be entertaining.

No playable alien races. PCs were all humans of different body types which gave modifiers to their physical attributes, although later when I used the game for Traveller proper it was easy to say that aslan were mesomorphs, vargr ectomorphs, and humans normal. This approach simplified character generation, and also allowed each alien race to have a secret to uncover (which alien PCs would have known from the start).

Changes Over the Years

The game as I knew it only lasted through two editions, so these are more about how I used the game than how it changed over time. The second edition was a solid improvement on the first, but the Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook felt like an attempt to cash in on the then-popular cyberpunk game market rather than something that grew naturally from the setting backstory; it didn't really fit in.

I adopted the second edition for all my SF campaigns, and used it for Ringworld and Stargate campaigns as well as several in the Official Traveller Universe.

The main thing I eventually felt it lacked was some sort of point-buy character generation, so I built a system for that. By the time it was ready for use, though, people already had well-established PCs, so though I was happy with it, it was never used in anger.

My Future with 2300AD

2300AD is still the game I have run the most, even more than Traveller, although I expect Savage Worlds will edge past it into first place eventually.

However, I haven't touched it since the early 2000s, and I can't see myself returning to either the game or the setting. For me, it was the best RPG of its day, but that day is now over.

And as The Bangles observed, when it's over, let it go.