So I froze my first character, Bran, and decided to create a new character and try and play a more ‘kinetic’ scenario. With all my new found knowledge, I knew I had to check and constrain and dictate to Chat to try and get it right. So I verified all the Book 1 tables for a Marine. The Term roll table (enlistment, survival, etc) was all correct. Asking for the rank table, it provided some mishmash, giving me two tables, starting with enlisted ranks and progression to officer ranks. So I had to correct that. Then with the skills tables, it started out well getting 100% on the Personal Development Table, and I think only one error on the Service Skills, but both Advanced Education tables were out to lunch. With those all corrected, I fed it entry skills for Marines (enlistment, and then commission). Then I check muster tables, another mixed bag. Benefits were mostly correct but missing the line 7 for rank 5 or 6 since they get a +1 DM. Cash tables were all wrong, which I expected from before. So with all the tables corrected and locked, and telling it to run strict die rolling, I got into attributes.
The first set really sucked so I tried again (I know, I’m not doing true Traveller. But since this is an experiment with not really a lot of roleplay, I wanted something decent). Second sucked too. So I said give me a table of 6 sets of rolls and I’ll pick. In those 36 numbers there was only one double-digit (a 10), so I asked if it was truly doing 2d6 or just a random 2-12 calculation. It said it was doing 2D6 and this was just an oddity. Sure, a 1% chance of that, so possible, but not expected. I meant to ask for another set of 6 sets of attributes, but it gave me one, and it was ok so I just went with it.
For my test (and my normal house rule) I play a modified version of CTs survival roll option. Miss by 1 just wounded, miss by 2 seriously wounded, but stay in, miss by 3 or more seriously wounded and complete the term with just one skill roll. I use the wounds for the character story. This works better with Mercenary/High Guard etc when you have the 4 assignments in each term, as you can create a story based on the assignments also. But other than this survival mod, I play rolling for reenlistment.
I ended up with a 2-term marine LT, with Cutlass-1 (Marine base skill), Revolver-1 (Marine LT base skill), Auto Pistol-1, ATV-1, and Vacc Suit-1. One other skill roll was a +1 Edu. With three muster rolls, I took two benefits and 1 cash, getting a plus Int and Mid Passage, and 10,000credits.
So not a stellar character, but functional, and with the skill-0 in all weapons I could still do security work.
So I asked Chat to start a new campaign with this character. Showing it’s penchant for just continuing, even though I said ‘new campaign’ it just started right in with the other characters ‘world’. This meant it had me just landed on Jenghe. At least it had kept the right UPP with a tainted atmosphere (I verified the UPP just to be sure). When I asked the cab driver about a place to look for work, it pointed me to the ‘Exchange’ which was the same place mentioned in my previous campaign. So unless you specifically tell it to start from scratch, maybe give it a new world and other parameters, it will just carrying on with what you had been doing with it.
I wanted to try and play with a group of NPCs, and as soon as I asked that of a potential patron, it shifted smoothly to her being able to accommodate that. So I was quickly on a team with a contract mission. This mission was also tied to the previous campaign. Not explicitly, and not until the end really, but still the same kind of comms/data package MacGuffin at the center of it all, and also still seeming to conflate computer system nodes with physical locations. Not a big deal, but again showing it can’t create something new unless you tell it too or start a new session.
The mission was assaulting a location, securing it, and calling in the client to take over. It did a fairly good job of tracking the 4 of us, but most of the action centered on me. I saw this in my first run with the other character, where after some queries from me it explained it was trying to focus the narrative on me and for me to be successful. It was all theater of the mind and it didn’t do a good job of painting the picture, especially for a tactical assault. I did not try and query it much for more details though.
When the shooting started, since I said show all rolls, it showed a 6+ target number. I took the kill (😊), but corrected it to 8+. I also tried to correct it for skill DM, but may have been too specific, since going forward the only DM I got was when I used my pistol. It didn’t seem to ‘know’ the mechanics of Traveller combat or injury. Overall it was just doing a narrative ‘game’ with the only mechanic being my shot rolls. But on those rolls it was not applying any DMS. There was also no surprise rolls, initiative, or DMs for cover/concealment, movement, aiming, etc. At the end I fired my pistol blindly down a ladder shaft at someone climbing up the ladder. Granted I said I was firing down the ladder, so thinking as a GM I might not give a penalty for not being able to see the target, but I thought there might be something. But no.
When the mission was over and we were debriefing as a team (and the team leader deferred to me a lot, so again the Chat doing narrative with my character as the focus), I wanted to compare skills to see what holes we had. Chat just gave the NPC skills as generic descriptions, not as Traveller skills. So it isn’t ‘rolling up’ NPCs with attributes and skills.
So here’s another bottom line. I think unless you feed it a lot of mechanics data and tell it specifically to use it, to create NPCs with attributes and skills, to use all combat and wounding mechanics, it will always default to just narrative storytelling with your character as the focal point, and driving towards constant success. So there is no real game there, with the risk of dying.
So I’m back at the same point, trying to decide how much I want to invest in it. It acts like it knows all about Traveller, and just saying Classic Traveller it came back saying ‘ok, we’ll just use Books 1-5’. But it can’t really discern ‘just books 1-5’, and it doesn’t ‘know’ what that means when I ask it to run a game using those books. It doesn’t ‘know’ there are mechanics in there it is supposed to use, and details it is supposed to track (wounds, ammo, etc). It’s doesn’t ‘know’ to be a GM to take what the player says at face value and hold them to a ‘reality’. After I bought my guns and ammo, we were heading to the hotel and I just said ‘my auto pistol is in a drop leg holster’ and it added that to my character sheet. It didn’t say ‘you didn’t buy that, do you want to go back?’. Another example of just trying to carry the narrative forward with success for my character.
Reading more about ChatGPT, it is a language model designed to carry on a conversation. It wants you to ask it questions. When I was asking it about orbits and star luminosities and such (with in the context of Traveller, so it ‘knew’ I was wanting to work within the game) it kept offering GM tools with table and such. So maybe it is better as a GM aid to create those kinds of things, unless you just want to run a narrative campaign and not worry about mechanics. I’m sure you could guide it to not be so focused on character success, and put some probability into the game. For the first character it was consistently ‘rolling’ against a target number by difficulty with DMs for skills and planning. That was more fun and gave a sense of potential failure.
I so want this to be a simple and efficient Traveller GM, but I don’t think it can be. I think the amount of work to teach it how to do that would be equal to creating my own scenarios.
