Last Friday was the first real play session of the Traveller campaign my group is kicking off. You can read Bryson's Journal to get an idea of what happened in the session. I'm not sure yet how the game will meet with my expectations. My hopes are for it to be a real down to earth (no pun intended) kind of humanistic sci-fi, in that it's like real normal people acting like normal people, but in the future. Some of that kind of talk was had going in, but I'm not so sure it'll come to be the case. The reason is that the default role player expectation is that all RPG sessions are basically action movies. Like, if players are poring over weapons lists, chafe at a world having a law level that doesn't let them wander around fully kitted out to kill people, their characters have already killed other human beings, and the expectation is shoot-outs and space battles that no one is phased or shocked by... that's all the regular gamer stuff, right? If a player makes a character and the character doesn't say anything, but will make a skill roll, it's not really building towards the character connections that could support a reason to play beyond the "engaging the mechanics" stuff, right?

Anyways, the first session was A-OK and hasn't set anything in stone really so far. There was a lot of mechanics reference needed, kinda expected for a first session. I really should do up some cheat sheets based on the rough points we noticed from first session. The GM decided I'm running the next session so I'm gonna consider what it is I like in sci-fi and try to bring it to the game. I'm not a super-confident GM, but I have a couple ideas and will see if I can make anything happen. I should be running on Friday, March 15.