Traveller

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I have had a memory for almost 40 years of us being introduced to some kind of pen and paper game in elementary school. As a class. Crazy times to think about it. It wasn't D&D. It was...

Well, this is where my memory fades. I knew there were "planets" that had different qualities to them. And we all got a photocopied set of stapled papers about the different planets. I think maybe they had three kids to one planet? There were not that many of us. I don't know how many kids made up a class when I grew up, maybe 30? So 10 planets for three kids to run. I had no memory of playing the game itself... I knew that I was on a planet called "Terra" which doesn't help a lot because there are many games where that is the name of a planet.

Well, I also had a memory of an Apple II being involved. What I thought was that the game itself was translated to the Apple and the next year the accelerated kids were playing it. I have tried to remember the name of this RPG and Apple game forever. What could it be called?

I finally asked chatGPT4. I did it in a sort of way where I was narrowing down questions. First I started with the Apple angle, and it really didn't come up with something, so I switched over to asking about pen and paper RPGs and that is where I struck gold. It had an idea of the game called Traveller, and there was the Terra planet and so forth.

I did some more research and found what I think was the Apple II disk that was being inserted to all the different computers --

https://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Imperial_ ... ery_System

The Imperial Data Recovery System is a computer program published by FASA in 1981 as a play aid to speed up bookkeeping for Traveller, and assist with sector maps, character and ship records, accounting, and encounters. John M. Morrison reviewed The Imperial Data Recovery System in The Space Gamer No. 50. Morrison commented that "I would seriously recommend that FASA take this off the market and re-write it form the ground up. There's definitely room for a Traveller aid program on the market, but not this one."

So it was just a database program of a sort. Not really. But kind of. But it explains why I couldn't find this thing as an Apple game.

I have a memory of the teacher going around for the second year of this to different Apples in a classroom with the same floppy disk, which she did not think was ideal.

Anyway. Traveller. Traveller. I did some searches on it and it seems like the single most overcomplicated RPG in the world. I would imagine it's probably fun, but also the sort of thing that pretty much becomes the only thing you do in life. There's a lot of books and add-ons and modules to this. (And I had never heard of it coming up on its own for the, what, 25 years I have been on the internet.)

Forget the AI piece of it, the ability to just *search* with chatGPT is so much better than Google. Google is obsessed with making sure whatever you type isn't what it looks for and it's SEOed to hell and it really is another terrible product of theirs if you really want to learn something. I am sure OpenAI will ruin chatGPT eventually but for now it's the most effective way of searching for info online that I use.

[Flack]

Video game forums are always getting those "help me remember this game" posts. Sometimes they're super easy to solve ("it seem to remember it included bards, and tales...") but more often than not the memories are vague, generic, and sometimes, incorrect. The problem with identifying these games is unless you remember it too, they're tough to google because people don't write articles the way people ask questions. ChatGPT is better equipped for these types of queries. I'm wondering if some of those old threads about might be solved using ChatGPT.

What I've found particularly useful is generating lists. For example, if I wanted to know the Shaw Bros. ten most popular films, or the ten best horror films of 2023, you either have to do the legwork yourself or hope that someone has written an article that contains that exact information and it titled in a way that it'll come back in a search. But you can use ChatGPT to ask, you know, what are three movies about soccer. Or five. Or ten. And it just kind of generates the article you were hoping to find using Google. There's definitely a use case there, as long as the results are complete and trustable.

As for your game, glad you found it. Sounds like a good Assembly project for the ol' PC Jr.!