Traveller: low berths

Some background: I have a vague plan to run some Traveller sometime soon, so I’ve been doing some reading (Mongoose 2nd edition, the 2022 update), and I’m enjoying immersing myself in it.

I haven’t read this much Traveller since the early 80s, when I started roleplaying. I’m pleased at how familiar everything is – but at the same time, modern and updated.

But I have a few niggles; things that don’t seem quite right. None are game-breaking (and few actually affect actual roleplaying), but they have the sense of something that hasn’t really been thought about properly.

So I’m going to mull over some of them – starting with low berths.

What are low berths?

“Back to the old freezerinos.” – Brett, Alien

Low berths are a staple of science fiction and may be known as cryotubes, stasis, hypersleep pods or whatever. Essentially, the passenger is frozen for the duration of the voyage.

Alien starts with the crew coming out of cryosleep – but you can see the same sort of thing in Avatar, Passengers, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (the Golgafrincham B Ark) and many others. (Here’s a wiki page devoted to the subject.)

Technically, it’s not without its challenges. In particular, the challenge of preventing ice crystal formation. But assuming you can overcome that problem, cryosleep is great for transporting a lot of people a long way with minimal life support.

Traveller, however, is a bit odd about that as they’re typically used for one-week jumps. It hardly seems worth it. (Here’s the Traveller wiki page on low passage.)

What’s wrong with Traveller’s low berths?

In short, they’re lethal. 

My 1982 copy of The Traveller Book says: “Throw 5+ for each passenger when he is revived after the ship has landed. DMs: Atending medic expertise of 2 or better, +1; low passenger with an endurance of 6 or less, -1. Failure to achieve the throw to revive results in death for the passenger.”

So that’s an unmodified 5/6 (83%) chance of survival.

That means if a family of four takes a trip somewhere, they only have a 48% chance of all surviving the journey. (So, a greater than even chance that at least one family member won’t make it.)

Those odds are appalling! Even with a medic on hand (+1 DM), there’s still a 30% chance that at least one family member won’t survive the journey.

(In Traveller, a 200-ton Free Trader has 20 low berths. There’s only a 2.6% unmodified chance of everyone making it.)

I certainly wouldn’t get into a low passage – they’re just too dangerous. It’s literally a game of Russian Roulette. And putting 20 on a Free Trader (taking up 10 tons of valuable cargo space) seems extraordinarily wasteful!

(And the low lottery, where passengers hold a sweepstake on the number of low berth survivors, is just tasteless.)

Mongoose Core Rules

In Mongoose’s Traveller, things are slightly better. Slightly.

The Core Rules say: “There is real danger to the passenger, as a Routine (6+) Medic check (1D x 10 minutes, INT) is required upon opening the capsule, applying the passenger’s END DM to the check. A further DM+1 is applied if the ship is TL12 or higher, while non-humans suffer DM-2. An emergency low berth inflicts DM-1 on this check.”

While at first glance this appears worse, taking longer over a task gives a +2 DM. As there really shouldn’t be any reason to rush defrosting someone from a low berth, this gives an unmodified roll of 4+ to survive, or an 11/12 chance of survival. And Medic-2 makes it an automatic success, making low berth travel much safer.

What would I change?

First, I like low berths. They’re a science fiction stable, and it suits Traveller, but for me, it needs some adjustments.

First, I would assume that the problems of low berth travel have been largely fixed. Low berth travel should be boring. Routine. Safe. Maybe there’s a one in a thousand chance of a problem, with one in twenty of those resulting in a fatality. That makes low berths more realistic.

Second, I would remove low berths as fixtures in ships – maybe have a few low berths for emergencies. Instead, I imagine low berths being part of the cargo. 

There’s no reason for low berths to be per-jump. Instead, you could be put in a low berth at one end of your journey and defrosted at the other, however many jumps later. I imagine a small industry of seamless, low-cost passenger shipping.

Low berths and aliens

Mongoose’s Traveller gives a DM-2 for non-humans, but presumably, that applies only to non-humans trying to use a human low berth. On a Vargr ship, it should be the humans who get DM-2.

That’s assuming they can fit in the low berth in the first place – a K’Kree won’t ever be able to use a human low berth.

And some aliens may be unsuitable for low berths in any eventuality. (Discussed to some extent on this Traveller wiki page about Low Berth Racks.)

Other ideas

Low berths (or their equivalents) regularly turn up in science fiction, sometimes with interesting side effects.

It’s a long time since I read Arthur C Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two, but from what I remember, the hibernation pods had a small rejuvenating effect. How popular would they be in Traveller if regular use was a positive DM on your ageing roll?

On the other hand, in The Legacy of Heorot (by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes), some colonists suffer from Hibernation Instability caused by ice crystals forming in the brain during cryosleep. So maybe one potential side effect of low berths is a risk of -1 to Intelligence rather than death? 

(Similarly, in the Flatlined adventure, the Travellers awaken with temporary amnesia.)

Or might passengers enjoy cellular reprofiling during cryosleep? Maybe not as extensive as the rejuvenation process in Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained (Peter F Hamilton), but perhaps enough to give +1 to Dexterity or Endurance? This would probably be expensive – and I imagine it taking longer than a week. But if you’re travelling from Efate/Regina to Pretoria/Pretoria (11 jumps, at jump 2), why not avoid the tedium of travel, eradicate your hay fever, boost your reflexes, and change your eye colour at the same time?

Next time

Next time, I grumble about starship fuel tanks.