[Jack Holcomb]

[QUOTE=capnzapp;8866316]I think this is because Traveller attracts those interested in "hard sci fi", which in its old school is very hard indeed.

Traveller attracts a lot of people with a lot of different interests. When I was 12 and I ordered the Starter edition from Sears catalogue for Christmas (no, really! 1983!), I just wanted something space opera. I was a Star Wars nut, the first SW RPG was still five years in the future, and Gamma World and Tunnels and Trolls just weren't getting me there. (And AD&D was what my older brother played...)


Things like flesh and blood, heart and warmth tend to fall by the wayside when people go bananas designing their own fusion reactor or grav tank.

There are gearheads in Traveller fandom--but I don't think they're qualitatively different from, say, the folks who spend a LOT of time figuring out optimum power builds in HERO or M&M, or the folks who look for the best synergistic bangs from their feats in d20, etc. I'd say it's pretty easy for "heart and warmth" to disappear in those deliberations, too. I don't like playing like that, but some do, and I'm not gonna say they're wrong. And since all RPGs are imaginary, I'm not sure what to do with "flesh and blood" there, except to say that Traveller's damage system always made my players VERY aware of their human frailty...

That's at least my impression. I recall one adventure compilation for GDW's Traveller called "Smash & Grab". It was an utterly uninspiring laundry list of different military maneuvers, basically using high tech to best one Evil Overlord after another.

I recall another GDW adventure (a boxed set) called "Tarsus: World Beyond the Frontier" which was about a group of characters who return to one of the PCs' homeworld to help save the family farm from various threats. And I ran most of "The Traveller Adventure" (a LONG campaign), which required all sorts of action, including a lot of interpersonal, in-character play. You could play Traveller any number of ways, and a lot of different options were supported.


That might be the ner'ds dream, to finally be able to defeat the jocks using science, but it didn't leave much room for characterization of PCs and NPCs, no intrigue, no drama.

When I watched the first episode of Firefly, my first thought was, "O my god, this is JUST like Traveller!"--and the characterization, intrigue, and drama were part of that impression. Clearly our experiences differ.

I'm very happy with the new Mongoose version. It feels to me like the return of an old friend--kind of like some of the D&D edition 1.5 stuff I've seen produced under the OGL. In fact, that's how I'd characterize the new version of Traveller: it includes some of the better innovations of later versions (esp. MegaTraveller), but it pulls the game back toward the wide-open feel of the original, mostly setting-less rules. This, in my view, is no bad thing, so long as you know what you're buying.