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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7316366" data-attributes="member: 42582">I tried to run and play Traveller in the 80s, but couldn't get more out of it then a few false starts, a few skirmishes, a bit of trading play, etc.To make it work now I'm deploying a whole range of skills and techniques that I didn't have then, and that I think it would be pretty hard to get out of Traveller on its own. It's broadly the same set of skills and techniques I use to run 4e (except more random content generation, because that's what Traveller is!).Agreed. We never did the "troupe" thing, but one adventure I remember had the PCs - a bushi and a kensai - negotiating and playing dice games with a group of ogres in the latter's mountain hold.OA was where I really started to develop character-focused, more player driven GMing based less on planning and dungeon mapping and more on a general sense of genre/backstory, a few key relationships, and following the players' leads. That then led me to run the all-thieves game I mentioned before switching to GMing Rolemaster almost exclusively for nearly 20 years (March or so 1990 - Oct or so 2008)!I think that last point may be why the formal symmetry you point to between D&D and Traveller doesn't (in my view) map onto a substantive symmetry.A related thought, which goes to RPG culture probably more than details of systems.The way 4e solves the subtlety/realism/meaningful stories issue, while (in my view) remaining fully within the D&D paradigm, is by taking cosmology seriously and setting the players (via their PCs) loose among it. But a lot of the D&D community seems to have this "GM's world as sacrosanct" idea which makes them scared of letting the players actually do stuff.When your RPGing doesn't involve meaningful mundane stuff (because your PC sheet as a D&D player just doesn't give you many hooks onto that) and doesn't involve meaningful non-mundane stuff (because the GM's world is too precious for your input/"damage" to it) then that seems to have exhausted, and excluded, all the meaningful stuff!5e seems like it could have broken from this not by going 4e's cosmology way, but by respecting the "GM's world" tradition while using background as a way of hooking PCs (and so players) onto the more mundane stuff. But I hardly see any discussion of backgrounds, or how they really made much of a difference in 5e play. And there is still the issue that once you have the attack and hit point stats of a dragon, there's some sort of inevitable gap between you and the mundane.</blockquote>

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