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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 5224989" data-attributes="member: 26473">I got back into gaming after a thirteen-year hiatus with 3.0 D&D, which I played for a few years. I'm not a big fantasy fan, however, and I quickly gravitated to d20 Modern when it came out. I played Mutants and Masterminds, some Sidewinder: Recoiled, some d20 CoC, a little Grim Tales.One day I got to thinking about the 1001 Characters supplement for Traveller (the "classic" tag is superfluous). I discovered the FFE reprints and picked them up, and after flipping through those pages I hadn't seen in almost twenty years, I realized how much I still liked the system. I put together a Traveller one-shot, which lead to a (regrettably short) campaign.When Mongoose announced it acquired the Traveller license, I was cautiously optimistic: a new edition which coincided with the release of a couple of new lines of Traveller minis plus the ongoing support from BITS made for a Traveller renaissance which sounded pretty good.I didn't really pay much attention to the playtests, though there was a dice mechanic which didn't really appeal to me, but I picked up the 'goose Trav' core rules a couple of months after they were released. I was disappointed with quite a bit of it; it seemed like they'd taken most of the variant rules published for Traveller in the Eighties, in the run-up to MegaTraveller, and made them core, frex armor-as-DR and unified skill mechanics. The new combat system missed both the simplicity of the LBB system and the tactical complexity of Snapshot.My disappointment was even worse with 760 Patrons: it wasn't a book of patron encounters at all, but rather a book of random encounters, some of which might involve patronage but most of which do not. The book didn't provide what I wanted from a book of patron encounters for Traveller.Here's the thing: I didn't dislike 'goose Trav' because it was new, or because it represented a change. I don't like it because I don't like it. The final product gives me less of what I want than the original. It incorporates rules I didn't like for Traveller twenty years ago, and rules I don't like for any roleplaying game now.That doesn't make it a bad game; it simply makes it a game I don't care for.The problem is, when I say that I prefer Traveller to 'goose Trav', I immediately get 'grognard' thrown in my face as an epithet. It doesn't seem to matter that I have what I think are informed reasons based on experience for preferring the older edition to the newer one. No, as some posters have done in this thread, it's enough for me to say that I don't care for the newest edition to be insulted for what I prefer, by taking a word which long had at worst neutral, usually favorable connotations - I'm an actual gaming grognard, getting my start with tabletop miniatures wargames back in the mid-Seventies, years before I ever heard of D&D.So I say to all of you who want to make grognard an insult: you can't have that word. It doesn't mean what you think it does, and it won't mean what you want it to, no matter how hard you work to make it so.And for the record, I have no opinion on 4e. Never played it, never even cracked open one of the books, and not because it's new, not because it's different, but because I don't like fantasy roleplaying games nearly so much as I do other genres. If there's a 4e-based modern system, I'll give it a look, and if it knocks my socks off I'll play it happily. But if it doesn't, I have plenty of older games which I still enjoy, and if you feel the need to insult me over that choice, well, that's your problem, not mine.</blockquote>

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