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<blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9266013" data-attributes="member: 7044704">I think there's a degree of &quot;which first, chicken or egg&quot; going on with how early Traveller evolved.&nbsp; Did the book release schedule cause it, or were they chosen in response to it, or some mix of both.&nbsp; I recall Mercs as being a huge big deal when it hit originally, and suddenly Army and Marine careers were the new hotness.[SPOILER=&quot;Lengthy OT chatter&quot;]They certainly didn't once Mercs dropped in 1978 and made that the career of choice for power gamers, but there were still something that I ran into a fair bit even in the early-to-mid 80s when my Traveller gaming peaked. &quot;Diplomacy&quot; often resembled a Retief plot (who, I'll point out, was quite popular in those days) and espionage was something freelancers got sucked into as deniable assets quite regularly (even today, and usually in conjunction with other story beats like mercantile affairs as a cover). Exploration morphed considerably over even a short period of time IME, starting out as going &quot;where no one has gone before&quot; stories and gradually shifting toward more picaresque &quot;what weird local quirks does the next system over have?&quot; travel stories akin to Jack Vance's Ports of Call as the canon setting was fleshed out and mystery evaporated. A fair number of campaigns became exploration focused by accident too - mis-jumps happen. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />You were also more likely to see homebrew campaigns in the very early days when Traveller was more of a toolkit and less of a defined setting.&nbsp; Real frontier exploration is harder to fit in a 3rd Imperium game, while playing merchant is much harder when the GM's setting is loosely defined and lightly populated, and relatively peaceful settings don't support military campaigns as well as canon does.&nbsp; Quote a few GMs also skipped the &quot;freelance sandbox&quot; thing in favor of having the PCs all share an actual employer/patron, or be reservists called back to duty for one thing or another. It was a different and less uniform environment in terms of campaign styles back then, at least IME - but you're right in saying it became dominated by merc/military and merchant campaign styles over time, and pretty quickly too.&nbsp; Still think that's largely the result of what order the books were released in, along with the obvious need to make every credit you can to pay for your ship (if any).&nbsp; It's actually nice to see how Cepheus and indie publishers have shifted things back toward more diverse settings and gameplay styles IMO.&nbsp; Takes me back to the days of my relative youth.[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Wofano Wotanto, post: 9266013, member: 7044704"] I think there's a degree of "which first, chicken or egg" going on with how early Traveller evolved. Did the book release schedule cause it, or were they chosen in response to it, or some mix of both. I recall Mercs as being a huge big deal when it hit originally, and suddenly Army and Marine careers were the new hotness. [SPOILER="Lengthy OT chatter"] They certainly didn't once Mercs dropped in 1978 and made that the career of choice for power gamers, but there were still something that I ran into a fair bit even in the early-to-mid 80s when my Traveller gaming peaked. "Diplomacy" often resembled a Retief plot (who, I'll point out, was quite popular in those days) and espionage was something freelancers got sucked into as deniable assets quite regularly (even today, and usually in conjunction with other story beats like mercantile affairs as a cover). Exploration morphed considerably over even a short period of time IME, starting out as going "where no one has gone before" stories and gradually shifting toward more picaresque "what weird local quirks does the next system over have?" travel stories akin to Jack Vance's Ports of Call as the canon setting was fleshed out and mystery evaporated. A fair number of campaigns became exploration focused by accident too - mis-jumps happen. :) You were also more likely to see homebrew campaigns in the very early days when Traveller was more of a toolkit and less of a defined setting. Real frontier exploration is harder to fit in a 3rd Imperium game, while playing merchant is much harder when the GM's setting is loosely defined and lightly populated, and relatively peaceful settings don't support military campaigns as well as canon does. Quote a few GMs also skipped the "freelance sandbox" thing in favor of having the PCs all share an actual employer/patron, or be reservists called back to duty for one thing or another. It was a different and less uniform environment in terms of campaign styles back then, at least IME - but you're right in saying it became dominated by merc/military and merchant campaign styles over time, and pretty quickly too. Still think that's largely the result of what order the books were released in, along with the obvious need to make every credit you can to pay for your ship (if any). It's actually nice to see how Cepheus and indie publishers have shifted things back toward more diverse settings and gameplay styles IMO. Takes me back to the days of my relative youth. [/SPOILER] [/QUOTE]

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