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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 4899924" data-attributes="member: 19675">The difference is that the fiction with which D&D synergized- LotR- was first published in 1954.  IOW, there was a 23 year old fanbase's collective yearning to tap into.Star Wars came out in 1977...pretty much contemporaneously with the burgeoning RPG hobby.  Traveller did tap into that vibe a little bit, but it was nowhere near as thematically or content linked to Star Wars to the same degree as D&D was to LotR.  (Yes, there were other fantasy & horror sources D&D tapped into- Dying Earth, Conan, The Mythos, Fafhrd & Grey Mouser, Eternal Champion, etc., but the LotR influence is arguably the strongest.)  After all, where D&D had its versions of Ents, Hobbits, Orcs and so forth, Traveller had no Jedi.Go a different route like Star Trek?  Trek wasn't as big then as it is now.  The fanbase was just getting up to speed when Traveller came out.  Again, no real massive collection of potential consumers to tap into.In fact, the fact that Traveller owes more to the hard fiction of Asimov, Clark, Heinlein, etc. than to the space opera diminished that synergy...otherwise Traveller might have been a far bigger game than it was.  Traveller is a great game, and I truly love it, but its popularity has always been...an acquired taste.Heck, Sci-Fi RPGs still suffer in comparison with their FRPG cousins in terms of sales and the ease with which one can find a game.</blockquote>

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