Traveller or Star Frontiers?

[Erratic K]

I don't know which is more popular. I will post the results of a google fight below, that is my arbiter of online popularity. I would guess traveller.

I played both. I preferred Traveller and so did some of my players.

We ended up modifying both rule sets to increase the fun factor, so neither is perfect to my old groups.

I wouldn't play either again.

and

the results of google fight "traveller rpg" vs "star frontiers rpg"

traveller rpg is the winner!! 686K to 150K pages/occurances.

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=traveller+rpg&word2=star+frontiers+rpg

-E

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

Honestly, Star Frontiers didn't have the support from TSR that Traveller got from GDW, SJG, and now Far Future Enterprises.

You've got classic Traveller from GDW, and reprints from FFE. You have T20. You have GURPS Traveller from Steve Jackson Games. You had 2300 AD. You had MegaTraveller. You had the Traveller books from other companies like FASA. You had the JTAS and Challenger magazine articles.

Star Frontiers had a brief run around 1982-85ish. There were some articles in Dragon, IIRC, back when it was more than just the D&D mag. Other than Spelljammer, TSR stopped doing anything SF-related until the late 90s with Alternity.

I did end up owning both, way back when, and both were fun. Some of the D20 Future content is certainly part of the Star Frontiers universe, so it isn't completely dead -- just mostly dead.

 

[smilinggm]

Traveller is still one of my favorite Sci-Fi Games of All time. Star Fronteers was fun, but when ever I feal the need for my Sci-Fi gaming fix I will always turn to Traveller.
Also Traveller as a game is very alive and is doing very as far as I can tell.

 

[Chaldfont]

My first non-D&D rpg session was Star Frontiers. We played though most of the modules and had a lot of fun. I've never gotten a chance to play Traveller, though I own two versions of the rules (MegaTraveller and Traveller: The New Era). I'd love to play in a MegaTraveller campaign, though, just to try the rules.

It certainly looks like Traveller is more popular--just look at the number of books printed for each. But I will always have a place in my heart for laser rifles dialed up to 20, dose grenades and bad dralasite humor.

 

[Teflon Billy]

Of the two of them, I've had tons more fun with Star Frontiers (particularly aftetr the release of Knight Hawks).

But I think it's safe to say that Traveller is far, far more popular all told.

 

[WilliamAndersen]

so which is more popular, in your opinion, Traveller or Star Frontiers?

And why?

I have fond memories of Star Fronties, but I have never even heard of Traveller until recently.

`LE

Hi 'Le,

I would have to say that Traveller is the more popular of the two. In a number of gaming message boards, I often see sci fi games compared to Traveller. When new games are discussed, a question that is asked sometimes is how easy it would be to convert to Traveller (T20), or people are asked "why play this when you can just play Traveller".

I have not seen such comments about Star Frontiers.

Now... that is, of course, anecdotal and not 'proof' by any means.

William
ComStar
Publishers of content for d20, Action!, Fudge and soon the Hero System
http://www.comstar-media.com

 

[trancejeremy]

Traveller is definitely more popular. I mean, heck, it's still in print in various forms (d20, Gurps and in a way, even the original), while Star Frontiers is long dead, save for a rather mangled (IMHO) revision in d20 Future and I think a Dragon article for Alternity.

I say that as someone who has pretty much every product for both Star Frontiers and the original Traveller (multiple copies in some cases, I have 3 copies of Knight Hawks for SF, just because it's so great).



Anyway, I don't think Star Frontiers was ever meant to be a rip-off of Traveller. It's quite a bit different actually.

Traveller was largely based on semi-hard science fiction of the 50s-60s. H. Beam Piper, Asimov, Laumer's Retief. Big galactic empire, lots of intrigue, planets were generally self ruling, movement was fairly free, starships are very expensive. PCs generally were either "thugs in space" or free traders.

Star Frontiers on the other hand is more late 70s/early 80s-ish. The big influences I think were probably both "Buck Rogers" and "Battlestar Galactica" the TV shows. The style anyway. But in the original set, the PCs were "Star Law Rangers" battling pirates and Sathar spies or explorers.

Later on, in Knight Hawks and in some of the adventures, SF took on almost a cyberpunk feel (though they predated cyberpunk by several years), as the PCs in many cases were essentially "Shadowrunners", being hired by one megacorp to do something nasty to another megacorp, or getting caught up in criminal syndicate shenanigans. (Though being traders was another option.)

SF also had much cooler aliens. Traveller had aliens, but was largely humanocentric.

Traveller = big empire; Star Frontiers = very small area, actually.

Traveller = High tech; Star Frontiers = low tech (for the most part, they didn't even have artificial gravity)

Traveller was sort of static. I mean, there were wars and such, but not an all out war (not until Megatraveller). In Star Frontiers, there was the ever present danger of invasion by the dreaded Sathar and the entire region was in danger of being wiped out.

 

[Ranger REG]

Traveller is definitely more popular. I mean, heck, it's still in print in various forms (d20, Gurps and in a way, even the original), while Star Frontiers is long dead, save for a rather mangled (IMHO) revision in d20 Future and I think a Dragon article for Alternity.

Mangled, how?

Not enough campaign info? Too much info? Bad infor? Bad stats?

 

[The Shaman]

I don't know much about popularity, but Traveller was one of my three favorite games back in the late Seventies and early Eighties.

I bought a used copy of Star Frontiers - I found it to be far less cool than Traveller.

Traveller was sort of static. I mean, there were wars and such, but not an all out war (not until Megatraveller).

We never felt wedded to the official universe, so our Spinward Marches were on the frontline of an alien invasion of the Imperium. We had all the space wars we could handle, and then some.

 

[Henry]

I've sadly never owned or played either one. (My local Bookstore was lucky to have D&D back then!) Of the two, Traveller has always struck me as the more widely followed one, though the same guys and gals who played Star Frontiers probably also played Boot Hill, and Gamma World, and Gangbusters, and all those other WotC variants. Star Frontiers always held a special place in the heart to those in my old gaming group who used to play it.