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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9765574" data-attributes="member: 6671663">For me in particular, Traveller fell off the map of games I sought out to play and run for two major reasons (with the usual halo of smaller ones). 1. Falling behind the times in both reality and sf. Now, I had an unusual position in the ‘70s and ‘80s: Dad worked with Jet Propulsion Labs’ Deep Space Tracking Network. I grew up seeing Pioneer and Voyager results before almost anyone else. I was watching Trav system generation become obsolete right before my eyes, and when I went with Dad to Seminar Day (what Caltech does instead of Homecoming), I’d get updates of the same process on a lot of other fronts. Meanwhile, I was reading folks Niven, Varley, Pohl, Bester, and so many others take space-spanning sf in directions Trav didn’t seem to me to have anything to help with. Both parts of this contributed to my ‘80s-‘90s enthusiasm for GURPS. 2. Tedium. I’m not trying to be mean here, it just seemed like Trav resolutely jumped away from attempts at excitement. Planetary cultures weren’t presented with any particular flair, Imperial culture without any baroque weirdness or cool details. No exotic touches like Retief or Van Rijn mighty exploit, no sense of the sort of deep struggle that could engage a Flandry or Gersen. Fundamentally I didn’t want to manage a mortgage, but the game seemed not to recognize that it could and should call out less grindy options. Now, just recently, I had a surprising shift of perspective, thanks to reading some E.C. Tubbs. Whoa! Dumaerest and his story are cool. And suddenly I saw what Traveller wasn’t telling me: the life of a mostly-Low Passage traveler is a life of adventure. Going some place hoping to find info relevant to a long-term goal, making your way in the next exotic society and environment, suffering ups and downs, moving on, with room for derring do, skullduggery, capers and heists, the enchilada. The author of the Loner solo RPG plans to put a Galaxy Drifter book next year, and after reading the manuscript, I’ll be all over it. (See <a href="https://zotiquest.substack.com/p/the-making-of-galaxy-drifter?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2ac773&triedRedirect=true" target="_blank">The making of Galaxy Drifter</a> for comments and a link to the manuscript.)And now that I’ve been handed the ideas, I can see how to incorporate them into Trav, if I want to. And that in turn leads me to see how to similarly transform the implementation of other elements. But I sure didn’t feel any help from the game in doing so back in the day.</blockquote>

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