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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9765785" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Regarding death during character creation: even as a kid, I recognized it as a press-your-luck mechanic and not that different from rolling up a D&D character with a 6 Constitution and 'having to' start over. It clearly grabbed a bunch of other people by the adrenal gland, though (and permanently turned off who knows how many people who won't bother posting here). In terms of popularity, I think the biggest issue is that it represented a version of sci fi (/age of sail IN SPAAAACE!) that wasn't in ascendence at the time. Both the <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust" target="_blank">zeerust </a>aspects and just the 'middle-aged ex-space naval officers trying to make ends meet as interplanetary merchants/mercenaries/big game hunters/etc.' motif. It's a little like why movie adaptations like Dick Tracey and The Phantom didn't do wonderfully. I missed the initial introduction, but from what I hear, huge numbers of people in my FLGS catchment area saw Traveller and used it to play Star Wars or Star Trek (or BGS, or their own off-brand version of the same concept). And once those games had their own TTRPGs or there were other sci fi RPGs out there, they had no brand loyalty to Traveller.I feel like this is a good explanation for why few games have done as well as D&D (including D&D, I'll get back to that in a second). D&D stumbled into a very solid answer to 'but what do you do?' -- start out in dungeons looking for treasure (/fights), and eventually (maybe) develop some long term campaign-driven goals like build a castle or defeat the evil sorcerer/rescue the princess/save the kingdom. Most other games that I recall seeing a lot of actual play (vs. buying, rolling up characters, trying for a while but losing interest in), in my groups or around us, were some version of those motifs. Shadowrun was being hired to do a 'run' (effectively a dungeon, with a little more nuance). WEG Star Wars was 'do what you saw in the movies' (defeat the evil space-sorcerer/rescue the space-princess/etc). White Wolf was maybe a quasi exception in that it mostly provided a theme and let each group kinda figure out what to do themselves (and of the games I saw played--and WW WoD saw some play even if it saw more reading/purchase than actual play--it had the most variety in what playstyle actually ended up being done in each group).  Traveller is more like a bunch of other games -- including D&D: the West Marches/Sandbox version I think the devs expected us to play. It set up a basic incentive structure ('you need money for your ship loan' instead of 'you want money because it is xp'), gave you world-generating tools, and said have at it. Now obvious any number of groups absolutely took to that and figured out what adventures could be had with the hooks that were generated with that setup and had a great time. But other groups kinda meandered, re-read, tried to figure out if they were doing things right, and eventually just lost interest. In both cases, I think more rulebook space dedicated to explaining the central play loop, the why of it, how it facilitates game hook opportunities, examples, maybe even modules specific to doing that.</blockquote>

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