Just got ahold of this. I was so excited to hear that there was an article about Traveller in a nigh-unto-mainstream periodical. It turned out to be disappointing, though....
Some observations:
1) The article's opening line is an incomplete sentence (brackets indicate what I think he meant to write....):
"There are people who will tell you that the problem with RPG's in the 1990s was to much attention to setting, at the expense [of ?] non-setting material [such as that ?] from the Dungeon Master's Guide."
2) He makes the usual jab at the CT's death during character generation bit-- but not with as much verve as I've seen others make it. (Scott Haring comes to mind.)
3) He failed to make a clever jab about the "Other" career-- and he fails to mention both it and the Army career at all when he lists the careers from Book 1. Instead he mistakenly states that the original character classes included "ex-noble."
4) If the bad opening sentence gave me doubts, at this point he's lost all credibility as a Traveller/rpg 'expert'. However he did make the case for Proto-Traveller fairly succinctly:
"The Imperium, originally a laissez-faire sort of place built on hexadecimal nobility and a gratifyingly hands-off approach to planet-looting characters, had run smack not only into evil telepaths, but wolf-people, lion-people, centaur-people, and clearly-ripped-off-from-Larry-Niven people."
[Good joke, but... didn't he mention the Aslan twice and forget the Hivers?]
"The trouble was that every new development wound up choking the original point of the game to death. The Imperium was suddenly hemmed in on all sides of its sadly two-dimensional galaxy; the frontier was closed."
5) After briefly mentioning MegaTraveller, The New Era, T4, and World of Darkness, he concludes the piece with a proclamation that GURPS Traveller was responsible for "yanking the Imperium out of its death march." He admits that GT doesn't solve any of the problems of the hemmed-in/choked Imperium, but says that at least GT doesn't make things worse.
In conclusion, the article isn't particularly thoughtful, enlightening, or encouraging. It's mostly just a sarcastic diatribe that amounts to whatever-it-must-be-cool-to-say-about-Traveller-around-the-watercooler-at-Steve-Jackson-Games. I really wish that the magazine had disclosed the fact that Hite worked for SJG. Of course, the article is so cynical, it doesn't even sell me on the GT solution!
In the future, I'd much rather see an article by someone that actually cares about Traveller... and that doesn't have a financial stake in the background/system/setting wars.
