Maybe, Mal. and I are not too far apart. It seems like that he does not want to be concilitatory with what has gone before. Then I see he does make some compromises. Utimately, it is a wait and see process, in the meantime, we have fantastic products being released over at ComStar, yes, it is a pity ACT is not one of them in the near future.
But I shall be buying both ACT & T5 realizing that as heurstic, T5 might inspire me (just as in a weird way parts of T4 did) and probably play with ACT. Who knows Marc might have secretly adopted ACT his own. We simply do not know.
But to address Mal.'s concerns or comments
People like Loren and Martin aren't being held back because they don't have T5, its release won't really make much of a difference to them (unless of course Marc pulls the licences). After all Marc's not produced anything new himself for CT for at least 20 years, yet Avenger still produces new stuff for it. If T5 comes out, all Avenger would need to do is carry on with T5 stats included as well - they don't need to drop CT or anything else just to do that.
That again assuming that T5 actually changes things dramatically from CT. My gut feeling is that it will not.
But really I have to laugh when you call Traveller a "high level storytelling RPG" - it's nothing of the sort (at least, not the versions that Marc's been directly involved in). In fact it could very easily be converted directly into a computer game - whether it's traders doing stuff for patrons, or mercs getting tickets to kill stuff (which is most of what CT is about), either way they're basically just "Quests". There's very little in CT that encourages "high storytelling", characters are just randomly generated numbers on a table that people are forced to create a background for. There's no character perks or flaws like in a real storytelling system like say WoD, and little in the way of the flexibility that a more narrativist system allows.
You will note the word heuristic in my discussions. Traveller have evolved in the hands of players & referees past yet incorporating those LLBs. In which, the rules are now more serving as a guideline.
The EVE universe is actually very rich, to dismiss it as a giant wargame implies you don't really know much about it at all. There's a lot of trade involved, a lot of political machinations going on behind the scenes, a lot of ancient ruins and battle sites and other weirdness to explore. WW will be doing an RPG of that, and my hope is that it'll leave Traveller in the dirt.
Wargame is more than shoot-em action, it is the simple algorthm that govern play. If the transactions are simple they form a wargame if they change with every encounter then it is a RPG. So, I do agree with you that Traveller has to do more shed its wargame roots.
I don't know where or why you think that "many people believe we're heading back" to wargaming roots. We're not. And besides, the presentation and design of RPGs has moved far beyond what it was in the 70s. Like it or not, RPGs aren't instruction manuals, they need inspiring art and story vignettes and flavour text to get people interested now, and so far I have seen zip, nada, zilch on that front for T5.
Well, I see the return of mininature playing as personified by the smaller players and things desktop gaming as a quasi-return to the rigid wargames of the past. Most of the innovative RPGs are actually losing money...in favor of the simple or ones that involve set formulas.
Marc's got to listen to what people want - both the existing fanbase, and any others that he wants to attract to the game (if he's even interested in that at all). An MT-like task system is a step in the right direction since that's somewhat iconic for Traveller, but he still needs to simplify it a lot and write everything else with a view to fitting into the modern market if it's to be remotely successful.
I would hope that he does. But, as someone, who wants IP control and then farm out different mechanics for different situations, I don't think he will listen to all the different and diverse voices. Sad but neccessary.
The overarching problem, as illustrated by scout_harris quite nicely, is that people don't WANT another task system. They're not interested in new rules when they've got ones that work already. d20 opened up Traveller to the biggest RPG market around, and one that is notoriously hard to persuade to play any other system. As far as I'm concerned, that's it for new systems for Traveller - game over, end of line, the market's as big as it'll ever get and producing anything else is a waste of time so long as d20 is around. It'd be suicide to drop it - if Hunter can't do it then someone else had darn well better step up to that plate.
Thing is, there is a great shift away from d20 and resentment toward it, if you have not noticed.
If I was in charge of the IP, then what I'd do as a first priority is a second edition of T20 that is OGL compatible, rebuilt from the ground up to iron out the flaws and free it from D&D-style d20. After that, I'd get something like ACT or CT+ together and release that for the grogs who use the old rules, making the refined CT/MT system that they want to see. And then (or at the same time) I'd release a unified setting in a single 'Golden Age' time period that fixed everything for both, with T20 and ACT/CT+ rules. And after that, I'd have the option of releasing single, large setting books for different eras, like the milieu books touted for T4 but that never happened. There'd be just the two rulesets on the market and that would be that, and I bet that more people would be happy about that than not.
Here we both agree.
