So many attempts to "update" the original game?
I wonder...
Do you think Classic Traveller needs an update?
Traveller, like D&D is one of the most influential games of my childhood. It was published the same year I stood in line for Star Wars. We used Legos for our ships, measured string for movement just like our Civil War miniatures, and stored data on cassettes using a TRS-80. Now we have Roll20, game with people 7900 miles away daily, and IBM is working out the storage of a bit on the space of a dozen atoms. The times they aren't just a changing - they have phenomenally predicated the inconceivable.
Frank Herbert wrote a story set 10,000 years in a future wherein humanity had manipulated their genetics in the search of the profitable, perfected, and the messianic - and he made it clear that what ever we create it will supplant us. But we do not need 10 millenniums to accomplish this, we only need to weaponize stem-cell research for mass-destruction within the next 30 years.
What will happen when we can store a googleplex in the space of a subatomic string? Will we be able to program spontaneously generating DNA? Will we create sensory organs for the remaining 11 dimensions? Will we discover supplemental formats to the dimensions we only currently postulate?
Asimov predicated Foundation and Empire on scientific projections limited in capacity to what we can now reasonably expect - with the most recent Battlestar Galactica being a logical conclusion for his concerns about AI operating independently in organic society.
Why should we estimate the drives of sophant species will continue to be based in the scarcity of consumable energy, reproduction, or the fear of death? A hive mind has no reason to fear the death of an individual anymore than a person fears the death of a single cell in their body. If energy can be drawn from the interchange of matter and dark matter (assuming this is not an obsolete theory born from our own ignorance) what is dark life?
If the answer is yes, then Traveller does not need updated. If the answer is no then Traveller is falling short of its potential. And I say this with no disrespect, for while it did not inspire me (a child of librarians, artists, and musicians) to become a scientists I developed an appreciation for the sciences I would never otherwise of had and a reason to learn about them outside of the drudgery forced education could never have inspired.
That said - I would update the art. Traveller has always been based in certain styles of art which are nostalgic to some of us. Many of the sketches seem reminiscent of ads from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. There is even a similar limitation in cultural and racial dispersion throughout it's content. What of the Blue Star of India from Roger Zelazny's
The Lord of Light? Or a Chinese influence, as a fifth of the world's population (and hence its) market is Chinese? What remnants of the East African Confederacy of Bantu, who became the third colonial power to establish on Mars, can we see? Where are the Prince Charlie formals, with Kilts, which became the foundation for high-class dress under the Pax Edina - when Edinburgh became the capitol of the world (
Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein)? With the rebirth of their own written language will the Maya assert their identity and rise to an interstellar superpower?
Would the emblems and background stories of the past editions keep up with such a vibrant collection of societies? I already know those symbols do not readily scale for use as small icons for VOIP programs. Can something derived from the current symbols be developed which is both vibrant and modern within the current standard for commercial graphic arts and yet carry the class, dignity, and simplicity at the transition between Art Nouveau and Art Decco?
I would update the epic. Currently the story seems linear, not organic. Universal empire originates in the sudden appearance of one person who is a genius, bellicose, and makes himself immortal? From this self-made God all else follows? It reminds me of this Greek mathematician who creates a parable using the math of music composition to describe how a system can naturally generate disharmony which results in the destruction of the system. Ever since people have been diving all over the world to find his fictitious land of Atlantis and attributing every indication of prehistorical civilizations to something that never was.
So, would I update the game?
- Could the stories and histories reflect a more global and entertaining idea of humanity?
- Could the epic represent more possibilities for both the human and the inhuman in an organic history where both the cart (economic materialism) and the horse (ethical deliberations) are directed by the driver (individuals holding the many many different reigns in the various factions and species)?
- Could the art be better suited to today's market and electronic media?
- If a 10 year old were to get Traveller today would it open their minds to the current concepts and possibilities of science that will lead them into the New Far Future?
If the answer to these questions is yes, then the answer to a need to update that part of the game is yes.
EDIT: When I got Megatraveller - I read a few pages, glanced through a bunch more, and put it on the shelf in my collection. When I got 2300, I did the same. What made Classic Traveller and early D&D and Chainmail and many other games so much more fun was that you could find out what you needed to know in 20 minutes and get started. It was the small supplements and books offering possibility, not necessity, which made the game something I could do with my allowance. And in exchange all I had to do was spend hours learning how to socialize, dramatize, narrate, produce, and research the science well enough to make my descriptions credible. That is the part we need from CT.
