I've wanted a smuggling system for Traveller for some time now. (I always wanted to play Han Solo instead of Harry Mudd if you know what I mean.)
Anyways...
The various versions of Traveller have lots of neat subsystems and partial minigames, but as a potential referee I could never see how to harness them into a cohesive system. I wanted to be able to move from space combat to trading to smuggling to hyperspace/whatever to ground combat all in a single session effortlessly but every action being integrated into the setting and locale. That's a whole 'nother thing from what really happens in real life rpq campaigns (assuming you've got the players around....)
robject... you were asking for a transformative/fundamental concept upon which to base T5 so that its not just a rehash of previous systems....
How about a Traveller that is so streamlined and integrated and playable that it could completely work solitaire. (It was of course suggested that people play with books 1-3 as a solitaire game, but you'd have make up a lot of story and game mechanics stuff to make it work. "Solitaire play" has come to mean rolling up stuff, programming, and/or fiddling with the rules-- whereas books 1-3 actually imply you're supposed to be Travelling from world to world by yourself and having adventures!)
Your core book for T5 would be your standard rpg necessities with some tweaked Traveller essentials mixed in. Then you have supplements that are solitaire modules for each campaign type (smuggler, trader, police, mercenary....) A set of these modules would give a huge amount of setting info for a particular area and allow the character to change campaign type in mid-play: for instance a detached scout starts the game as a trader and uses that gamebook to play... he then gets hired as a mercenary so switches to that campaign book... later he becomes a renegade or criminal. You could then realease additional areas as seperate supplement sets so that the players could range even further in their campaign.
I'm being completely unreaslistic of course, but if the solitaire stuff could appear on the supporting CD as bonus material, that's fine, too. The key thing is to have something that would link all the Traveller rules subsystems together AND communicate the scope of the subsector's setting at the same time. That is exactly the missing piece of the game that has prevented me from mastering it.
My fear is that no one has actually thought this though with Traveller and that its just a nifty set of cool toys that can only be fully integrated into a real game with a healthy amount of house rules, etc. A solitaire game of this type using a Traveller system would prove to me that my suspicions were unfounded-- just that I was untrained in actually using the tools!
(Just more uncontrollable brainstorming here... I'll go laminate my Starsmuggler map tiles now....)
