I missed a lot of the drama because the parental unit, misinterpreting my gaming hobby as an escape from reality, when in fact I was trying to prepare myself for a media career and using games as an organic story telling device, intentionally kept me away from a lot of gaming groups with the aid of two Italian brothers who were gamers, but heavily into religion. But I digress ... rather bitterly.
I'm glad Traveller seems to have escape some of those battles, which makes me wonder what advantage there is of porting one system to another. GURPS I can kind of understand, as GURPS has a strong database for various backgrounds.
But Champions / HERO seemed like an odd duck to me, unless the whole burgeoning superhero craze was going to infect Traveller (which is what I thought was going to happen).
In my personal judgment, as interesting as a translation from one system may be, it strikes me as an academic exercise, because unless you're publishing new material for your target market, you're not really expanding your market as such (at least in my judgment). It almost strikes me as a marketing ploy, because it would seem to make more sense to not only publish the rules, but also sample adventures showing both sets of stats for both systems for weapons, equipment and characters.
Just me. I could go on about this subject, but will refrain. I guess both games lend themselves to law enforcement themes, so maybe there's a kind of connection there or something.
Interesting.
See, the thing is you're trapped with a mid-80's to maybe 1992 view of the Hero System... a view that Champions is the primary version played...
Many of the Hero System gamers since the mid 80's don't play supers with it. My experience is that Champions players are about 1/3 of the Hero System players I know. The other 2/3 won't do supers at all. They play westerns, they play Fantasy, they play espionage, they play various forms of sci-fi...
When it comes down to it, Champions is the largest genre for the game, but it's not the majority of what I'm seeing played/discussed.
Mind you also: I've not been active in the Hero System community online since the WWIVnet days, and haven't run it since about 2004. I've only run it as champions for maybe 6 hours, but have run two half-year-long Fantasy Hero (HSR4e edition) campaigns, a 2 month Robot Warriors game, several one shots of Danger International...
it's a VERY robust engine. But it works best when everyone playing understands the system. And it really helps for all players to have a strong grip on the setting as well as the rules.
There are really 8 generic games of note (GURPS, Hero, BRP, Storyteller, d6, Fate Core, CORPS, and EABA), and several others less well known (Plainlabel, Cortex Hackers Guid, Cortex System Guide, Masterbook), and some traveller fans have ported traveller to them, and other games as well. I've ported Traveller to Storyteller and EABA... CORPS had a detailed conversion at one point. There was a GURPS conversion 3
years prior to Loren's, floating around WWIVnet. There was an unofficial hero version by 1994, but it wasn't very thorough. BRP Traveller is older still - and was published with the serial numbers filed off as "Worlds Beyond"...
Fans of generic systems tend to pull everything into it. Just like many Classic Traveller fanboys port Star Trek to Traveller, and there are half a dozen released fantasy versions of Traveller based upon the MGT engine.