creativehum
SOC-14 1K
This perhaps deserves a longer reply (and lord knows I make long replies) but this morning I'm in a rush. So...
1. The board games I was referring to were Fifth Frontier War, Invasion: Earth, Imperium, and Striker... each of which are clearly above the level of PC action.
2. I loved Imperium. Played the hell out of it in high school. I played Traveller. I played Imperium. I never saw any connection between the two. I know I could be told about the connection. But I never went deep into the Imperium background material, and missed this. For me, as a teen, one was about characters jetting around and getting into adventures in a setting of the Referees own creation, and the other was strategic level combat set near earth. Apart from space ships and space, there's really nothing to connect them -- apart from the fact that I think GDW said, "Hey, we have these two products... let's connect them!"
3. Imperium may have co-develooped with Traveller (the death in character creation for Traveller, example, came from a discarded rule in Imperium about creating dynasties and the potential loss of sons and daughters in battle.) That doesn't change the fact that Traveller, as an RPG, stands alone and successfully as an RPG.
4. That there were alternate methods of handling combat in Snapshot is awesome and interesting. But not anything I was talking about in my previous post. In the original Dungeons & Dragons, there is a reference to using Chainmail to handle combat, but that the three three books in the box contain an "alternate" system if one wants to use it. Everyone used the "alternate" system in the OD&D rules (and not Chainmail) because they worked great for the concerns of exploring dungeons and an RPG game. In many ways I see the layered, more complex possible rules sets for personal combat for Traveller as being the "Chainmail." More war-gamey, but not needed, nor necessarily an improvement.
5. The perennial combat system in Traveller is flexible and easy to use by the Referee and players to adjudicate all sorts of crazy shenanigans the PCs might get themselves into. It's an abstract system to move things along, provide DMs as required on the fly for special circumstance, and pretty much force the Players to make decisions about how much they'll risk their PCs to move forward or get what they want. (I think the simultaneous combat actions are vital on this point.) They will let tension exist at the table without bogging things down to solid miniatures play. If people want solid miniatures play, that's great. But for an evening focused on exploration, negotiation, stealth, and other hijinks, the abstracted combat system of Classic Traveller delivers in spades.
6. Of course if one is used to using Snapshot for Traveller and take it out of the equation, the game is different. But, by the same token, if one is used to playing original Traveller and adds Snapshot, the game changes. My point is this:
This was never, and can never, be the "real" Traveller experience.
For some people they bought the original three books and went to town, never looking back and never buying another GDW product. For others Classic Traveller is Books 1-8, and not using all of them is somehow doing it "wrong."
But the fact remains that if you bought that original Traveller box with Beowulf's distress call on the front and opened up Books 1, 2, and 3 you had everything you needed to play for countless hours of entertainment. You had to add a lot -- everything really -- in terms of setting. But it was assumed back in the mid-70s that people wanted to do that.
That Traveller play and assumptions of setting changed as more and more of the books were added is a given. This isn't to say bad or worse, just the plain facts. But in no way is this ripping anything away from Classic Traveller or the entire game line. It is stating the plain truth that RPG have always been full of kit bashing and assuming the Referee and the Players will, ultimately, go off and do their own thing.
In my post I was pointing out that Traveller was a complete and functional rules set for RPG play at the PC level. And that, as GDW opened up the horizons to handle the strategic war games they wanted to add, the setting became less focused on the concerns for RPG, PC-focused play, and more and more focused on larger scale concerns beyond that scope. This in turn created, in my view, a setting that often worked against having an environment really ready for PC level play.
People will disagree with that last assessment! But I know I'm not alone in it.
But the fact remains that in the Proto-Traveller material, there was conflict within the Imperium to address and for the PCs to get involved with. As the setting built out, the Imperium became calmer, more stable, and more focused on the politics between interstellar states -- the provinces of strategic war games.
Oh, well. Long anyway. Off to work!
