On March 30, 1983, two friends of mine gave me the basic Beowulf starter set
for Traveller, and it was good. Then, another friend of mine gave me book 5,
and it, too, was good. Before I knew it, I had so many little 4"x5 1/2"
booklets that I hardly knew where to keep them all. Traveller had been very
good to me, as well as to all the other people with whom I played it. Sure,
it was a little rough around the edges, but that added to its charm.
Then MT came along... and let me just say that I think Strephon got the best
deal of any of us. Traveller used to be a nice, infinitely moldable, and
over all, comfortable game. Since the borders never changed, the only kind
of adventures available were small-scale mercenery tickets, espionage and
intrigue, trading/smuggling, sleuthing, etc. This was fine with me because,
hey, who REALLY wanted to control whole squadrons and lead them into battle?
(That was, after all, what TCS was for.) But even more importantly, who
really wants to have to play cat and mouse with battlecruisers when all they
have is an underarmed fat trader? Maybe once in a character's lifetime, but
certainly not as a matter of course any time that one wants to travel beyond a
couple of subsectors. In old Traveller, the scale of events was eminently
manageable. The sheer size of the realm allowed the ref to do just about
anything... but the fact that the system was stable meant that none of the
possible options were proscribed. You want adventure along a battle-zone?
Just head over to the Hinterworlds or to the Zhodani border.
But that is neither here nor there. MT is here, and that's life. (I guess
one could always become a romantic and go back to the old system... warts and
all. My friends and I usually just used the rules we liked and ignored or
abstracted the rest.) So now that the boys at GDW have become bored with
their little Congress of Vienna, eh? Now they want to see the Visigoths
breach the walls of a declining rome, eh? And to do this, they think they're
going to foist off some two-bit game system that sounds like a really bad
Wagner opera? (No offense to any Wagner fans out there.) Well, I have many,
many better things to spend my money on than 'new' game systems that base
their plot upon some over-zealous computer virus!
I guess I'll just have to hole myself up in an ivory tower somwhere and start
looking for people who want to do Traveller the old-fashioned way... Strephon
and all.
(Oh, and coincidentally, I never did purchase Fighting Sh--s or COAAC{K!}, so
I guess I don't have complete justification to be as angry as some of the
other TMLers. I'll simply consider myself lucky on this count.)
There, that's all. Thank you for listening to this romantic's lament.
Richard H. Anderson
[email removed]