As one of the Traveller players who still had his first set of teeth when
Star Wars came out (and being an American to boot), I feel the need to
throw my Cr0.02 into the fire. I think Jo Jaquinta is somewhat right about
the Great American Guilt complex, but I'm not convinced that the current
Traveller trends are really a side effect of it. I, for one, have Zero
Interest in playing the Terminator in a game. The movies were only mildly
entertaining as Science Fiction, being more of an excuse to use special
effects to show robots getting the tar beat out of 'em ("Takes a licking,
Keeps on Ticking").
Although Star Wars was probably the seminal Science Fiction event of my
formative years, I soon graduated to Asimov, Heinlein, and Tolkien. In my
younger days, Foundation, Space Cadet, and Citizen of the Galaxy were
probably my favorite SF books, as well as anything with a Robot in it :).
Traveller used to be a game that reflected "hard" science fiction.
Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that Hard SF is a Niche market.
I honestly believe that the current trend towards Combat-Heavy, grim, dark
RPGs is an expression of the same trend in Movies, TV, Comic books, and
all other sorts of media. I mean, I have no interest in reading the
various X-comic books from Marvel because they're drivel. However, they
sell well. Somebody is buying them. I think that GDW is simply hopping
on this bandwagon, hoping for higher profits from the 'More Blood, Less
Dialogue' crowd while more or less ignoring the established customer base.
They do make some concessions to us (after all, we *can* still use the TNE
for a 'classic' campaign), but we are, I suspect, a side concern...
I dunno, maybe I'm not giving GDW enough credit. Loren has mentioned that
'many people' are extremely overjoyed with the new setting and direction.
However, I don't think I've seen or heard from *one person* who has this
opinion. Either these gushing fans are (IMHO) incredibly clueless (ie,
have tastes in gaming universes in violent disagreement with my own, which
is, of course, the most informed POV in existence) or are from the
aforementioned 'More Blood, Less Dialogue' crowd.
I suspect that, for the most part, the TML is made up of generally older,
'More Mature' fans, whose tastes in gaming do not, in general, reflect
those of the wider gaming audience (At least here in the US, the wider
gaming audience is primarily made up of males in their teens who
rabidly advocate their opinions on the high quality of AD&D as a
role-playing system or who spend time optimizing their Shadowrun
characters :/)
Dane
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TNS Stringer, Terra/Solomani Rim (1827 G867975-8 Hi 514 Na G2 V)
My opinions are those of my fuzz-brained, cat-sniffing Norwegian Elkhound.