I need to clarify my point. I did not mean that people who play(ed) Traveller did not also play Battletech. People do all kinds of dissimilar things for different reasons. My point is that people who played Traveller did not play it because it was like Battletech, or vice versa. When they played Battletech it was because that was what they were in the mood for (stylized, cinematic) and when they played Traveller it was because that was what they were in the mood for (all things to all people).
You don't say, "people who read Hemingway also read Doonesbury, so Hemingway should include more stoners who snorkel in ponds," or "people who eat hamburgers also drink Coca Cola, so McDonalds should make their hamburgers taste more like Coke, or get out of the burger business and make Coke instead." People eat hamburgers and drink Coke for different reasons, both of which are important to them, and somebody already makes Coke, so no point in McDonalds trying to duplicate that effort.
BT was able to say, "here is the technology, that's what you get. It's left over (Star League?) technology, and you can't make any more," then gradually add in, "Here's some new Clan Tech" in a managed fashion. There was no design-your-own alternative tech, no alien races, all of the hyperspace commo was owned by one outfit, so players were prevented from attempting to provide or duplicate various in-game standards. The loyalties in BT were mostly to pre-defined houses or clans, and you could show up at the summer Con wearing your house colors and patches and attend the wedding and it would be cool, and you'd enjoy that sense of everybody being in the same universe.
Traveller said, "here's how to build all kinds of things at all kinds of tech levels, and you can play in the OTU or play any universe or novel or movie you want." So it had a number of bases who wanted to set their campaign anywhere, or wanted to know who won the rebellion, who wanted to design their own ships and vehicles and weapons and robots, who wanted to play aliens, who wanted to design aliens, who wanted to design planets and ecosystems, who wanted pre-generated adventures, who wanted books of personalities or patrons, or who said, "I'll create my own adventures and personalities, give me more design sequences," etc. The primary loyalties in Trav were to radically different approaches to play, including a significant focus on solitaire. Perhaps the most common remark from a Traveller fan is, "Oh, I never played that, I just bought it for the XXX."
While any given player could choose to play BT or Trav with his(/her) buddies tonight, when they wanted to play Traveller they wanted something quite different than what BT provided, and what Traveller provided was quite a bit more complex, and more difficult to manage as well.
(As an aside, I expect this is related to BT's ongoing success. If you are going to make a computer game or animated series or get a movie deal, it is probably better to have a simple cinematic soundbite for the studio executive, like, "it's about giant rock-em-sock-em robots with lasers" (and I don't mean that unkindly, but that's about where the game's visceral appeal coalesced) rather than, "Traveller is kind of about everything, it depends on your campaign because you can do about anything you want. IMTU..." Joss Whedon can get away with not admitting that Firefly is Traveller in a way he could not if it were about giant rock-em-sock-em robots with lasers.)
There is something inherent in Traveller (or in the people that play it and who produce it) that wants to be all things to all people. You could say it's stupid to allow yourself to sign up for that, or to "allow" your base to keep wanting that, but it's the way Traveller is. T5 is a perfect example of that Traveller personality, and working on Traveller is riding the tiger.
We were always talking to distributors and retailers (Frank was the president of GAMA during those years) and hearing, "simplify the game." The meme repeated to me most often was, "new players are intimidated by thinking they have to memorize the list of emperors, ditch the background." We had existing players, (associated in my mind with Challenge subscribers who wrote physical letters), who were invested in the Rebellion factions, and wanted to know what happened because GDW had encouraged them to feel that way, but by 1991 that had spun out of control. The loudest and most insistent voices were the self-selecting groups who formed electronic communities on their own, the mailing lists, or were commissioned by GDW, like HIWG. The mailing lists were generally "I don't play in the OTU" guys who designed lots of technology and figured out how it would work and studied C-rocks and crowbars from orbit, and HIWG was obviously very 3I history and Rebellion oriented. Obviously input from the self-selecting populations was skewed, but since there is no way to poll people who don't play your game, opinions of distributors and retailers filled in for that, and that was skewed as well, because they had their own economic interests. The issue is not that we didn't spend lots of time sifting through market input, but that it was all over the map, and we had reasons to want to be responsive to all of them, mostly because we had encouraged most of them to be there. Perhaps it is a credit to our being "nice guys" that we tried, or perhaps it is a credit to our being stupid that we tried. Certainly someone will point out that there is an MBA science to market research which points the way to the money (and then someone would object, "that is corrupt, you just treat us as cash cows"). While a Harvard MBA could have said, "listen to this segment because they have money, ignore them because they don't really help you," that's really what WOTC brought to the table a little later. For example, the endless argument of,
Distributor: "You get new players by putting out a new game with lower barriers to entry and simple, clear examples of what they are to emulate. Don't focus on your existing constituencies."
Existing Players (TML, HIWG, et al.): "NO! You get new players by existing players and GMs bringing them in, and explaining the rich and detailed legacy and heritage. Focus on us, because we are your word of mouth."
Who is actually correct? Where is the validated, normed, statistical evidence that one is right and the other wrong? I can tell you that in 1991-92 no one could tell me the answer, it was a lot of opinions and gut feels, and GDW couldn't commission RAND or Harris to find out. In the early '90s gaming was still at the end of its cottage industry beginnings and not yet transitioned to being divisions of Hasbro and Topps. Maybe Hasbro and Topps know the answer to that, or maybe the real answer is "TV advertising," I don't know. (Did FASA know the answer, or had they simply built a simpler baseline to produce on? Ask Jordan or Ross.)
Anyhoo, to misquote Jesus, "You cannot serve both the distributors and the retailers and the TML and XBoat and HIWG and the people who haven't bought your game yet because they're scared of it, especially now that the MBAs over at WOTC have just cracked the code on combining the twin obsessions of power gaming and game/card collecting."
But, people who play Traveller, even though they may also play BattleTech, don't play Traveller because it scratches the same itch that BT already does. I would agree that BattleTech was designed (or copped from anime) more shrewdly than Traveller to create a more predictable, stable fan base that can support a rationalized product line over time, but that ship had already left the pier by 1991. Traveller wants to be all things to all people (and seriously, bless its heart for trying) as T5 shows, and that's not easy, as the eight or ten editions of the game over the years demonstrate. However, the alternative is to throw the Traveller audience over the side and say, "can't be done, not worth it," and no one wants that.
Mmm, donuts.
