Some Folks Were Looking Forward To It

[Jeffr0]

Looks like several folks were looking forward to T5.

Hopefully they never lurked on this forum.

 

[kafka47]

WOW! Six pages of pure nostalgia and then followed by 41 pages of people responding. Only fueling the argument, you build it, they will come.

Come on, friends, fellow travellers, citizens we have a Future to build.

 

[The Shaman]

Originally posted by Jeffr0:
Hopefully they never lurked on this forum.

Y'know, I've read a lot of criticism of Traveller and its various editions over the years, and never once has a critic's words spoiled even a few minutes of the fun I get playing this game.

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by kafka47:
[QB] WOW! Six pages of pure nostalgia

i.e. no actual content...

and then followed by 41 pages of people responding. Only fueling the argument, you build it, they will come.

Uh, did you actually read the comments? That's not 41 pages (or whatever) of people who are just responding positively to the idea of T5 - that's 41 pages of people talking mostly about D&D, while mentioning that they see Traveller in their store and nobody buys it. Sure some say "yeah I really liked it", of course there's people who would be looking forward to seeing what Marc is going to produce (the poor shmucks, if only they knew). But this isn't 41 pages (or whatever) of unadulterated praise for Traveller, it's 41 pages of people just discussing things relating to the original post.

Also note that the article was posted in March 2006. This isn't new.

 

[scout_harris]

Originally posted by kafka47:
WOW! Six pages of pure nostalgia and then followed by 41 pages of people responding. Only fueling the argument, you build it, they will come.

Come on, friends, fellow travellers, citizens we have a Future to build.

If it involves T5 in its current form. Count me out. I'm out of shelf space for books that will never be used (my 6 T4 Books are currently taking up the room).

Unless T5 is an improved MT... then I will be involved... I go with what my player base will accept!

 

[MJD]

One alarming thing I saw here and I've seen elsewhere: "Oooh, Traveller. Traveller was great you could do this and this and that..."

Past tense.

My experience is that Traveller is seen as one of the great games of yesterday by many gamers, leaving just us, the faithful, playing on.

Which is why I sometimes grind my teeth over the divisions among the faithful....

 

[flykiller]

Which is why I sometimes grind my teeth over the divisions among the faithful....

probably inevitable. traveller is hard. you have to come up with entire PLANETS, minimum, to even start a game, and in the beginning and to this day we're all on our own as to what those planets, worlds, systems, are. takes a certain kind of ref to do that - the kind that go their own way.

My experience is that Traveller is seen as one of the great games of yesterday by many gamers, leaving just us, the faithful, playing on.

yeah, and that was kind of inevitable too. kid walks into a store, looks at two games. one is "realistic", "gritty", "ordinary people in extraordinary situations", "shotguns in space". the other has artwork of cute babes, pictures of colorful flashing energy weapons, and ever-increasing powers for the character. decisions, decisions ....

 

[Malenfant]

My experience is that Traveller is seen as one of the great games of yesterday by many gamers, leaving just us, the faithful, playing on.

Which is why I sometimes grind my teeth over the divisions among the faithful....

If people want it to be a great game for the current generation, then the game surely needs to adapt to fit the mores of the current generation - one can't expect it to appeal to people today by waving it in their faces and saying "Look! It's older! It's better!". What's Traveller got in it to appeal to the current market?

Serenity/Firefly shows that something similar to Traveller could appeal to the 20-30 age market today. Maybe people need to start thinking about what Firefly had that Traveller doesn't have and try to get more of that in Traveller to sell it that way.

 

[Jeff M. Hopper]

I think a distinction needs to be made here between Serenity/Firefly the movie/TV show and Serenity the role-playing game. One was a pretty good science fiction show and another was a RPG that has had poor sales and reviews. Its like comparing apples and oranges.

I can tell you what the few younger gamers I've run across who played CT have told me: They can't believe the rules are so simple and that they work, although there has been complaints about the math. They love the random character generation and do chargen just to see what they come up with and try to create a backstory for the result.

So I think there is still some appeal to the current generation for this 30 year old game.

 

[bryan gibson]

at the risk of fanning flames, but this is something that ACT could have accomplished - because simple elegant systems have an appeal regardless of generational approach, especially when they work.

Whereas, after all these years, Traveller seems to have been evolving into more and more complex, obscure and just plain unclear rulesets and such, while there is less and less exploration of the setting proper.

This is why i am always happy to see more setting stuff pop out ( the setting is vast, and the timelines many, and lots still to be explored) and always stumped to see more mechanics ( like T4, T5, ad infinitum) being cranked out - one causes the game to grow, while the other merely confuses the issue.

If we must have mechanics, why not build on the originals, rather than yet another set of rules incompatible with all thats gone before? many of the fans ( Supplement 4 and his UGM, and ACT are two such examples) do so nicely, while others only add confusion and lack cross compatibilty ( such as- do i design my ship with High guard, FFand S, GURPS, T4, T20 or....you get the picture)

 

[Liam Devlin]

T5?

No comment.

 

[The Shaman]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
If people want it to be a great game for the current generation, then the game surely needs to adapt to fit the mores of the current generation. . .

A wise man once said, "There are two fools in the world. The first fool says, 'This is old, therefore it is good.' The second fool says, 'This is new, therefore it is better.'"

Originally posted by Malenfant:
Serenity/Firefly shows that something similar to Traveller could appeal to the 20-30 age market today.

Firefly and Serenity were bombs. The series was cancelled, and the movie tanked.

It pains me to say that, because I enjoyed them both very much, but I don't think one can really point to Josh Whedon's franchise as a success story to be emulated.

 

[Malenfant]

Well if one considers Firefly and Serenity to be "bombs", then that just proves the point even more - they're the most Traveller-like things on TV... and supposedly they tanked (I won't believe it myself without more data - how are DVD sales?). So that would indicate that Traveller-like settings aren't viable today.

 

[far-trader]

Rant mode engaged...

Well the series was cancelled because the corporate types are idiots. They let Joss do it because he was (is) a bankable commodity and figured even if he put out a show about foot fungus his name would guarantee profits and a loyal following. Then of course they looked at the pilot, didn't understand it at all, and said "Do you have any chase scenes?" He showed them a later episode with a classic chase scene and they said "Excellent, we'll air that one first!" Never mind that it would make no sense story wise. Then I think they made the next classic move of playing "find the new series" as they time and day shifted it all over. Nothing kills a new show quicker than "I missed an episode because they moved it."

Despite this the show did gain a significant and loyal audience. And just as it was finding it's market... BLAM! Killed dead by the same executives who asked for it. No real reason as far as I know. Some mumblings about poor market share (while worse stuff with poorer shares is still on, and even utter crap is left on because it does have numbers).

As for the movie, blame the Browncoats to some extent. They hyped the hell out of it and turned it into a geek-fest that no self respecting youth could go see without being labled a geek. If they'd just let the movie be made and released with the normal promotions I think it would have had a much wider audience appeal and could well have ressurected the story.

...disengage rant mode.

But then I get the feeling from the movie that Joss was saying goodbye to his story with it and I don't anticipate anymore on it from him.

I think Mal's point is that the show did indeed find a youth market though, despite the best attempts of the suits to kill it, proving that there is a chance for science fiction to appeal to a younger generation. I'm not sure that means the same market is going to embrace an RPG though. A closer comparison for that would probably be console games, and that has it's own comparison issues (solo play, FPS, anonymity in group play, etc.) that make it tricky to apply what works to sell an RPG.

 

[The Shaman]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
Well if one considers Firefly and Serenity to be "bombs", then that just proves the point even more - they're the most Traveller-like things on TV... and supposedly they tanked.

With respect to the movie, would you believe Joss Whedon himself?

Originally posted by Malenfant:
(I won't believe it myself without more data - how are DVD sales?)

I read that Serenity DVD sales may have recovered the advertising budget, meaning that the film either lost a bit of money or barely broke even.

I've not read anything about Firefly DVD sales.

Originally posted by Malenfant:
So that would indicate that Traveller-like settings aren't viable today.

Ouch, trying take in the sweep of that generalization nearly gave me whiplash! (Denying the antecedent tends to do that to me.)

Aliens and Cowboy Bebop were both very successful by their respective industry standards, and both have a Traveller vibe as well - if I follow your logic, I conclude that Traveller is a viable setting.

You're drawing an invalid inference here. Part of the audience for the movies and series is also a part of the audience that enjoys roleplaying games. However, a large portion of each audience has no overlap whatsoever, and there is also a portion of the audience that overlaps that still doesn't want to play a roleplaying game based on a movie they like. (For example, I enjoyed The Lord of the Rings trilogy and I like roleplaying games, but I have no desire to play a LotR RPG.)

 

[The Shaman]

Originally posted by far-trader:
I think Mal's point is that the show did indeed find a youth market though, despite the best attempts of the suits to kill it, proving that there is a chance for science fiction to appeal to a younger generation. I'm not sure that means the same market is going to embrace an RPG though.

I run across this idea from time to time, that the popularity of genre fiction (i.e., sci-fi, fantasy) is somehow integral to the popularity of roleplaying games, and from the bits of gaming's cottage-industry talk I've read over the years, that simply isn't the case.

Nineteen-eighty-three is in the rearview mirror for RPGs and it isn't coming back, no matter how big a movie or movie franchise may be.

 

[kafka47]

You're drawing an invalid inference here. Part of the audience for the movies and series is also a part of the audience that enjoys roleplaying games. However, a large portion of each audience has no overlap whatsoever, and there is also a portion of the audience that overlaps that still doesn't want to play a roleplaying game based on a movie they like. (For example, I enjoyed The Lord of the Rings trilogy and I like roleplaying games, but I have no desire to play a LotR RPG.)

This is only partially true. Ever try explaining an Elf to someone who has not seen LOTR? The audience is often shared between RPGs and popular films/TV shows/books, as it forms part of the shared universe of assumptions that the RPG fan is trying to convey. Learning what constitutes the appeal factor of those can go along way in making a good game.

 

[The Shaman]

Originally posted by kafka47:
This is only partially true. Ever try explaining an Elf to someone who has not seen LOTR?

Sure - they're little fellas with pointy ears who make cookies.

I'm not sure if I'm understanding your point here.

Originally posted by kafka47:
The audience is often shared between RPGs and popular films/TV shows/books, as it forms part of the shared universe of assumptions that the RPG fan is trying to convey.

Yes, but not with the sort of one-to-one correspondence that was applied upthread: "That movie was unpopular. This game is like that movie. Therefore the game will be unpopular." That's a logical fallacy called "denying the antecedent" that's readily disproved.

In any case, what I think is a mistake is pointing at something in popular fiction, whether it's a book or a movie or a television series, and saying that if it succeeds or fails, then the same will be true of a roleplaying game that is similar to or even licensed from that book, film, or series. The Star Wars movie franchise is the most commercially successful in the history of cinema, but the SWRPG was never the most popular roleplaying game by a long shot, in either its d6 or d20 incarnations - conversely the Dungeons and Dragons movie flopped mightily, and D&D is still the RPG leader by a healthy margin.

Both appeal to a subset of their respective audiences, but one can't look at either the game or the movie and draw an accurate inference about its place in the other medium.

 

[Rhialto the Marvelous]

What kafka said. There is something like a "core experience" contained in Traveller that you can find popping up in contemporary scifi material.

I haven't seen either Firefly or Serenity, but I'm thinking of the Freelancer CRPG (boring shooter, but with great Travelleresque visuals and even greater potential), and those novels by Richard Hamilton (not for the plot so much as for the set-up--a bunch of people in a tiny free trader hopping from system to system trying to beat the odds).

I'm sure there's tons more.

 

[The Shaman]

Originally posted by Rhialto the Marvelous:
There is something like a "core experience" contained in Traveller that you can find popping up in contemporary scifi material.

Sure. Jack McDevitt's novels and Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War books have a Traveller vibe about them, and I'm told that David Weber's Honor Harrington books are this way as well.

Of course that was true twenty-five or thirty years ago too, when we could point to H. Beam Piper's Space Viking and Frank Herbert's Dune and C.J. Cherryh's Merchanter's Luck as being "like Traveller." Many of the motifs in the game were popular then, and continue to be popular today.

Are there any White Wolf fans on the board? I know next to nothing about the World of Darkness, but I'm wondering about the relationship between fans of Vampire and fans of Anne Rice's novels. I'm guessing that many who played the game were fans of her novels, but did being a fan of the novels or the movies predispose someone to trying the game?