> lizard
>
> The success of GURPS Traveller would seem to dispute that.
I never played GURPS Traveller, and I have no idea if it was as successful
as the original. I played during the height of the GDW 'black' books in the
mid 80's, and picked up the newer MegaTraveller books an a lark. I didn't
even hear about GURPS Traveller until a couple of years ago.
I have no idea how SJG feels about the d20 System, but it appears to me that
d20 is tailor-made to compete with GURPS.
> To me, Traveller was about incredible mounds of detail -- the Grand
> Survey/Grand Census supplements, building grav tanks with Striker,
> rolling up animal encounter charts, and turning all those abstract
> numbers into something with meaning.
All that is quite true, and a significant part of the attraction to the
game. I've heard it said that one of Traveller's designers, perhaps Marc
himself, had the mind of an accountant but with the heart of a gamer. I'll
go that one further by saying that the designers had a gift for turning
random numbers into very workable source material. Granted, Traveller had
its limitations (combat was handled almost as an afterthought), and that is
why I think a meld of the d20 System with the tables and setting of the
original Traveller would be a good fit.
The chargen process was one of those very workable system that ended up
turning out something that was better than the sum of a bunch of die rolls.
I fondly remember my fledgling years as a programmer turning out code on my
Apple ][+ that would instantly create animals, encounter tables, worlds,
star systems, subsectors, and every character imaginable. I even used
VisiCalc to build ships of every size and every conceivable mission. Ah,
those were the days...it's a good thing nostalgia leaves out all the bad
parts, like, oh, every that happened between one's 13th and 19th year.
-Brad
