Phil, we'll just agree to disagree on whether CT was the best version or not or if so why.

That said, anyone just repackaging what was in CT was going to not be much of a commercial success. So new things were created to be a new take on the game - in MT, a task system, a system for research, some key tweaks to chargen, an entirely new construction and combat system for all forms of vehicles (with the asterisk that it borrowed from Striker liberally), and a setting well different from the status-quo Imperium of CT.

TNE took another step for the same reasons - commercial success.

There really was no way for anything other than reprint runs to ever happen and be a commercial success.

This is the same reason that some broken but manageable Ad&D mechanics  (oh, so broken in palces) still let you carry on great adventures at a decent pace were replaced by 3.x and 3.x replaced by 4E which in turn has been replaced by 5E. There were lots of changes while still looking in many ways like the original. But without the new rules to pull people to check them out, without the newer production values that were snazzy (I don't love those), and without having buzz to suck in new players, all you'd be doing is try to sell stuff to a few adventurous souls and the original CT gamers who already own the rulebooks. So chances of being commercially successful would be low.

So, you can kind of treat them as huge steps away and somehow broken, but the inevitability of having to go that sort of direction (maybe not in all specifics, but in many aspects) is incumbent on anyone wanting a new commercial success.

T.


On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 10:13 AM Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
Yep, just about every new pub seemed/s to be written with the idea that the author has license to "fix things" by inserting their own particular 'brainstorm' solutions.

While CT was undoubtedly flawed, the next three 'versions' were way, way worse what with all the hyper-complication & all.

I guess T5 was supposed to bring it all together but it actually appears to just have added to the 'pile'.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Sunday, July 5, 2020, 08:13:16 PM MST, Vareck Bostrom <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:


Traveller can never actually be fixed is part of the problem. New versions and supplements get released or adapted into Traveller but there's always the flawed CT to fall back on that has the same problems that will cause the same discussions.

When you are very young, Traveller and Star Trek and Star Wars perhaps had a little bit of the "the future could possibly look like this" and as you get older it seems much less likely to the point of all three of those seeming absurd. Flaws in the assumptions of the settings stand out much more. The future is not going to be a massive recreation of the Age of Sail, there's no interstellar empire out there, the universe does not owe us a faster than light drive or the physics to allow it, and humans do not exist anywhere other than Earth and that may very well be the case for all time.

I'm not quite sure what Star Wars has that Traveller doesn't and it seems to suffer all of the same problems, but if you are trying to avoid living in the past and want to replace it with a hobby or interest that is more forward looking, what are you considering doing instead?

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 5:10 PM Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:
I find myself reading/having/making the same dumb arguments about the
same dumb stuff as twenty, thirty years ago, and nothing changes except
I'm turning into even more of a curmudgeon.

(also, I keep hitting 'send' too soon
--
---------------
Kelly St. Clair
xxxxxx@efn.org

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