I could not agree more. Indeed, I blame the era. The mid-to-late eighties were an era of intense wargames for GDW and the community absolutely supported militarisation of role-playing games. To publishing companies took that up like no others, FASA and GDW. This has to be seen in the context of the late Cold War, of course, but it changed how the industry worked and how it developed: Games that tried to be hyper realistic and simulationist(ic) saw the light of day and more narrative games developed as some sort of 'counter movement', i. e. Vampire in its 1st edition.Sigtrygg wrote: ↑Fri Aug 07, 2020 9:01 amIt is my contention that it was the Fifth Frontier War that critically damaged the Classic Traveller OTU. Gone were the adventure hooks and fascinating news articles, instead we got a few years of war reports. Gone was the setting were a small group of characters could get up to mischief and shenanigans, instead you had to worry about the battlefleet in the system you have jumped into.
It also subtly changed how the fanon viewed the Imperium. Pre-FFW the Imperials were often bad guys, then during the FFW they wee americanised and became the good guys.
For Traveller this development meant a huge shift, indeed, as Sigtrygg wrote. Gone were the Imperium baddies, now Imperial Star Marines were cool and people did no longer unanimously want to play adventurer-type, Wild West in space style Travellers, but futurised special operations with pew-pew galore. Even West End Games own Star Wars RPG, which copied many elements of earlier Traveller went that way: Imperial and spec ops campaigns were a huge thing in the nineties.
The question would be: how huge was the impact of FFW by itself on that? Or would the industry and Traveller have gone into that direction either way?
