More Thoughts On Megatraveller And Such

The late John Berkey did some
cool spaceships

Yeah, I've been quiet here for a bit. Still dealing with some personal issues, but at least I've had some time to think about gaming again. Time to post something, so that you all can remember that I'm here!

I really love talking with the guys over at the G+ Classic Traveller group. They've given me a lot of things to think about in regard to the game, and pointed out places where later Traveller has changed things. For instance, it's clear that in the original release of the game, known as "LBB77" because it was released in 1977 (as opposed to "LBB81" for the revised version in 1981 and "TTB" for the slight revision from that which was The Traveller Book), there was much more emphasis on the sandbox elements and less on any interstellar imperiums or whatever (though the latter was still understood to be present in the background). Examples that affect this included the randomly-placed "Jump routes" or "spacelanes" of LBB77 that became instead the Referee-placed "communications routes" of LBB81/TTB. Interestingly, the communications routes, despite requiring more thought and effort from the Referee, have less impact on the game because the Jump routes determine where a traveller can get regular passage or a crew can buy pre-made navigation tapes. This limits the locations that the player-characters can travel to until they can improve their situation (either by getting the Generate program to make their own navigation tapes or somehow convincing a non-player ship to transport them outside of the normal shipping lanes, probably for a higher fee). The communications routes don't have the same impact on the game at the table, though extra rules found in, for example, The Traveller Adventure and other sources can allow the communications routes to have some effect.

MegaTraveller also made an assumption early on that greatly affected the way that game plays relative to the original version. That assumption was that a character attempting to do something would have a fairly high skill rating, such that the supposed typical character would be gaining a +4 DM from skill and attribute bonuses. That doesn't track with the original game, in which any level of skill above zero meant that the character had professional-level training in that area. That could probably be remedied by dropping all task difficulties 4 points, so that a Routine task is 3+, a Difficult one 7+, and so on (it would then be appropriate to add a difficulty level of Staggering between Formidable and Impossible, as Marc Miller's Traveller did). That could also mean that an average attribute of 7 could be re-centered on 0 instead of +1. Lacking a skill entirely would still increase the difficulty one level. In such a case, a Simple task would succeed without a roll (or perhaps require a roll if the total of all DMs is -4 or more, trying to get a total of -1 or higher), but could be increased to Routine or higher difficulty as usual for lack of skill or whatever. This change would also allow the character creation system to be scaled back to the original game's parameters, so that no "Special Duty" roll would exist to give even more skills.

On that topic, one of the benefits of being a Scout in the original game was the high incidence of Jack of all Trades skill. While that skill is more clearly defined in MegaTraveller (and allows higher levels of the skill to have meaning), I think that it should be returned to its original place of value, perhaps by adding (in addition to the "free retries" ability) the ability to offset the penalty for lacking skill. Probably give a +1 to unskilled use (only) for every 2 full points of Jack of all Trades skill, to a maximum of +4 (requiring skill-8, so pretty unlikely anyway). Again, that bonus would be in addition to the normal MegaTraveller benefit of being allowed one free retry of a failed task per Jack of all Trades skill level (taking the normal amount of time).

Another area to consider is space combat. The system in MegaTraveller is, simply, horrible. It's a kludge of the Book 5: High Guard system (originally intended for large ship actions) mixed with elements designed to make it more useful for small ships, and it was not developed well enough for actual use. That is to say, it can be used, but seems ultimately unsatisfying for either small or large actions. In the end, I think that I'd like to draw it back and make it more like the Book 2: Starships system or Mayday, or perhaps the range band system in Starter Traveller (or project it ahead somewhat and make it more like Battle Rider, which has always seemed to me like the nearly-ideal set of Traveller starship combat rules).

Which brings up some issues of design. MegaTraveller draws on the expanded weapon types available in High Guard. I'd like to drop at least some of those, such as meson weapons and associated technology. It might also be useful to include a weapon design system, such as that found in Traveller: The New Era (TNE) or Marc Miller's Traveller (T4). This is especially true for missiles, which could do with taking some ideas from Special Supplement 3: Missiles in Traveller. The design system in MegaTraveller moves away from the LBB/TTB in a significant way, though, by falling clearly on the other side of the so-called "small ship Traveller/big ship Traveller" line. When players are tooling around in 2700m³ ships, but the military have 270,000m³ light cruisers, there is an overwhelming power differential that deeply affects the feel of the game. This also doesn't match the historical eras which the game tries to emulate. The age of sail saw merchant ships that were no smaller than their military counterparts, while WW1/2 era tramp steamers were roughly the same size as military cruisers. For example, the OCEAN class steamer was about 10,000 tons displacement, while the Pennsylvania-class cruiser of the pre-war era was around 15,000 tons fully loaded and the Cincinnati-class cruiser was less than 3500 tons! To be fair, the latter were slated to be reclassified as Patrol Gunboats if they hadn't been decommissioned. I'm still not sure how to address that issue. Whatever happens, though, it will mean some significant changes to the design system. It also means that I will have to consider how to handle ship benefits from character creation, plus mortgages and other financial tools related to running the tramp merchant game. GURPS Traveller: Far Trader would certainly be of help there.

Now for the more morose thoughts in this regard. I've been considering ways to write all this up, including the setting I have worked out, and sell it, but the specific details of Traveller's current licensing scheme seem to preclude it. Weird restrictions in the Mongoose OGL (you can't include the method to roll up characteristics, for example, which would prevent me from presenting the "genetic dice" necessary for the dynastic game that I eventually want to write up) and behavior that seems from my perspective to be somewhat erratic on the part of the original designer (I've heard that people have been billed for asking him questions - which rumor I can't check because I couldn't afford any such potential billing to find out if it's true or not!) combine to make it a minefield I'd rather not navigate, at least not alone. Another option would be to present the setting I have in mind through another system, but all of the other systems that seem even remotely suitable to my preferences are based on D&D, with character classes and such. Stars Without Number, White Star, Starships & Spacemen (either edition), and so on all seem to rely on elements that don't suit my setting and the aesthetic preferences related to it. I've been thinking that it might be time to dust off my old idea of retooling Flashing Blades for science fiction adventure. That might even be historically appropriate, since Flashing Blades drew pretty heavily on En Garde, GDW's first RPG. One possible problem with this idea is that Flashing Blades's system is more suited to swashbuckling action/adventure than the more gritty tone that infuses most of Traveller's various incarnations. If that becomes too much of a problem for me, I could always build it using one of the open-rule versions of the d% system found in RuneQuest, I suppose.

But I really wish that I could just use a properly-developed MegaTraveller as my basis.

Alternate Traveller Campaign Frames: Strange New Worlds

I've discussed a couple of alternate campaign frames previously, covering the Mercenary campaign along with the Squadron and Active Duty campaign frames. Though the last was only presented in terms of Navy games (and so incorporating Marines by default), it would have been easily converted for use with other active duty military games involving the Army. I'm going to start skipping around, because the other campaign frames from the classic Traveller era are either minor and not well detailed, or ones that I am not very familiar with at this time (I will be discussing the frame implied in The Traveller Adventure later on, which is related to the "default" Traveller campaign frame that I've also described previously, but includes some new concepts that are very important).

Unfortunately, the classic Traveller expansion for the Scout service, Book 6 Scouts, did not incorporate a specific campaign framework. It included only a set of tools for the Referee to detail whole systems instead of the main worlds that were rolled up in the basic world generation system along with an expanded character generation system for Scout characters that followed on the same lines as the military services presented in the previous two books. Paranoia Press, who presented an expanded Scouts character generation system a little earlier in their supplement Scouts and Assassins, also did not expand on the sorts of activities that a Scout might perform as part of actual play. The supplements for MegaTraveller titled Grand Survey, Grand Census, and World Builder's Handbook started to cover the sorts of things a Scout might do, but as I have never actually seen the first two of those supplements I can't comment on them. World Builder's Handbook did include some very useful tasks related to surveying a world, but didn't go much further toward detailing a campaign frame related to exploration - though an enterprising and interested Referee could easily turn the notes presented into such a campaign. Instead of discussing those, then, I will skip ahead to the two editions of Traveller that presented Scout campaign frames at least reasonably well.

EDIT: Re-reading some of the World Builder's Handbook, I see that it includes more detail toward an exploration and contact game than I remembered. I may return to that supplement later.

First, Traveller: The New Era got in on the action. In its extensive rewrite and reimagining of the MegaTraveller supplement called World Builder's Handbook, titled World Tamer's Handbook, GDW presented detailed descriptions of the tasks necessary to survey a new world in the wilds ravaged by Virus. Those tasks were generic, of course, and so not limited to the New Era setting. Highly detailed looks at the environment of a world were presented, along with methods for generating them beforehand. Information down to the amount of extractable wind and hydro energy, soil fertility, and so on in a 10km hex was presented in a usable and efficient manner. Scouts could go in, find out the details of a world, and return to provide the results of their survey to whatever home base they served.

The supplement didn't stop there, though. The other side of the Scout coin in SF is colonization, and World Tamer's Handbook presented a campaign frame of colonists, a first in SF gaming generally, and for Traveller specifically. A model was provided that allowed players to determine the economic output of their colony based on decisions they made about allocating resources both infrastructure- and human-related, which they could then direct toward various improvements and maintenance - a true domain-level game at last. This also saw the return of the sandbox format for a Traveller campaign, which had largely dropped by the wayside during the late Traveller and most of the MegaTraveller eras in favor of the then-popular story-based format. In addition to whatever the Referee chose to throw at them to further the story, colonial administrators (the PCs, the rules assume) would experience various random events that provided story hooks related to administering a group of people in a colony. Sadly, this wasn't well implemented, as the events mostly were defined in terms of a single task roll to resolve them ("Crime Wave, succeed in a Difficult Investigation roll" or suffer some penalty, for example). Nonetheless, this was a great idea, but didn't see much support from the community of players, something that can really be said about most of Traveller: The New Era, unfortunately. Some general notes toward scaling the colonial model up to cover entire world governments were included, but the system becomes unwieldy at the higher end. This would lead to a different system for world-spanning empires later on, and I will probably discuss that campaign frame next time.

When Steve Jackson Games picked up a license to produce a Traveller edition using their GURPS rules, one of the supplementary books they produced was GURPS Traveller: First In. First In gave the GT version of Scout activities, including, in addition to the expected detailed world generation system, a set of rules for surveying a system. As is the case with most of the GT materials, though, these tools were provided with no real guidance as to what to do with them. A decent GM could certainly take them and turn them into tools for adventurous games or even campaigns, of course, but no such framework was explicitly provided. In a nice turn, there were a number of optional rules included, ranging from minor to as radical for the Traveller game as incorporating 3D star mapping instead of the traditional parsec-wide-hex based 2D sector/subsector system. The designer's notes for that supplement, available for free on the SJG site, give more detail still toward a game using 3D star maps, including discussion of possible changes to the Jump Drive and so on. I should add at this point that if you have any interest in the GURPS Traveller line at all, you should hurry up and get the PDFs, as SJG's license to sell that edition expires at the end of this year, and they will not be renewing it. After that point, they will not be selling GT materials, not even the PDFs.

Not-So-Obscure Games: Traveller: The New Era

What is going on here?

I pretty much skimmed over this game in my discussion of Traveller earlier. That was because it is a significantly different game than the others of the Traveller series of games. It develops from the GDW "House System", which was an adaptation of the second edition of Twilight 2000, modified for use with a D20 instead of D10 (and the rest of the House System games, including Twilight 2000 would follow suit). Closely related was Space 1889, which used a D6 instead. There are similarities with 2300AD (formerly Traveller 2300), but that was a direction of development that GDW abandoned.

Traveller: The New Era (or "TNE" for short) was a melding of concepts from the previous Traveller games with the House System. Characteristics were similar to Traveller, but not quite the same. Instead of Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, and Social Standing (and Psionic Strength), a TNE character was rated in Strength, Agility, Constitution, Intelligence, Education, and Charisma (plus Psionics and Social Standing). Unlike Traveller, which rated initial characteristics on 2D6, TNE rated characteristics on 2D6-1. This is an easy conversion, of course, but it does require conversion. Other editions of Traveller can be used directly with each other, no conversion required.

In other editions of Traveller, character skills are rated in small numbers. A skill rating of 1 is acceptable, 3 is significant, and 5 is amazing, with different editions implementing those numbers in different ways. TNE, on the other hand, uses "asset" ratings, which are the sum of an ability and some skill points. These are around 10 for an average professional skill (roughly equivalent to about 3 in other Traveller games). The asset is multiplied by the difficulty modifier (1 for "Difficult" tasks, 2 for "Average" ones, ½ for "Formidable" difficulty, 4 for "Easy" tasks, and ¼ for "Impossible" tasks) to find the roll needed on a D20 for success. There are some finer points, like degree of success based on the difference between the target number and the actual roll, but that's basically how action resolution works. There are occasional instances where the skill points matter, so they are also tracked.

Characters gain starting skills by engaging in "careers". This is also like other Traveller editions, though there are many differences in the actual implementation of that basic idea. In other Traveller editions, most of the previous experience in careers is adjudicated by random dice rolls, but most of the previous experience in TNE is by player choice (though there are some random dice rolls, too). Each period of four years in a career gives a number of skill points to divide between the skills available in that career. Those skill points, when totaled at the end of generation, are added to the appropriate characteristic to determine the character's asset in that skill. In addition, careers that involved combat would give a bonus to a character's "Coolness" rating, used in combat.

In most of the other editions, combat is based around abstract "range bands" and 1.5m squares, depending on the exact situation (the squares are usually used for interior and starship combat, the range bands for outdoors combat), with 15m squares replacing the range bands in MegaTraveller. In TNE, the ground scale is based on 2m squares. It's a small change, but it makes previous materials (such as starship deck plans) useless, and so was annoying. It was also annoying for those of us who tried to use the material to make our own starship deck plans, as the 1.5m squares were perfect for that (2 of those squares, assuming 3m per deck, were 13.5 m³, which was the approximate value of one "displacement ton"), while the 2m squares did not break down into those traditional Traveller measurements so easily. In fact, I don't think that any deck plans were ever released for TNE (or, if there were, they were from secondary publishers, not GDW).

A turn in TNE was 5 seconds, which is comparable to most of the others (usually 6 seconds, though Classic Traveller had a combat turn of 15 seconds). Coolness rating was important, as it was a character's initiative rating, with higher Coolness taking actions first. Very high initiative characters (over 5) would also get an extra action in the round.

TNE had hit locations, which was available as an optional rule in MegaTraveller, but which has never had much importance in the game other than in this edition. A character would take damage in each location separately, with the amount of damage to a location determining the effect. Unfortunately, the "hit capacity" of each location was very high (the chest alone had triple STR+CON points, or an average of 36, the head twice CON, and the other body parts twice STR+CON - compare to an overall total of about 21 for damage dice that were about the same in the other Traveller editions, with about 14 points of damage to render a character out of commission, at least on the first hit). There was a special rule in TNE for auto-kill results to close the lethality gap.

Where TNE shined was in Fire, Fusion, and Steel, the "technical architecture" book. That was a set of systems for designing everything from starships to ground cars, from meson accelerator spinal mounts to body pistols. It was the first major release that included all of those in one place, deriving ideas from both the Striker and MegaTraveller vehicle design systems and from BTRC's Guns, Guns, Guns (aka 3G) weapon design system. This would kick off the fashion for extensive design systems that would culminate with GURPS Vehicles and the CORPS VDS ("Vehicle Design System"). Some people found these design tools intrusive on their experience (even if they didn't actually use them), and these sorts of systems have been falling out of fashion, sadly.

Quick digression about gaming philosophy: Some people have been complaining about detailed gaming systems. The usual argument is that they are too much work for games, since it is just as easy to simply eyeball some numbers, and the effect on the game is the same either way. Most of the information that shows up in those design sequences has no impact on games, they argue. There is much to be said for that latter approach. It was, for instance, the approach used in the original Traveller rules (excepting starships, of course). However, not everyone wants to approach a game in that way. Let me draw a comparison to Poul Anderson. Back in the '60s and '70s, most SF authors would eyeball their fictional worlds. Poul Anderson, though, would work out all of the details of his worlds: their orbital periods, surface albedo, axial tilt, primary's luminosity, and so on. Most of that information had no effect on his stories. However, that deep background informed his authorial choices. In the same way, a lot of these design choices in games don't have any direct effect, but they give deeper background information. Plus, in an open sandbox style, you never know what will be important. It's not to say that detailed design is the best way to do things, but it is one way to approach a game, and "good enough" estimation is not necessarily the best way to go either.

The starship combat system of TNE was excellent, as well. The designers learned what they could from people who had worked on the SDI project of the 1980s, among others, and presented a fairly realistic system. The first release of it was in the board game Brilliant Lances. Starship hit locations were filled with the systems from the design sequences and selected by die roll from among a subset that depended on the facing of the target in comparison to the firing ship. The boardgame used hexes (of 30,000km each) and vector movement, while TNE abstracted this to range bands and other abstractions.

Anyway, it was a solid game, it's just that I prefer Traveller to Twilight 2000. I'm also very much, as I mentioned in the previous discussion, not fond of the background changes made. One of these days, I'll talk about how a Traveller game works. That is, the general outline of play.

Not-So-Obscure Games: Traveller Through The Years

As most people know, there are four editions of Traveller that have seen print from companies with which Marc Miller is or has been directly involved, one edition from Mongoose, and a few editions converted to other game systems (or "engines", as some would have it). The two most well-known of the latter are GURPS Traveller and T20 (the D20 system Traveller conversion), but others such as a HERO System conversion and even a D6 System conversion exist. These seem like quite different animals to me, as the conversions, by necessity, focus on the default background, while the Marc Miller games (and the Mongoose edition; in fact, the Mongoose edition offers several alternate settings) can be used with that background or with any other the Referee wants to design. In addition to those editions, Marc Miller is about to print a "definitive" edition, Traveller5.

Here's a quick overview of the editions, including some notes as to how they differ from each other.

First was classic Traveller. Often called "CT" or the "LBB Edition" (for "Little Black Books", which was the context that I first heard that acronym used, only later seeing it used for the Little Brown Books of original D&D). This was actually several sub-editions. In the very first edition, the space combat rules used a scale of an inch on the table being 1000 miles scale, and a turn being 15 minutes. One G of acceleration for one turn gave a vector of 2" on the table. This was changed quickly to a scale of one cm on the table being 1000km scale, and a turn of 1000 seconds, or 16 ⅔ minutes. In this version, one G of acceleration for one turn gave a vector of 10cm on the table. Other than that change, the game was largely the same through all printings of the LBBs and the squarebound paperback edition called The Traveller Book. This was the edition in which a character could famously die during character creation (which made more sense than it sounds, but I'm not writing an apologetic here). Combat was arbitrary, with armor and weapons cross-indexed on a table to determine a modifier to the attack roll, and damage being rated in an absolute number of dice if a hit was scored. Damage points were applied directly to the physical characteristics of a character. The only dice used in the game were six-sided, frequently used as a 2d6 roll. As time went on, a lot of additions were written, such as the "enhanced" character creation for Army, Navy, Marines, Merchant, and Scout characters, vehicle design (the first in gaming that modeled the mechanical parts of a vehicle and derived a set of ratings for the game from those, in the Traveller miniatures rules called Striker), alternate combat systems (in Snapshot and Azhanti High Lightning, mainly, but Striker had an influence as well), robot design, enhanced star system generation, and so on.

As those various details accumulated, the game started to become somewhat unwieldy. A new edition was called for (this was 10 years after the game was released, so it wasn't like they rushed into this), and the result was the second full edition, the atrociously-titled MegaTraveller, which is usually abbreviated "MT". Character creation was revised a bit, to give players a little more control over their characters and to reduce (but not eliminate, thank goodness) the "death in character creation problem" that some perceived in the original game. Many aspects of Striker combat were incorporated into the game, such as the vehicle design system (expanded to starships, though the derived ratings were different for starship combat, since it was treated much more abstractly even in terms of damage effects) and the combination of weapon penetration and armor ratings. Because the systems were not perfectly integrated, damage became a little complicated, and characters tracked two entirely different sets of hit points! One of these was the traditional Traveller system of applying damage to the characteristics of the character, while the other was derived from Striker damage ratings, and was a pair of hits ratings (the first for unconsciousness, the second for death) based on the "Life Level" of the character, which is the sum of the first three characteristics. Again, this works better in practice than it sounds, but it is still an obvious kludge. Personally, of the published editions so far, this is my favorite, though I strongly dislike the "Rebellion" background and the events that follow on from that. As time went on, a number of additions were made to the game, many of them from the company called Digest Group Publications (DGP) that belonged to the people who did most of the work in revising the game, and it continued to grow, but never became the unwieldy mess that classic Traveller became from its additions.

[ADDENDUM: 26 June 2012] In the spirit of the game, let me take a moment to issue a correction, and point out that one of the biggest problems with MegaTraveller was the immense amount of errata and corrections that were issued over the six years of its active publication. Most of those have been consolidated, and you can find them, for instance, here. There is also errata for the other editions there, but none of them approach the extensive errata issued officially for MegaTraveller. Well, the errata for T4 comes pretty close, I suppose.

However, GDW was making some… let's call them "interesting" decisions in the early 1990s. One of them was to create a "house system" to which all of their various games would be converted over time. This was based on the second edition of their popular (at the time) Twilight: 2000 game, and was an outgrowth of the system that they had developed for the excellent Space 1889 game (I'll talk about that one another time). Since the Rebellion background was growing interminable, they also decided to, in effect, reset the background. In my opinion, this was the biggest mistake that GDW made in its entire history. Through a dramatic plot device, nearly the entirety of known space in the Traveller default setting was subjected to an apocalyptic computer virus that nearly wiped out the spacefaring races. One area was spared this fate (through the foresight of its enlightened ruler), allowing more traditional Traveller games to continue if desired, but the idea was now that players would be trying to rebuild interstellar civilization. The new edition was called Traveller: The New Era, often abbreviated "TNE". I'm not really going to discuss this edition, as it was a dramatic change from the traditional Traveller system. It did include a book called Fire, Fusion, and Steel, which was a complete design system for everything from robots and guns to cars, tanks, ships, and even spacecraft. This was the forerunner of such gearhead books as GURPS Vehicles and CORPS VDS. Some of the "alternate tech" in the book made it clear that GDW intended to convert its other SF RPG, 2300AD (formerly known as Traveller: 2300, but changed when it became apparent that too many people were confused by the similarity of the title to Traveller, and another game that I intend to discuss on this blog in the future), into the system, but this never occurred. I do like TNE, but not enough to make it a regular option at my table. It did include some excellent supplementary material, such as the space combat boardgames Brilliant Lances and Battle Rider, a superior edition of the miniatures game (Striker II), a colony mini-game designed to be integrated with a roleplaying campaign (The World Tamer's Handbook), and so on. It was also a little frustrating, since it came out only 6 years after MT was released, and lasted less than 3.

Sadly, GDW closed its doors, relegating TNE to the dustbin of history (though you can get PDFs of it, from RPGNow or DriveThruRPG). Three years after releasing TNE, a new company formed by Marc Miller, FarFuture Enterprises, would release a new edition of Traveller which went back to its roots. Taking a cue from MT, it made character creation more player-friendly (enhancing choice, reducing pre-play lethality). Combat was greatly simplified such that now armor simply reduced the dice of damage rolled when a hit was scored, and damage was returned to its CT elegance. However, this edition, called Marc Miller's Traveller or Traveller4 (abbreviated almost always as "T4") was plagued by typos and insufficient development. A number of supplements were released (notably, the superior Pocket Empires, which introduced a mini-game of interstellar economics and politics), but the problems in the main rules and in the new Fire, Fusion, and Steel attached to it helped prevent the game from gaining any traction.

That brings us to today, 16 years after T4 was inflicted on an unsuspecting world, and 35 years after the game was first released. Later this year, Marc Miller's Far Future Enterprises will be releasing, at long last, Traveller5. With luck, this will be a definitive edition of the game, incorporating the best of all of the editions. I doubt that sunny prospect will occur, but I can dream.

If it doesn't, I notice that Mongoose's edition of the game includes the OGL, allowing third parties to use large portions of their text verbatim. You can find a link to their developers' kit toward the bottom of the sidebar on the left side of this blog. [EDIT 2025-11-28: They no longer carry it, but it can be found at this link.] I would be interested in using that to put together my own version, taking what I consider to be the best of each edition (and stealing liberally from other games as I desire). You can bet that it would look a lot like MT, just integrated more thoroughly. But I have a lot of other projects to get to first, so I am hoping that T5 is all it can be.

The other major option is GURPS Traveller, which makes use of an alternative timeline in which the Rebellion of the main background did not occur. I like this, since one of the reasons that I am no longer as fond as I once was of the Imperium background is that we know how it is going to turn out. Everything is for naught. Anything you build will only fall into the pit of Virus and have to be rebuilt. The setting is not endowed with the infinite possibilities of the future, since we know what the future must be. I hate metaplots, is what I'm saying. GURPS Traveller's alternate timeline erases the metaplot from the setting and allows players to chart an uncertain course into a dynamic future again. Unfortunately for me, Steve Jackson Games has chosen to present the rules updated for GURPS 4E such that they focus on the very early part of the setting where Terra is taking its first tentative steps among the stars, and meeting with the old and decadent Imperium (later to be called the First Imperium, as the Imperium of the main part of the setting is called the Third Imperium). This is unfortunate because it means that they have not converted a lot of the technology over to 4E standards. Ah, well. It's not like I haven't been moving away from GURPS recently. Designed, point-bought characters just don't meet my needs at this time.