Traveller/MegaTraveller Interview

Those of you who have been playing CRPGs for a couple of decades will most likely remember Paragon Software’s MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy and MegaTraveller 2: Quest For the Ancients. Since the MegaTraveller system is based on GDW’s original Traveller tabletop RPG, I thought I’d point out a two-part interview (here and here) with Game Designers’ Workshop co-founder and Traveller designer Marc Miller over at Black Gate. In it, Marc talks about his inspirations, how Dungeons & Dragons revolutionized “everything” in the 70’s, his plans for a Traveller game on Facebook, and much more. Check it out:

Let’s get into how you moved from designing those space combat and WWII games into a role-playing game that heavily featured space exploration and combat.

MM: Well, first of all, when Dungeons & Dragons appeared, it revolutionized everything. It changed everything. We had to make our own formal rule that you couldn’t play during the workday because everybody was playing and nobody was working. This was 1975 or 1976. We all understood it immediately. Frank Chadwick did En Garde! in 1975. It was an alternative system and Gary Gygax really liked it because it was not a copy of Dungeons & Dragons. It was real role-playing without being a D&D imitation. I frankly sat down with D&D, looked at it, and said, there is no space game out there like this and we should do it. I set about doing that. I spent close to a year just thinking about what it would be like, and as you noticed, what I came up with was a character generation that is totally derived from what the military does. Here’s an army, here’s a navy, here’s space marines, and here’s how you generate characters. We just went from there.

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I’m a Classic Traveller fan, but let’s talk about Megatraveller, New Era, and some of the various reinventions. It seems Traveller has had more reincarnations than Star Trek.

MM: What other role-playing game has three editions currently in print? There’s GURPS Traveller, there’s Mongoose Traveller, and there is the reprint version of Classic Traveller. The other versions are still selling nicely on Ebay all the time. Classic Traveller was this first run, this draft, so to speak. It just came together very well. It lasted a long time. So, almost ten years later, when we came out with the next edition that was Megatraveller, we were implementing all of the understandings we had learned and worked around all the kinks that had come up along the way. We implemented tasks, which I think was a major innovation and at the same time we introduced the Rebellion. And again, we didn’t please everybody, some people didn’t like that. New Era was forced by the company being in trouble and not having the resources to manage the many role-playing games that we had. GDW had Twilight 2000 and it had Traveller and it was difficult for them to adequately manage all of the rules operations that were going on. So, they tried to fold Traveller into the Twilight 2000 rules system. At the same time, they tried to move Traveller forward out of the Rebellion and into a new era that was supposed to be chaotic. Frankly, GDW always tried to create chaotic situations which provide the player a lot of opportunities to do many things. And then immediately started moving that chaos towards order, it was one of the problems with Twilight 2000. We created the devastation after WWIII and then immediately started repairing the damage as opposed to enhancing the chaos so people had more opportunities to adventure. I think the same thing happened with New Era.