Traveler

I don't know how popular role-playing games are any more. I suspect that they've lost a lot of ground to computer games over the years, and I doubt that kids today are inclined to start playing Dungeons & Dragons when they could just as easily sign up for World of Warcraft.

I'm of the D&D generation. I started playing Dungeons & Dragons back in about 1977, a year or so after the game was originally published. And I liked it plenty, at least until I discovered a new science fiction role-playing game called Traveler. I never had much success convincing any of my friends to play Traveler, as they were all D&D fanatics, but good heavens did I ever spend a lot of time on that game. I designed planets, subsectors, sectors, starships, and weapons. I generated entire legions of characters. I wrote computer programs. I wrote fan fiction. I drew mission patches and sketched people. And I don't regret a bit of that goofy fannish obsessiveness.

Later on GDW chose to modify the Traveler backstory with the releases of Mega-Traveler and Traveler: The New Era. I didn't care for either. I thought Mega-Traveler had some extremely flavorful touches but had gone over the top in terms of complexity, and the whole collapse-of-the-Empire thing in Traveler: TNE was tired and trite (not to mention even more complicated than Mega-Traveler).

Over time certain aspects of Traveler started to bother me. It took place in the 25th Century, against a backdrop of a galaxy-wide Empire that was stable, rich, kind of inert, and slightly corrupt. And after a while, if you thought about it too hard, it became hard to deal with. In the 25th Century, against a backdrop of unimaginable technology, what does money act like? What is a trip to the convenience store like? What is sex like? It becomes almost impossible to imagine what ordinary life would be like and the contradictions and problems start to pile up.

But oh my was it ever fun. I'll probably never play it again. Sitting here, I can imagine myself sitting down with some friends to play D&D in a less than totally serious way, but I doubt that Traveler will ever see the light of day again. But my decade-long obsession with Traveler helped to make me who I am today - which may or may not be a good thing.