Lately I've been watching Firefly, the one-season science fiction show from the mind of Joss Whedon. It's quite nice. You'd think a show that didn't make it a full season would stink, but it actually doesn't. It inverts many tradition science fiction themes and tropes and maybe its deliberate blurring of the line between science fiction and western rubbed critics the wrong way. For example, it has no aliens, no faster-than-light drive, no blasters or other energy weapons, no swooshing sounds when ships zip by, and no particular emphasis on military matters. At one point the ship ends up carrying a herd of cattle as cargo; how often do you see that in a Star Trek episode?

Firefly feels a lot like the old role-playing game Traveler to me. If you mentally block out the Third Alliance, jump drive, and any non-human intelligent species, it's pretty close in general feel to Traveler. Not that I'm implying that one was cribbed from the other, merely that Firefly feels a lot more like the Traveler game than any other science fiction show I've seen.

Which is good.

Traveler fails to do Firefly justice in some areas, though. Traveler was, even in its earliest incarnations, overtly militaristic - characters were almost always military veterans and were not infrequently in their thirties or forties, and I don't think the system could produce characters like Kaylee, Simon, Inara or Book. The technologies don't line up either. In some areas Firefly seems pretty advanced technologically, and in other areas it seems fairly primitive. And the show is a study of characters, while characters as such in Traveler tended to be pretty vanilla - good players could work up their own motivations, but the rules themselves don't cover such things. (Deliberately, I'm sure - Traveler could be hugely complicated when it came to things like designing starships, but in actual play the rules were pretty short and sweet.)

But the odds that I'll ever dig out my old Traveler books and dink with them are just about zero. There are too many other things to do and I'd have to win the lottery to ever find enough time to do that. But it wouldn't be an uninteresting exercise.