On Tue, Aug 04, 2026 at 02:03:46PM -0700, The Traveller Mailing List wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I was just having a conversation with someone asking about Traveller and its
> “crunchiness”. I feel that’s sort of mischaracterizing Traveller and said as much. The
> other person commented that it’s too easy to get your character killed (guess what system
> they play normally?), and I responded with Heinlein’s quote from Beyond This Horizon,
> e.g. “An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up
> his acts with his life.” Meaning that choices have consequences that may not be something
> one can recover from. The other person was somewhat put off by that, but honestly, that’s
> one of the appeals Traveller has always had for me.

My early Traveller campaigns didn't differ too much from the way I ran D&D. I would say I
famously let my second and third groups of players run amok in the universe. But, at some
point in time, both my players an I decided that heading off the local starport bar to start
a gunfight for _"shiggles"_ should get you into a lot of trouble. If James Bond gets into a
gun fight, it should serve the plot. I think that I really understood it when a player
character faced down a Shotgun and lost.

You don't mention another game system but we can guess what it might be. To that I'd say
that my son played a fantasy genre game from Wizards of the Coast between his Junior year in
US high school and a couple of years after getting his Masters degree. He ended up with the
same complaint that I've seen from long running D&D games. After enough time, the player
characters become so powerful that they really have nothing worry about. Your counterpart in
the conversation may have been expecting that because that is not the way that Traveller
characters grow.

-- Chris

--
Chris

      __o          "All I was trying to do was get home from work."
    _`\<,_           -Rosa Parks
___(*)/_(*)____.___o____..___..o...________ooO..._____________________
Christopher Sean Hilton                    [chris/at/vindaloo/dot/com]