Marc W. Miller

I've enjoyed the game Traveller since the very early 80's, and have played the original, the sequel Megatraveller, and Mongoose versions of the game. Marc Miller has been the creative force behind the game from the beginning. I recently met him and he's intelligent, creative and a really nice guy.
This is the 5th edition of Traveller, and when it came out on Kickstarter I was enthused to back the most ambitious version of the game, and to give something back after all these years.
Unfortunately... this book is a wonderful design "bible" that could be used to produce the best Traveller yet but it is not, however, a very playable game by itself.

Character creation used to be one of the most fun aspects of Traveller. In fact, it is a mini-game all its own with characters learning, having life experiences, developing contacts, acquiring heirlooms and sometimes being killed, all in a matter of minutes. Yes, while you are in the process of creating a character for the game, your character can be killed. Some professions have high risk/rewards, and if you push your nascent character into it for too long, they may get taken away before you get to play them. My daughter and I have spent hours creating characters, seeing how far we could push their experiences without losing them in the process.
In contrast, I have spent hours on two different occasions trying to create a single character with T5, flipping madly between widely spaced sections with no index to assist (note: MM has since released an index in PDF form, but it was not included in this version of the book), only to eventually get hung up on some aspect that I couldn't resolve.
In general, instead of listing out recipes for different types of human, alien, planets, spacecraft, equipment, etc., this book provides detailed formulae for creating any form of them. There's no "grab a template for a psychic human", you need to follow a process and generate each aspect and it's easy to lose your way.
Marc has promised to release a "Player's Guide" that will be more of an actual game manual and hopefully then I'll be able to play T5. I just can't do it with the current book as-is. In the years until a player's manual is available, we'll continue our adventures with Mongoose Traveller and T5 will sit on the shelf.

It's a shame and somewhat ironic that T5 was dead before we got a chance to play it, like so many of my over-ambitious characters.… (mer)