What's the difference between...

[knightwriter]

I was thinking about purchasing either the space, sci-fi fourth edition books or Gurps traveller, but I'm not sure which one might be better. Does anyone have some suggestions?

I like a mix of roleplaying characters with some table top spaceship fighting.

[cccwebs]

Space will give you some tools to build your own setting. You may still need Spaceships though. Traveller will give you a setting to use, equipment, societies, ships, et al. If you don't want to take the time to build your own universe, then go with Traveller.

[lexington]

Space is generic. You get the tools to build aliens, planets and societies. For technology you'll need Ultra-Tech and for ships you'll need Spaceships.
Traveller is a pre made setting with ships, tech, cultures and such already put together for you.

[knightwriter]

Ok, thanks. That clears things up for me. Does anyone have an opinion on Traveller?

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by knightwriter

Ok, thanks. That clears things up for me. Does anyone have an opinion on Traveller?

It was born in the 70s and shows its age, as a sometimes implausible retro-space opera game with some hard-ish bits (think Foundation crossed with Known Space) it's pretty good, but it isn't anything like something that would be published today.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by knightwriter

Ok, thanks. That clears things up for me. Does anyone have an opinion on Traveller?

Ever read any H. Beam Piper? It's a lot like that. Traveller is a campaign setting of very long standing, reflecting something like the state of the art of SF just before the New Wave of the late 60s and 70s. The property has been through many publishers (and I think is being published by at least two publishers at the moment), there's a die-hard Traveller community, and there are several decades of support for it, but it can be a lot to wade through.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by knightwriter

I was thinking about purchasing either the space, sci-fi fourth edition books or Gurps traveller, but I'm not sure which one might be better. Does anyone have some suggestions?

GURPS Space 4th edition is a setting design book. I love it. You wouldn't use it at all in what you describe.

I like a mix of roleplaying characters with some table top spaceship fighting.

There are tactical spaceship combat systems suitable for tabletop play in:

• GURPS Traveller (GT Starships adds ship systems but does not alter the combat mechanics.)
• GURPS Traveller Interstellar Wars, and
• GURPS Spaceships 3: Warships and Pirates(this is a supplement, you need the basic GURPS Spaceships as well).

I prefer the one in Spaceships 3 best, because it is adapted for use with the ships out of Spaceships, which has a design system of awesome range, scalability, and simplicity, and which does not assume the use of Traveller's skiffy reactionless thrusters.

Originally Posted by knightwriter

Ok, thanks. That clears things up for me. Does anyone have an opinion on Traveller?

If you're interested in a sci-fi setting because you want a sci-fi setting, and looking at Traveller to see if it it will do the job, I recommend GURPS Traveller Interstellar Wars. It's for GURPS 4th edition, so you have no conversion work to do. It is complete, compact, and well-organised. It has a clear, explicit, well-organised description of: its situation; planet generation rules; rules for starship design and construction; rules for exploration; rules for trading operations in PC-sized ships; and space combat rules. And it has an index.

I consider GURPS Traveller Interstellar Wars to be the best RPG setting product I've seen. Take this with GURPS Basic Set (and maybe, if you are keen, GURPS Ultra-Tech and even, possibly, GURPS High Tech) and you will have all the RPG rules, setting, and equipment stats you need.

The down side is that Interstellar Wars will not get you on track to play Traveller with all the cool kids. It is set thousands of years before the situation described in the Classic Traveller line and the GURPS Traveller line. And those are the products with volumes full of adventures and sector listings. They are also the products with the installed fan base.


Classic Traveller is a haphazard series of RPG and supplementary products published over a space of years. Developed on the fly, it grew without a plan from a generic sci-fi RPG into a vast and sprawling space opera setting with specific places, history, and people. Classic Traveller was designed by great games designers: subsystems that would be a chore in any other game are fun multi-player or solo games in Classic Traveller. It's the only game I know in which you could play the character generation system for fun, or play the trading rules or exploration rules solitaire. The down side is that it is unorganised, sprawling, haphazard. Also (and this may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your tastes) at a lot of crucial points the designers stayed vague about fundamental features of the setting. They did this partly to preserve the legacy of the original three-book set as a generic sci-fi game, and partly to avoid writing their future collaborators into a corner. The upshot is that in about 1,400 digest-sized pages of small type, with haphazard organisation and no index (get it on CD-ROM, I'm told text searching is a boon) there are vast shoals of detail, but very little framework, very few clear, explicit statements of how the Imperium is actually organised and governed. I find that that makes the setting very hard to get across. For my taste, Classic Traveller is too big, too badly-organised, and too vague.

GURPS Traveller is the same setting as Classic Traveller, with the advantage of GURPS RPG rules. It also has the advantages of having been organised after the setting was designed and being clear that it was a specific setting, not a generic sci-fi game. It is much more compact and better-organised. GURPS rules work better than Classic Traveller rules. But the subsystems aren't games any more: you wouldn't fill an exercise book with GURPS Traveller characters for the fun of it, and the trading game looks like work to me.

There is a bunch of other versions of Traveller around too, each of which marries a different historical period of the Official Traveller Universe to a different set of game mechanics. I think they all have fans. I am not familiar with any of them.


Opinion, ultimately? I am hard at work writing up my own SF setting. Like the Official Traveller Universe, it has a plethora of independent and rather isolated worlds embedded in space that is ruled by an empire. I do this even though I own three versions of Traveller that I paid good money for. I would not be doing that unless there were a lot of things about Traveller that bug me more than I can endure. Note, though, that some of the things that bug me are exactly the things that other players like. One man's meat is another man's poison.

[davidtmoore]

You can get that mix with all those options. It depends on what setting you want, I guess, and what sort of 3e/4e/mixed play you want.

GURPS Traveller is massively supported, with many 3e books, some 4e conversion stuff, and (if you so wish and have access to the out of print stuff) the whole body of pre-Steve Jackson Traveller stuff to draw on. It's a fairly space-operaish setting.

GURPS Transhuman Space has a load of material, again mostly 3e with some 4e conversion stuff, and a fair amount of Pyramid stuff as well. It's a more hard-sf/futurism setting, also very cool.

Space , Spaceships 1 (the many follow-up Spaceships are optional) and Ultra-Tech are fantastically useful resources for any space/SF game. Strongly recommended even if you go for Traveller or TS.