I played very little Traveller 2300 when it came out and sold the books within six months of my first reading as we were neck deep in Classic Traveller and Twilight 2000 so nobody in our crew got excited about 2300. It's been so long that I don't really remember anything about the game.

Did I miss something cool?

Is there a reason to hunt it down again?

Is it a lost gem?

Do you have some fun memories of the game?

Traveller was basically nonexistent in my neck of the woods - I ordered 2300 more or less by mistake. The Near Star Map in there is very nice. Ran one game of it with a converted Alternity adventure.... Combat seemed to have lots of heart called shots, apart from that and some of the weirder bits of character generation (attribute modifiers for being an ectomorph?)...I've mostly forgotten the system. Nowadays I've lost most of the box apart from the player's book, from that I couldn't actually figure out even what dice I was supposed to roll.

Bought it but never played it. Sigh...
The main reasons I picked it up were A) It was from GDW and B) It seemed to be channeling the aesthetic of Aliens.
After reading it I thought it was a bit too 'straight'... but I think the weapon illustrations were partially responsible for setting off my short-lived passion for Living Steel/Phoenix Command.

All I know of it is that it is some kind of bridge between T2k and Traveller.  There's mention of "The Twilight War" between east and west blocs in 2300, is there not?

Quote from: thedungeondelver;710755All I know of it is that it is some kind of bridge between T2k and Traveller.  There's mention of "The Twilight War" between east and west blocs in 2300, is there not?

Yes and no... 2300 AD/Traveller 2300 WAS a futuristic continuation of Twilight 2000. However, the original edition's name caused confusion between it and Traveller.

According to Lester Smith, who wrote about the Traveller 2300/2300 AD revision in Challenge #34:

QuoteSome people originally confused Traveller: 2300 with Traveller or thought that there was some link intended between the two games. By changing the title to 2300 AD, we put an end to that problem, while at the same time maintaining the continuity of the releases in the 2300 line. Let me emphasize here for anyone who might still be wondering: 2300 AD has nothing to do with Traveller. Not only are the rules to the two games much different, the games are set in different "universes," with completely different alien races, different routes of travel between the stars because the FTL drives in each game operate on completely different theoretical bases, different technologies (there are no grav plates in 2300 AD, for instance), and different themes. Traveller spans the Milky Way galaxy and concerns humanity's struggles to maintain a civilization over that broad reach of space. 2300 AD reaches stars just beyond 50 light-years from Sol and concerns humanity's struggles just to survive among those stars.

It should be noted that Traveller 2300 and 2300 AD ran with the T2K 1st edition rules. Why GDW didn't revise 2300 AD to the T2K 2nd edition rules instead of giving us TNE with those rules I'll never know...

Later!

Harl

Mongoose has also re-issued 2300AD with their system for Traveller; but, if you want the original, FFE sells it all as a disk (bunch of PDF's).

Yes it developed out of the T2K universe, 300 year space faring French Empire and all that.

Bought a couple editions of it.  Never played though.  Not bothering with the Mongoose edition since that would never see any play either.

The original Traveller didn't catch on my RPG circles. The only SF games that were played were Star Wars (WEG) and 2300 AD (and a homebrewed Stargate-like game based on the mechanics of Midgard 1880).

And yes, you missed a nice hard SF setting with fascinatingly alien aliens.

I was a fan of it back in the day.

Essentially it's a fairly good attempt at producing a serious, half-way plausible hard SF game.

Basically Earth develops a FTL drive (stutter-warp, it's called, something like the proposed Albiero (sp) drive) and all the nations of Earth go into space, with the galaxy divided up between them, I think based on how much land they controlled on Earth.

However, besides conflicts, humanity also ran into another expanding race. So there was a war with them ongoing.

The rules weren't great, and probably one of the things holding it back.

Yes, you certainly missed something if you skipped 2300AD.

Traveller is Asimov, Heinlein, Piper, etc.

2300AD is Aliens,  Outland, with a touch of a blade Runner.

The setting is a continuation of Twilight 2000 where the discovery of the Stutterwarp Drive, short range quantum teleportation cycled many times per second, has opened up the nearby stars.

The Stutterwarp has a range limite of 7.7 light years which create three natural routes of exploration. The Three Arms, French, American, and Chinese. There are roughly two dozen nations with exta-solar colonies and a half dozen alien races.

Aliens are depicted as real as possible.

I arrived in 10th grade with my friends playing D&D, Star Wars, Palladium. Then one day another kid showed up with Traveller 2300. It was amazing though I never actually owned it.

When the Mongoose version was released, I grabbed it right away. It's pretty good. In a way, I find it more approachable than Traveller itself.

The PDFs of GDW's version started out a bit rough but have improved over the years. I bought mine on RPGNow so I've been getting the updates.

I just bought the disk of the original, it also has notes and pictures on "the great game", from where T2K evolves into 2300. Like the OP, I was an avid CT player and we played T2K as well; 2300 was a non-starter, the tech was wanky - flying hover tanks? Nope, never. Plus the things like the spin habs, don't work from an engineering point of view; this infects all of GDW's work by the late 80's, early 90's: they are liberal arts people trying to interpret engineering and getting it wrong.

That doesn't even go into the politics of it all, even mongoose's version writes "Americans do not like Mexicans"; which if my wife and son saw that, they would be offended. I know it is inheritance from the original, but it is bad inheritance.

Quote from: dragoner;710871. Plus the things like the spin habs, don't work from an engineering point of view; this infects all of GDW's work by the late 80's, early 90's: they are liberal arts people trying to interpret engineering and getting it wrong.

Marc has had the same problem since '77.

Quote from: dragoner;710871Plus the things like the spin habs, don't work from an engineering point of view; this infects all of GDW's work by the late 80's, early 90's: they are liberal arts people trying to interpret engineering and getting it wrong.

Actually, spin habs have been a staple of science fiction since the 50's. The spin hab is downright venerable.

How do they not work from an engineering point of view?