TheGenerator says:
... seen some mentions of ppl interested in Traveller ... we'd be able to find another player if we wanted to ...
Agreed. I don't foresee any difficulty finding more players if we decide to look.
Airshark says:
... I'd hate for you to go through all the character creation with someone who's bailing out within the first week.
I honestly don't mind going through the process with someone, even if they were not going to play.
However, forming the Connections and then
playing with the results is a large part of the Character Creation appeal. Not having to live with the outcomes makes it less valuable than theorycrafting D&D or Masks characters, though, so --outside of making test characters before a real character-- I don't see that happening, and there are experienced Traveller GMs that could probably do a better job than my scrabbling around the book for each question.
If they decided afterwards that they did not like the game (or that the system would be better suited to a non-PbP medium) and dropped out, I would hold that against them.
TheGenerator says:
... it's a bit of a gamble ...
A gamble for them too. I am loath to recruit new players into a game that we are not serious about.
We had many option when we started this and Traveller did not win out by such large numbers.
Are we committed enough to this to justify recruiting?
From my perspective: I keep trying to fall back to other systems, but want to try make this work for a few reasons.
I do want to play something other than PbtA (but the prevalence of PbP and PbtA's suitability to PbP makes that a dominant system in my life these days).
I really like (the theory of) some parts of Traveller.
Using the Characteristics (Stats) as Hit Points is how I prefer to design my own systems, and, while I don't much like large Characteristics from which we derive the actual Dice Modifiers, this is a really good way to do Stats as HP. It allows for low modifiers, while giving enough HP, and provides a nice predictable death spiral with options to mitigate it and escape.
The FTL Jump system with light-speed-information-limits makes for a system where we can outrun our infamy... for a while. This gets around a few common problems with 'space travel' games and consequences.
Should we recruit one or two more players?