That's a new one. I also happen to agree with it.
An old lesson learned at Games Workshop, of all places. . .
As a game designer, what benefits to you see in removing psionics from the Aslan slate of options? I'm honestly asking this as a serious question. Do you feel it would make an alien character easier for players and GMs to handle? Sort of cutting like down on the workload during a session?
That is certainly a factor. Aliens in Traveller are, well, alien. They are far more than humans dressed up in bodysuits, which brings an additional layer of complexity to playing them. So, for our first Alien Module, it makes a certain sense sense to skip over a part of the rules that many people consider optional anyway.
However, by far the greater part is the idea that if all major alien races have psionics to one degree or another, then that is an immensely boring situation. What makes them so special? However, if you have one psionic heavy race and one with little to none (with other in-between), then that creates some interesting dynamics.
It should also be pointed out that the statement in question within the Aslan book may not be the be all and end all. Think of the Alien Modules as (detailed) primers on the race - these are the established facts as the vast majority of people understand them. That doesn't mean surprises can't happen.
Will we feature psionic Aslan in a future book as a one of these rare surprises? We have no hard plans to do so, but it is possible - if we do, they will be portrayed as something very, very special, precisely because they go against the understood norm.
Remember our other take on the Traveller universe - it is a very, very, very big galaxy. Anything can happen.
For now (and the foreseeable future), we are simply addressing what is 'standard' and well understood.
Now, if I was the one writing the new Traveller OTU material (and you may judge it is better that I am not!), I would not be laying out everything as fact - you would be reading, say, xenobiologist reports on the various alien races, documents from scouting parties, etc, each giving their _opinion_ on what it is they are seeing. So, the xenobiologist may confidentely claim there are no Aslan psionics at all. But is he right?
Of course, with that method, you won't be able to trust anything you read, especially when two different people are telling you two different things, and both are clearly biased!
That is a very interesting way of approaching a setting, and we will adopt it somewhere along the line. Writing as 'God' is not always the best way of doing things. . .
I've another serious question too, if you aren't too fed up with us yet.
Heh
In
this post Don McKinney admits that he, Robject, and Marc all missed the changes Mongoose made in the way bay weapons are handled. Will Mongoose stick with those changes despite the admission that they weren't actually approved? Or do you view this as an issue of errata? If so, will Mongoose change it when you publish another version of
High Guard?
This questions goes to several different levels. None of them have overriding importance on the others (so don't latch on to just one answer!), but they are all valid.
1. They were approved. We have a piece of paper that says so. They may have been missed during the approval procedure but, to be frank, it was not big enough an issue for it to stand out.
2. High Guard is a good book. The are some practical (printing) problems to revising something that actually _works_.
3. The fact that it is different from what has gone before is, again, not a major issue. What is _vitally_ important is that our books have their own internal consistency. This goes further than bay weapons, and on to the various points raised about Aslan and, say, the exploration of the Trojan Reaches. Our main concern is being consistent, rather than maintaining consistency (if you see where I am going).
All that is not to say there will never be a High Guard II or High Guard Second Edition, which may introduce some other funky new things, revise bay weapons (that _is_ unlikely), and feature power points. It is not planned and not on the schedule, but it is a possibility we have already considered for the future, depending on the feedback we get.
Finally, has Mongoose every considered an errata system similar to that at SJGames?
We've looked at lots of different systems for every step of the book creation process. For example, since Psion we have had a new proofing process in play designed to hammer out the issues that arose specifically over the Traveller range. Seems to be working, as we have had few complaints from any book since
The absolute, critical component to handling errata is timing - you have to be quick about it.
I read on one forum the other day where someone was complaining that we had released errata for a book one week after it went on sale. Now, _that_ had me scratching my head - like it was a bad thing that we had reacted within days. The other possibility, of course, is that the poster believed that errata breeds over time, and that a book goes out error free, and it is our fault if problems occur in less than a year
We endeavour to fix problems, when they occur (and they will, for every publisher, let alone every gaming company), as quickly as possible. However, it should also be noted that not everything raised by readers is an error. Bay weapons, for example. Not an error, thus not requiring errata. You may want something different and, if we were able to write an RPG specifically for you, that is what you would have.
At the end of the day, we produce the games we want to play, in the fashion we want to play them. And that, I think, is about as honest as I can be about our approach.
