Dreadnought
SOC-12
Another thought while this is all still swirling in my head.
While I still believe that it is inherent in Traveller's personality to try to be all things to all people (and I mean that positively, not negatively--it's just that it's harder that way), that also owes something, I think, to the GDW culture.
I noticed something similar in 2300 when it came out. When I was writing "Lone Wolf," I asked a lot of questions of Tim Brown which I understand he staffed around, about how sensors worked, and interacted with stutterwarps, etc., and he came back to me and gave me the basics. When I later came back to him and said, "okay, based on those basic principles, I have projected out these operational principles." I expected some push-back from him: "Whoa, that's an unintended consequence, we didn't intend to go there," but got absolutely none of that at all. He and by extension the rest of the design staff that he consulted were all very open to allowing the system to expand based on collaborative input. Which made an impression on me.
Later there was a movement among other contributors that undermined the principle of the stellar arms, which were very central to the game's structure: stutter warp tugs, but more importantly, the brown dwarves. But instead of, "no, you can't build new mechs," or "magic users can't carry swords," because that's part of the intended play-balance, or "female dwarves have beards because I say so," the response was, "okay, I think that makes sense."
So, I think that Traveller's personality of, "yeah, we'll add that too" grew out of a larger culture that was open to interesting or persuasive ideas even if that took the game in a direction not originally envisioned. (That or you could say that perhaps 2300 was already being phased out in favor of MT so no one cared, but we'd have to check our calendars to test that hypothesis.) I talked to Les about that recently, and concurred that it was a real receptiveness and not no one caring, and that fits with my experience that Game Designers' Workshop truly was a collaborative workshop that readily accepted input from many sources.
That is on the one hand a "nice"/good thing in being open and receptive, and also a risky thing, in that it adds more complexity to product management by being open to too much change (brown dwarves in particular introduced a change in how the game was intended to feel). There are two sides to every coin. I'd prefer to say, "all swords have two edges," but someone would point out that's not true. I just think the "edge" thing would have gotten at the "point" a little better.
(As a last speculative aside, I recall that a lot of that stutterwarp tug and brown dwarf stuff came from contributors under DGP, so you could say that some of that was an artifact of the balance of power between DGP and GDW at the time. But I was working directly with Tim Brown on a Challenge article and got the response recounted above.)
I really must do something else with my day.
Donuts.
While I still believe that it is inherent in Traveller's personality to try to be all things to all people (and I mean that positively, not negatively--it's just that it's harder that way), that also owes something, I think, to the GDW culture.
I noticed something similar in 2300 when it came out. When I was writing "Lone Wolf," I asked a lot of questions of Tim Brown which I understand he staffed around, about how sensors worked, and interacted with stutterwarps, etc., and he came back to me and gave me the basics. When I later came back to him and said, "okay, based on those basic principles, I have projected out these operational principles." I expected some push-back from him: "Whoa, that's an unintended consequence, we didn't intend to go there," but got absolutely none of that at all. He and by extension the rest of the design staff that he consulted were all very open to allowing the system to expand based on collaborative input. Which made an impression on me.
Later there was a movement among other contributors that undermined the principle of the stellar arms, which were very central to the game's structure: stutter warp tugs, but more importantly, the brown dwarves. But instead of, "no, you can't build new mechs," or "magic users can't carry swords," because that's part of the intended play-balance, or "female dwarves have beards because I say so," the response was, "okay, I think that makes sense."
So, I think that Traveller's personality of, "yeah, we'll add that too" grew out of a larger culture that was open to interesting or persuasive ideas even if that took the game in a direction not originally envisioned. (That or you could say that perhaps 2300 was already being phased out in favor of MT so no one cared, but we'd have to check our calendars to test that hypothesis.) I talked to Les about that recently, and concurred that it was a real receptiveness and not no one caring, and that fits with my experience that Game Designers' Workshop truly was a collaborative workshop that readily accepted input from many sources.
That is on the one hand a "nice"/good thing in being open and receptive, and also a risky thing, in that it adds more complexity to product management by being open to too much change (brown dwarves in particular introduced a change in how the game was intended to feel). There are two sides to every coin. I'd prefer to say, "all swords have two edges," but someone would point out that's not true. I just think the "edge" thing would have gotten at the "point" a little better.
(As a last speculative aside, I recall that a lot of that stutterwarp tug and brown dwarf stuff came from contributors under DGP, so you could say that some of that was an artifact of the balance of power between DGP and GDW at the time. But I was working directly with Tim Brown on a Challenge article and got the response recounted above.)
I really must do something else with my day.
Donuts.
