Originally posted by Larsen E. Whipsnade:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
"Yesterday, we bought a 20 kDton light cruiser for 200 MegaLabor-Hours . . . ," nah, it doesn't sound right."
In my original post I asked if you had every thought that warm bodies were part of the taxes a world owed, not all of the taxes a world owed.
</font>[/QUOTE]And my answer remains “no”, because I believe that is a form of body-shopping slavery (and if it wasn’t meant to be that in the beginning when it was originally required, it would wind up amounting to that in very little time), and while the Imperium might turn an all too blind eye to whether or not it was occurring locally (might!), it wouldn’t engage in it itself.
It’s not that I don’t believe that “providing” bodies couldn’t be a form of obligation owed to the Imperium (it was done historically, as I acknowledged in a previous post)
other than Credits, it’s just that I don’t think the Imperium would accept or demand it.
Originally posted by Larsen E. Whipsnade:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by RainOfSteel:
It is the very nature of the "freedom of movement" that prevents oppresive governments, when they're too oppresive, everyone one the world starts signing up with Imperial Services voluntarily, and they never come back.
Freedom of movement? Score a laugh point.
Explain the charnal house world in Deneb ruled by the Ward of Vision in terms of 'freedom of movement'. Hell, explain Red Zones in terms of 'freedom of movement'. The number of hellholes in the Imperium put paid to your idea. If people could vote with their feet, such worlds wouldn't exist.
</font>[/QUOTE]This goes back to arguments I’ve made earlier both here on CotI and on the TML (back in 2003).
All through canon and non-canon fan-work, there is world after world that is, just as you say, a “hell-hole” of terrible governments and mass-mistreatment of citizenry.
I read through these, and I don’t think, “Wow, the Imperium must be a terrible place,” but rather, “Wow, all these worlds were written up in isolation from one another’s existence, just like the UWPs are created in isolation from one another.” This is a factor of inappropriate loading of world types by widely scattered authors, and does not, IMO, represent an accurate loading of nasty vs. indifferent vs. nice governments throughout the Imperium. As the mass of UWPs contain an amalgam of data that is “crazy”, so too do the massed descriptions of worlds contain a “crazily” inappropriate mis-loading of nasty world governments.
If all the worlds everywhere were really so nasty, then it wouldn’t be possible to conduct decent trade with most of them, because trade occurs across the extrality line all the time, not solely within it. Heavily oppressive regimes would have to restrict such activity so much (to prevent smuggling of both people and weapons on a mass scale), that trade would be severely restricted. The Imperium, IMO, is cognizant of this, and will turn a blind eye to requests by the government to aid against rebels fighting against that sort of nonsense. Requests by the world’s government, of any kind, might well fall on deaf ear at the Subsector and Sector Duke’s Courts (as Supplement 11 says, I paraphrase without looking up the exact quote, “That honor runs very strong in the Imperial Nobility”, and I’ll say that honorable beings will
not sit totally still for that sort of nonsense by some two-bit good-for-nothing world off in the corner of the Imperium somewhere). Now, a Megacorporation might want a more oppressive government (so that the citizenry doesn’t object to it’s mass trampling of environments and ruthless exploitation of resources), but it’s a balancing act. Overall, the most lucrative and profitable employment activities a Megacorporation can engage in is having highly educated employees performing highly skilled labor (software design, high-tech engineering, starship and vehicle assembly, high-level consulting work, etc.), and you do not get a large population capable of those tasks in a heavily oppressive regime.
Originally posted by Larsen E. Whipsnade:
There is no explicit or implicit freedom of movement across extrality lines in the OTU.
But there is mention of anti-slavery in canon, and I still think body-shopping leads straight to slavery.
“Freedom of movement,” I think, may be something that keeps cropping up because of the game’s name, Traveller. And because without it as default in the majority of places, the majority of the Imperium becomes a dull, lifeless, and oppressive place none of the potential players I know would wish to visit most of the time. It winds up being like running in a Star Wars game, forever hiding in between the cracks of the Galactic Empire, only in the Imperium, the PCs would be hiding in the cracks of each individual nasty world government.
Originally posted by Larsen E. Whipsnade:
What would an insistence on freedom of movement across the port extrality line be? What would allowing an entire population a 'Get Out Of Crout Free' card be?
I’m not sure what you mean be “card” and “get out of Crout free”. The Imperium doesn’t care whether individuals have the economic resources to leave their world or not. If they don’t have that money, then they can’t buy a ticket on a starship. (The question of “freedom of movement and its canonicity, or lack thereof, is, I feel, a separate issue.)
Originally posted by Larsen E. Whipsnade:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />The "draft" in this case is not a "conscript" system, it's a "you didn't get what you wanted and got stuck in a place you didn't desire," system. There is nothing mandatory about trying to enlist in the first place.
Well, it is mandatory if you want to create a PC. You are either enlisted; read 'recruited', or drafted; read 'drafted'!
</font>[/QUOTE]PCs are not the majority of the population. The “draft” exists so that character creation continues. CT always got a bad wrap for killing PCs during character creation, I can’t imagine what would have happened if it stopped nascent PCs from even beginning the process! Oops, you can’t enter anything. Start over . . .
Originally posted by Larsen E. Whipsnade:
I'm always struck by the way people use bits and pieces of the chargen to 'prove' certain things about their TUs; like the 'fact' that all marines don't use battledress because every marine doens't get battledress automatically, while ignoring other portions of the chargen that don't quite fit their TU.
As I mentioned, I think it’s entirely questionable to read facts into the nature of the Imperium based on chargen. I don’t think it was the original author’s intent to describe the Imperium via chargen. Chargen was there to get PCs going and adventuring, nothing more.
Originally posted by Larsen E. Whipsnade:
When it comes to illuminating the OTU [my spelling correction plus minor snippage . . .] I want the PCs to realize that they're not in Kansas anymore, and I don't want the PCs to treat the entire affair as 'Jersey City with jump drives'.
Hmm, I think the otherworldliness of the Imperium can be more successfully explained by introducing cultural “facts” on some worlds that are totally at odds with our own experience.
Like, over at
www.foreven.com, in the original Lunion Campaign’s logs, the characters get to Spirelle fairly early on. There, they discover that people are allowed to enter the workforce as soon as they feel they are able, and can begin voting in the government at that age. The PCs get into an absolutely New Jersey ordinary taxicab, and there is a six-year old girl in the front seat. She’s the driver. My personal reaction to this is, “I’d never trust a six year old at the wheel, judgment and reaction speed aren’t finally developed, etc.” It’s this sort of jarring fact of “everyday” life on Spirelle that is more alien to me than any amount of the oddities of Imperial feudalism.
