Originally posted by Merxiless:
It's not criticism of the game, it is calling people who are happy with it Obsessive
Which I've never done. I have never made a link between "people who are happy with Traveller" and "obsessive people". Those are not connected at all.
I consciously choose to ignore these things.
OK, but you do realise those issues are still there whether you ignore them or not.
My problem with your approach is that in this quest for "Realism" it will remove some or all of the imaginative elements that are a core foundation of my game.
Will it though? That's what I'm asking. Is having a Regina orbit a close binary when that can't really be the case
that much of a 'core foundation' to your game that it falls apart completely if that is taken away? The fact that we replace two stars - the smaller of which
isn't even visible at all from Regina in the glare of Lusor - with one just causes the whole thing to collapse does it? Really? I don't think it is at all.
I in fact do not want it to be 100% correct according to modern theories of astrophysics. It's a game. My players don't care. For them, it is the visual, the story, the action. If I want to worry about what lies beneath Titan, I'll make it up, and be happy. Period, end of story.
That's fine. Enjoying what you play is what matters, I've never said anything to the contrary.
You make the stand that Realism will improve it.
I'm saying that from experience. I can look at just a UWP and a star type and that can tell me a hell of a lot about the history of the system and what the planets on it are like. It is possible to get a LOT of supplemental information from what is provided if you know how to do it. Sure, most of it will be "chrome" (as mentioned on that thread), but it also gives you a lot of stuff to play with that you hadn't realised before.
For example, there's a secondary star in a near orbit in the system. As it turns out, in some cases that can pump the eccentricity and/or the inclination of planetary orbits further in. That gives you climate cycles to play with that would seriously influence the evolution of life on the planet. Sometimes those cycles are short enough that they'd be noticeable on a historical timescale, so maybe a colony established a few thousand years ago when the planet was in a nice circular orbit is now finding itself enduring long periods of deep freeze and short blistering summers as the planet's orbit is stretched out. Makes the place a bit more interesting, and you have a backup of saying "this really could happen" rather than just plucking some random thing out of the air that may or may not make any sense or be consistent with the environment.
Or even if none of that happens and you just have everything in roughly circular orbits, have you thought how much light and warmth that other star would provide? It might be bright enough to seriously affect daily cycles of life on the planet. It could just be a bright star in the sky (like Venus), or be bright enough to cast shadows and to see by at night (like the full moon), or it could be so bright that it causes significant scattering in the sky and basically turns night into day, in which case night would only truly fall when both stars rise and set at similar times. That could enormously influence life on the planet, not to mention ruling out such things as "waiting for when it's dark before we go sneak around that camp" and thus causing players to think of other ways to be subtle.
All of this just from stopping and thinking about how things would really be on these alien worlds, instead of just throwing random ideas together to make an inconsistent mess. Think of the realistic consequences of things and suddenly you see them in a new light.
Now I'm sure you could argue that it's too much effort and that it stops you from doing "cool stuff that could be fun" but I've not seen that to be the case. More often than not, thinking realistically actually creates new situations (that are also fun) that you most likely hadn't even
considered before.
On the one hand Malenfant, you say "you do not tell anyone how to run Traveller." On the other hand, to you, people that are not willing to look at Traveller are aging guys with "heads up their arse"; Obsessive hold-outs to a dead game that needs to be brought up to modern marketing standards.
Again, I have never made that connection at all, you just did that. My "heads up their arses" comment referred to people who think that what they believe about the popularity of the game in the RPG market and what they think it can do in the future if it continues on its current path takes precendence over the cold, hard facts of the current RPG market. It has nothing to do with how they play their games at all.
Your insulting tone makes it impossible for me, personally, to take anything that you have to offer to the community, not matter how well backed up by heavily researched science.
Then that's your loss. Personally I'm primarily interested in the message rather than the messenger.
Go off, and rewrite Barsoom, Dejah thoris, Stories about Venus that have rain clouds and jungles. They are part and parcel of What Brought us here from the Pulps.
I've no intention of doing that at all, because those are Space Opera or Pulp. They're not even remotely supposed to be realistic in any way at all, and to rewrite them would just destroy what makes them unique.
The problem here really is again Traveller's schizophrenia. With GURPS Space or Star HERO you had clearly divided options that could let you play Space Opera/Space Fantasy or Hard/Realistic SF. Nobody would argue that someone running a Space Opera using GURPS Space is "playing it wrong"... but Traveller never really made that distinction. It gave us Space Opera-like worldgen in Book 3, and then threw a hard-sf system at us in Book 6 and expected the two to co-exist. And later editions of the game have only propagated that contradiction - MT and TNE and GT felt more hard sf, while T4 and maybe T20 felt more space opera. But the problem is that you can't really have a single setting be both at once.
So we get people saying it's supposed to be space opera so realism doesn't matter, and we get people saying it's supposed to be hard-sf and so realism does matter. All I'm saying here is that neither is really pivotal to defining Traveller though - you can add or remove some realistic or unrealistic elements to your settings and it doesn't really change the game all that much.
