Question about the UWP

[stofsk]

The PBG component of the UWP tells you the 'population modifier' as well as the number of belts and gas giants in the system. But what does the population modifier mean?

The handbook says it refines the population size of the UWP by acting as a multiplier, so my understanding of that is: if a world has a pop size of 2 (hundreds of people) and a population multiplier of 1, does that mean there would be a ~hundred people on the world? (since pop-2 equals at least one hundred people, and the pop multiplier is x1, therefore there would be at least 100 people on the world and under 200, or anywhere between 100-199.)

To use another example: another world has a pop-8 (hundreds of millions) and a pop multiplier of 4, therefore would it have a refined population figure of at least 400 million people?

Does that make sense? Am I doing it right? If not, can someone help - I fear the Handbook entry isn't too clear on the matter, but that's how I interpreted it.

 

[Black Globe Generator]

Yes, you're doing it right - a pop 6 mod 5 world is five million, a pop 4 mod 6 world is sixty thousand, and so on.

If you want to be really precise, you can then roll d10 for each successive digit, so that pop 6 mod 5 can be expanded to 5,426,773, for example.

 

[Gruffty]

Originally posted by stofsk:
if a world has a pop size of 2 (hundreds of people) and a population multiplier of 1, does that mean there would be a ~hundred people on the world? (since pop-2 equals at least one hundred people, and the pop multiplier is x1, therefore there would be at least 100 people on the world and under 200, or anywhere between 100-199.)

Correct

another world has a pop-8 (hundreds of millions) and a pop multiplier of 4, therefore would it have a refined population figure of at least 400 million people?

Correct again

Does that make sense? Am I doing it right?

Yah und yah

MT actually gives you the number ranges for the Pop codes in a handy, pocket sized table.

 

[stofsk]

That sounds like a lot of work.

 

[Gruffty]

Nah, it's a doddle:</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Pop Value Range
0 0-9
1 10-99
2 100-999
3 1,000-9,999
Etc etc.</pre>[/QUOTE]

 

[stofsk]

Another question, this one more for discussion than anything definitive: but how do you rationalise some of the stranger UWP results you get?

Like the TL-2 pre-industrial society that has a tainted atmosphere?

 

[Klaus]

You don't rationalise them. You ignore them. You rewrite them.

The UWP makes the ref's job harder rather than easier. The bare numbers are fairly useless without lots of extra work, but they contain just enough info to restrict the ref's choices.

The Spinward Marches just about work, as it seems that was designed as well as being generated, and tweaked to fit afterwards. Most of the other sectors seem to have just been rolled up at random, and as a result there's far more noise than signal in the OTU. Pages and pages of bare UWPs are worse than useless.

 

[stofsk]

You're saying what I want to hear. I think I like you, Klaus.

 

[RainOfSteel]

Originally posted by Klaus:
The UWP makes the ref's job harder rather than easier. The bare numbers are fairly useless without lots of extra work, but they contain just enough info to restrict the ref's choices.

Instead of "the ref's job harder", that should be "the jobs of some ref's harder".

I, for one, have never found any difficulty in using or extrapolating from a well-formed UWP (the crazy ones, yeah, but that's another story).

Originally posted by Klaus:
The Spinward Marches just about work, as it seems that was designed as well as being generated, and tweaked to fit afterwards.

I have always thought that the Spinward Marches largely didn't work from a UWP perspective.

Originally posted by Klaus:
Most of the other sectors seem to have just been rolled up at random, and as a result there's far more noise than signal in the OTU. Pages and pages of bare UWPs are worse than useless. [/qb]

You should realize that the majority of sectors were created by what has largely been acknolwedged by a flawed process that was itself not obeying the rules laid out in canon.

Not that the old rules for CT Bk2 and Bk6 were perfect (though they were great for the time).

 

[Klaus]

I don't care whether the Spinward Marches works from a UWP perspective: it's an interesting space to adventure in.

It took me months to understand what was going on in the Spinward Marches, by interpreting UWP's, when a one line planetary description would have let me get it instantly.

I once tried looking for a low law level colony type world, a kind of Tatooine like place for some bounty hunting. I searched through the Gateway domain for days looking for something, and found but one, in the Redemption cluster. I shouldn't have to spend days finding this stuff.

The evidence is there, in the form of the most mediocre kind of rpg books going: pages and pages of raw UWPs. Who in their right mind would pay for books of random numbers - that's effectively what they are.

As a ref, I want stuff I can play straight away, rather than having to do all the hard work myself. A UWP gives you nothing you couldn't have thought of yourself within 10 seconds. You even have to consult a table to work out what the UWP actually says. And there's what it doesn't tell you, like whether the biosphere is developed,whether trade is important.

If I buy an rpg product, I don't want to then have to extrapolate from a string of numbers. There ain't no such thing as a well-formed UWP. You can come up with a much more informative planetary description in less time than it takes to consult which atmo type a planets got.

A high G tropical garden world.

A vacuum rockball will lots of mining camps.

A desert planet renowned for the lowlife hives of scum and villainy.

AQn industrial powerhouse with some civil rights issues and a poisoned atmosphere.

There, that's 4 planets before you can interpret 1 UWP.

Like I say, worse than useless.

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by Klaus:
You don't rationalise them. You ignore them. You rewrite them.

The UWP makes the ref's job harder rather than easier. The bare numbers are fairly useless without lots of extra work, but they contain just enough info to restrict the ref's choices.

I have to disagree

, I like interpreting UPPs to make sense of them.
The ref's guide to planet building article in two issues of JTAS should have made it into later versions of the core rules IMHO.

Originally posted by Klaus:
A high G tropical garden world.

A vacuum rockball will lots of mining camps.

A desert planet renowned for the lowlife hives of scum and villainy.

An industrial powerhouse with some civil rights issues and a poisoned atmosphere.

There, that's 4 planets before you can interpret 1 UWP.

Like I say, worse than useless.

I dislike entire planets described by one climate type...

UPPs for the above worlds off the top of my head:

*A68***-* high G tropical garden world

*2008**-* vacuum rockball with lots of mining camps

***1**0-* desert planet for scum and villainy

**7*9*9-* industrial powerhouse etc.

 

[Klaus]

I know what you mean, Sigg, but it takes work to get to that level of understanding. It's not pick up and play, you have to learn how to interpret it, and unlike other rpg skills, like working out probabilities and organising data, it's of no use in the real world whatsoever.

Instead of 'tropical', I could have just said 'hot'.

The UWP also lacks crucial data, that the ref then has to make up, ensuring that no MTU looks the same.

In fact, no data for planets would be a hell of alot more useful to refs than the miniscule amount that's in the UWP.

It's like a kit car without an engine or wheels, or a computer without a keyboard or mouse, or an N64 with no game.

 

[stofsk]

The UWP line lacks data about the system's other planetary bodies, whether any planets have rings, moons, whether the gas giants are big or small, how many satellites they have, and so on.

There comes a point though where you feel like going "Too much information".

 

[Border Reiver]

Although I fully understand where Klaus is coming from (and agree to some extent) a UWP will allow for a number of different interpretations. That is what I want as a ref. I don't want to be held to rigid descriptions. I want a seed.

It was part of the magic of CT. The UWP's gave something to build on. 76 Patrons were adventure seeds. The cargo tables, patron encounters, animal encounters etc were all lacking in details. The took away some of the hard work and allowed the imagination to flow. And all those details crammed into those handy LBBs.

On the gripping hand MT and then TNE provided much more info on a limited amount of systems which still allowed for some creative work.

I suppose growing up with UPP's I find them easy to scan and pick out candidates for whichever purpose I have planned for them.

 

[Klaus]

I'd have prefered a few key, and interesting, worlds described in detail, then most of the rest given just a bare bones.

For instance, Gov 6, Captive, could mean anything; what I want to know is who is occupying it, and why.

The problem arises that a ref may develop a world, then discover it's used in an Adventure and that world could be completely different. It makes it hard for the ref to then use published material.

Worlds earmarked for 'canon', and worlds earmarked for ref development would have been a better model.

Of course they weren't to know when they developed it back in the 70's, but subsequent iterations just make this problem worse.

IMHO the UWP format is the giant dead-weight around around Traveller's neck. Everything else is absolutely fantastic.

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by Klaus:
I know what you mean, Sigg, but it takes work to get to that level of understanding.

You know when you are too far into Traveller when you can translate UPPs in your head - I still can't remember all the government codes though

Being able to picture a ship from nothing more than a USP (without looking it up in High Guard) is the sign of a true fan(atic).

It's not pick up and play, you have to learn how to interpret it, and unlike other rpg skills, like working out probabilities and organising data, it's of no use in the real world whatsoever.

I agree with you here

The UWP also lacks crucial data, that the ref then has to make up, ensuring that no MTU looks the same.

No two people's TUs will ever look the same though, and I prefer to interpret the Spinward Marches UPPs to suit my proto-Travellerish vision of the Imperium.
I know a lot of people on the SJGs Traveller forums like Behind the Claw, but my version of a lot of those worlds is very different from the way MJD and NF detailed them.
UPPs allow my imagination to fill in the gaps, while a few paragraphs can actually be creatively stifling IMHO.

 

[Klaus]

I've not been able to track down Behind the Claw. I'd really like to see it.

It seems there is a kind of consensus about the Spinward Marches though. District 268 is by far the most interesting subsector, as evidenced by the number of adventures et cetera that are based in and around it.

I still have trouble with HG USPs, but I can remember the govt codes!

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by Klaus:
I'd have prefered a few key, and interesting, worlds described in detail, then most of the rest given just a bare bones.

I'm all in favour of this too.
Tarsus and Beltstrike did a wonderful job of detailing a couple of key worlds in District 268, but I could develop the rest however I wanted (based on their UPPS of course ).

For instance, Gov 6, Captive, could mean anything; what I want to know is who is occupying it, and why.

And what if the official version doesn't suit your campaign? You'd change it anyway. I prefer to just make it up to fit MTU in the first place.

The problem arises that a ref may develop a world, then discover it's used in an Adventure and that world could be completely different. It makes it hard for the ref to then use published material.

One of the things I like about most of the short adventures, and nearly all of the long adventures for that matter, is that they could easily be placed on similar worlds to fit in with my campaign at the time. This was something that was even mentioned in the introductions usually.
The Traveller Adventure was the first to really define a region of the Spinward Marches in great detail, but there was still room to put in my own stuff.

Worlds earmarked for 'canon', and worlds earmarked for ref development would have been a better model.

Again I agree, it would have been better rather than have sectors put aside to have subsectors or worlds within the Marches for referee development that canon wouldn't touch.

Of course they weren't to know when they developed it back in the 70's, but subsequent iterations just make this problem worse.

Agree, the more detailed the OTU became, the harder it was for me to use it as a setting since my own version diverged so far.

It's proto-Traveller only for me from now on

IMHO the UWP format is the giant dead-weight around around Traveller's neck. Everything else is absolutely fantastic.

Again I have to disagree, I can't think of a better format for such information in such a small space.

 

[mike wightman]

Originally posted by Klaus:
I've not been able to track down Behind the Claw. I'd really like to see it.

It's a good book IMHO, despite the errata problems.
Others seem to view it as a love it or loath it issue.

It seems there is a kind of consensus about the Spinward Marches though. District 268 is by far the most interesting subsector, as evidenced by the number of adventures et cetera that are based in and around it.

Yep.
The whole quadrant - Darrian, Five Sisters, Sword Worlds, District 268 is my favourite place to set adventures in the Marches.

 

[Klaus]

Exactly. So whats the point of all the other sectors detailed? Or even the rest of the Marches. Seems like a big waste of trees to me. ;D

Funny that the best bit of the OTU is outside the Imperium...

I've located the 'Redemption Cluster' in the Gateway Domain as a fun place too. But that's about it, in 30 years of published UWPs.

There's interesting worlds all over the place, but they're oases in the desert. It makes campaign designing hard if there's a 6 month travel time between interesting locations.