That's another membership card I can offer you...
Our Absent Friend Hans and I wrangled for decades over my belief that the UWP is a snapshot in time and not carved in stone. Especially the "sociological" parts of the UWP.
Well, I go even further.
Keep in mind that what I'm about to type is from the point of view of ur-
Traveller of Books 1-3, and that later concerns of the Classic
Traveller line aren't really of concern to me.
It take Book 3 at its word: The UWP and Main World generation system is there "as a prod to the imagination." It was never intended to provide a complete and incisive classification system. It leaves too much out and zeros in on a few very specific possibilities. (Please note that if you read the first three paragraph's in Marc Miller's essay "
Planetary Government in Traveller" from 1982 you'll see he's saying the same thing.)
Yes, yes... later Classic
Traveller products would state that the UWPs are, in fact, classifications noted by the in-fiction Scout organization of the Imperium. Now, I think that's a horrible mistake.
First because it undercuts the inspirational looseness of the original intent. As originally designed the UWP was a set of quick notations that the Referee can combine in his head to produce something that he never would have thought of before. He wan't supposed to use them properly... he was supposed to interpret them, both individually and as a group of factors, to create something that made sense on its own.
But now, suddenly, each notation had to represent the same thing from world to world because some fictional organization inside the Referee's game was telling him that these were objective measurements and statements of the world.
Second, as Miller points out in the essay above, the factors are not there to provide a notion as one might find in a
World Almanac:
The reason, in reality, is that they are not omitted or absent; the many varied types of government which can be imagined all fit into the basic scheme given in the Traveller government tables. To understand this, it is important to remember just what purpose the government factor is meant to serve. Traveller players and characters are rarely involved with governments on the international and interplanetary level. That is to say, they do not deal with kings or presidents or heads of state; they deal with individual members of broad government mechanisms, they deal with office holders and employees whose attitudes and actions are shaped by the type of government they serve. As a result, travellers are rarely interested in the upper reaches of government; they want to know what they can expect from the governmental structure at their own level. For example, if a group of travellers were to journey across the United States from coast to coast, they would be interested in the degree of responsiveness they could expect from local governments, in how easy the local court clerk would respond to information requests, or in the degree of difficulty that could be expected in obtaining certain licenses. As they moved through Nebraska, the fact that that state has a unicameral legislature would be of little or no importance.
For this reason, among others, labels such as monarchy have been eliminated. Calling a government type “monarchy” would conjure up images of a king and his retinue, but still leaves a lot of information unrelated. Within the Traveller system, such a government could be classified as a self-perpetuating oligarchy (hereditary monarchy), representative democracy (constitutional monarchy), feudal technocracy (enlightened feudal monarchy), captive government (puppet monarchy), civil service bureaucracy, or any of several others. The simple term monarchy becomes nonsense when one attempts to apply it to a widespread classification system.
Another reason for the labels that are provided in the government classification system is as an aid to imagination. The unaided imagination of even the most inventive referee can go dry after generating a few simple worlds. Using die rolls to create the individual factors for planets jogs the imagination, forcing the referee to think of rationales for the combinations that occur. The use of too familiar terms (such as monarchy) can stifle imagination by allowing the referee to settle into old lines of thought.
Of course there are governments that are monarchies. And there are monarchies in nearly endless interstellar civilizations. (At least one!) But that government type isn't listed in the Book 3 options because listing it would not help serve the purpose that Miller had when creating the system.
Third, by nailing down the UWPs of "literal" observations of a planet rather than as a tool for the Referee, we end up in countless arguments about what the Factors "mean" rather than using them for their true intent: To create awesome worlds and share them with others.
And finally, the "literal" interpretation defies the fun to be had when inspired one way or another in ways that "break" the randomly generated UWP but certainly grow from it. Sure, a planet might have a Population of a hundred thousand with a TL of 4. But what if the Referee, after mulling the size, atmosphere, population, government, and law factors decides that the Population refers to a settlement of about 100,000 with a TL of ten with a indigenous population of 3,000,000,000. Why should he not do that if that was what the system prodded his imagination to come up with and he's really excited about it?
Thus, we can have low tech worlds with a city of high tech that manages the local starport, as offworlders want such a starport in this system.
I could come up with gazillion examples. But I think everyone here gets my drift.
I'm not saying everyone
agrees with me. I'm sure few do. But if you look at the text of Book 3 (and the quoted passage from Miller's essay) I think it would be hard to dismiss that it is one way of looking at how to read and use the UWP.
