Originally posted by Casey:
I think it's funny that everybody on this thread read UWP for UPP until into the 2nd page. Wonder if that has anything to do with the usefullness of the UWP. It could just mean nobody uses the term UPP though. ^_^
Personally while I find the UWP useful for listing a huge number of planets compactly I find myself looking up at least one of the values (if not half to all) in a world's UWP whenever I use one. I keep a printout of a one-page text someone made up that details the values handy and have an archived javascript UWP expander. (can't find either url at the moment)
I don't think the UWP itself should be extended. I like in general not having everything detailed out on a sector level which leaves plenty of room for IMTU. And for me it wouldn't quite be Traveller without random planetary generation. However I do like the full writeup ala GT: First In or even the DGP type world data (1-2 pages) for worlds that are focal points that the PCs are going to spend a lot of time on.
Casey
UWP vs. UPP
As for repeating UPP several times, I've carried on threads in the past where I've stated UWP over and over, and my counterpart kept on stating UPP over and over. Eventually, I realized many think UPP is Universal Planetary Profile, and decided not to mention it the same way I usually manage to restrain myself from pointing out typos and grammar errors (because I, of course, make errors myself
).
UWP Expansion
There is a difference between what the OTU publishers should give us, and what I should be able to
expand to in MTU. When player's get a mind to jump a few hexes off course, "Just because.", I tend to want to be able to have a list of pre-generated and fairly detailed system and world stats on-hand, the full skeleton, so to say. As GM, of course I'm left to do up the meat of it, even on the fly. But knowing what the gravity is on the 4th moon of the 2nd Gas Giant in the 5th Orbit is useful without having to decide on it myself in an instant (where I'll probably get it wrong). It is also very useful when looking at polity-wide statistics, so that I can get a personal feel for the spending of various branches of government, both at the interstellar and system level.
I do not want a full detail handed to me, I want the ultra bare bones, and then I want a known and accepted framework upon which to expand it.
Galactic 2.4 provides this to some extent. Heaven & Earth 2 (in beta) will do so as well. But both rely on the static and standard Expanded UWP. Galactic provides a few extra stats (like I mentioned up thread), and provides an alternate script for system generation that "corrects" some of the worst "randomness" flaws of the original Bk2/Bk6 systems. However, Galactic has its own proprietary starsystem generator (it uses it's own author-designed routines to position worlds, moons, rings, etc.), and the author of H&E 2 has just finally come to the conclusion that it's unlikely the starsystem generator rules found in the World Builder's Handbook (which are based on Grand Survey, in turn based on Book 6) will ever work because the systems in the books are inherently flawed and designed to be human-fudged when problems were encountered.
I mention all this because I'd like, to see a new world-design handbook. I'd like to see an expanded
and corrected UWP, and corrected starsystem generation routines.
<I'd like to see>
Ideally, the basic UWPs, with zeroed Social Stats, would be generated by the Traveller author and writers. Terra, Vland, and the few other planets inhabited by intelligent species would be updated with their stats.
Then, the base data would be "run through" a process to update the worlds in 250 or 500 year intervals. Each leap forward would include additional corrective process runs for each sector and subsector based on known historical requirements (war, disasters, war, expansion, war, etc.). The degree to which population grew and spread would be controlled by TL (which governs lifespan, health, child-rearing years, jump ranges, and the quantity of additional wealth which which more expansion can be driven), which is artificially set by known historical requirements.
By the end of this, we get to 1000, then leap to 1110, and then make a short 6 year leap to 1116, and then the next leap to the TNE timeframe.
Each leap forward has its own Last Survey Date/Time stamp. This produces a complete set of basic stats for each world for each leap forward. The combined database would be released, hopefully (from my standpoint), in a widely available database or XML format (so the data can be Normalized from the beginning instead of making people do it themselves) and honestly, in hopefully more than one format (MySQL, Firebird, Access, Mimer, etc.).
The amazing front ends that various excellent programmers have made could then, in theory, connect to the common back end of a common database of UWPs. Each person could then expand and personalize any of the data for any era of the OTU. Of course, each GM is free to change anything, including whole sectors, to match personal needs and desires.
Or, as a fall back position, file-format converters could be established to cross data between this "Common UWP Database" and the likes of Universe, H&E 2, and Galactic 2.4.
The finalized development of such a "Common UWP Database" allows for additional possibilities. The programming that does the process of leaping the timeframes forward could be packaged and sold an an application. By creating blank UWP Databases, a user would run random generation with zeroed Social Stats, updating key worlds (for universes that start on Earth or other worlds at whatever point in their history the author wants), and then leaps the new milieu forward in user-selectable intervals. In short, it would be a tremendously useful milieu design tool for non-TU gaming.
Wow, it's pretty easy to suggest other people do so much work, isn't it?
</I'd like to see>
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