On Mon, 24 Mar 2014 09:05:06 -0400, DED <> wrote:
>It was TNE's story that really grabbed me. Too much of what came before
>and after was dry and very much like what you'd find in a textbook.
>While textbooks are informative, they rarely inspire.
And, in retrospect, I think this may have ultimately hurt Traveller -
there really wasn't anything in the setting to 'grab' you.
My primary - essentially, /only/ - objection to TNE was /not/ the
wholesale destruction, but the /means/ of that destruction - just based
on what we knew of computers at the time of TNE, Virus represented a
violation of just too many principles that were even then considered
/basic/ for protecting against malware. Of course, with the increasing
capability of browsers, and the advent of such abominations as
unsandboxed Flash, Java, and scripting, the TNE scenario suddenly seems
less improbable, even given that we have people howling about how
insecure browsers, especially Internet Explorer, are...
But TNE did represent a 'doing right' of what the classical setting 'did
wrong' - the PCs /could/ Make A Difference, and we could /see/, not
simply /read/. Did I like the Star Viking motif of the RC expansion? Not
really; that struck me as being more like the Spanish colonization
model, and it's pretty clear that the Anglo-Dutch model was a bit more
successful. But I didn't have to use the Star Vikings; I could run my
own post-Collapse universe with a Dawn League that wasn't in that
expansion mode, but instead did so by fostering trade and /creating/
wealth rather than treating wealth as a zero-sum game.
--
Jeff Zeitlin, Editor
Freelance Traveller
The Electronic Fan-Supported
Traveller® Fanzine and Resource
http://www.freelancetraveller.com
http://freelancetraveller.downport.com/
®Traveller is a registered trademark of
Far Future Enterprises, 1977-2014. Use of
the trademark in this notice and in the
referenced materials is not intended to
infringe or devalue the trademark.
Freelance Traveller extends its thanks to the following
enterprises for hosting services:
CyberNET Web Hosting (http://www.cyberwebhosting.net)
The Traveller Downport (http://www.downport.com)
>It was TNE's story that really grabbed me. Too much of what came before
>and after was dry and very much like what you'd find in a textbook.
>While textbooks are informative, they rarely inspire.
And, in retrospect, I think this may have ultimately hurt Traveller -
there really wasn't anything in the setting to 'grab' you.
My primary - essentially, /only/ - objection to TNE was /not/ the
wholesale destruction, but the /means/ of that destruction - just based
on what we knew of computers at the time of TNE, Virus represented a
violation of just too many principles that were even then considered
/basic/ for protecting against malware. Of course, with the increasing
capability of browsers, and the advent of such abominations as
unsandboxed Flash, Java, and scripting, the TNE scenario suddenly seems
less improbable, even given that we have people howling about how
insecure browsers, especially Internet Explorer, are...
But TNE did represent a 'doing right' of what the classical setting 'did
wrong' - the PCs /could/ Make A Difference, and we could /see/, not
simply /read/. Did I like the Star Viking motif of the RC expansion? Not
really; that struck me as being more like the Spanish colonization
model, and it's pretty clear that the Anglo-Dutch model was a bit more
successful. But I didn't have to use the Star Vikings; I could run my
own post-Collapse universe with a Dawn League that wasn't in that
expansion mode, but instead did so by fostering trade and /creating/
wealth rather than treating wealth as a zero-sum game.
--
Jeff Zeitlin, Editor
Freelance Traveller
The Electronic Fan-Supported
Traveller® Fanzine and Resource
http://www.freelancetraveller.com
http://freelancetraveller.downport.com/
®Traveller is a registered trademark of
Far Future Enterprises, 1977-2014. Use of
the trademark in this notice and in the
referenced materials is not intended to
infringe or devalue the trademark.
Freelance Traveller extends its thanks to the following
enterprises for hosting services:
CyberNET Web Hosting (http://www.cyberwebhosting.net)
The Traveller Downport (http://www.downport.com)