Jim--
I wrote this this morning, but then my internet connection dropped and
webmail dumped this whole thing so I'm writing it again. A lot of this is
not really a response to you, I do get to that down near the bottom, but I
took your e-mail as an invitation to discuss "why a storyline" in general,
so I unpacked a bunch of stuff that might be of interest to other list
members even though you're familiar with a lot of it.
> Traveller is the original Moving Timeline RPG, so a strong argument
would
> have to be made for moving to a new period and not at least telling the
tale of the age. Just because the nightly news isn't all that
interesting
> to the inhabitants does make it useless to us, the outsiders looking in.
"Why a storyline at all?" is a significant discussion, and one which gets
a lot of attention nowadays. The short answer is, "In 1992 that's just
what was done." But you know me and short answers.
There are a group of gamers, self-described "grognards" (French for
"grumblers," a Napoleonic term synonymous with "Old Guard" that Jim
Dunnigan of SPI popularized back in the '70s for old-school wargamers) who
basically believe that all RPGs are ruined once they get an official
campaign setting, because the energy, production budget, release schedule,
etc., gets eaten up with background which sucks attention away from rules,
and also undermines the rules by getting them stuck to a particular
scenario. They have a point. I have mentioned here that TNE often got
stretched between the two poles of open SF rules and the campaign setting,
for example the space combat missiles. Another example is UWPs where Frank
started using them to mean TNE Wilds/TED specific things instead of their
universal meanings, and I realized it too late to smooth it over or
provide a clear warning/translation to the readers. (I also found out over
the weekend that related to this, Leroy Guatney dislikes me for suggesting
that we do something similar with "X" starport ratings in his Hiver world
generation, I'm pretty sure that was related to the Wilds thing above, and
perhaps even my suggestion to Terry McInnes that he merge 2300 into WTH.)
Frank used to say "vox populi, vox dei," but how many voxes does it take
to make a dei? This relates to recent stuff about the goals we had for
TNE, and the input we got convincing us of those goals came from these
sources. From 1991-95 they were:
1. Letters and phone calls from players. These would be first opened or
answered by the business office, who would tabulate them, and then pass
them on to us as time permitted. (We tried to spend an hour or so a week
answering letters.)
2. Input from players at Cons, which really means only a three-month
period each year.
3. Guidance/input/Demands from distributors and the retailers they claimed
to represent (often the distributors would screw us, and by extension the
gamers, but that's a different discussion) and the information they
gathered from the retailers. We would talk to them all the time as they
made their regular orders.
4. Association with other game companies and professionals. Frank was the
president of GAMA through most of this period, so he got a lot of gouge
this way.
5. Word-of-mouth and direct input at local gamestores and from playtests.
Les did a lot of this, and used to beat me up for not making more time to
get out on a regular basis and playing.
6. The electronic BBSs, like Xboat, TML, a few others. This was before the
Internet proper, and these were done via dial-in list servers like GEnie.
However, the phone lines at the GDW offices were old and would not support
modem connections, so we could do none of this at the office, it all had
to be at someone's home "after work." HIWG is KINDA similar to these, but
I'll get to them in detail farther down.
7. Gut feeling from a design staff who had been doing this since 1973, so
had a sense of what worked.
The primary voices were probably 1, 3, 4, and to a lesser extent 6, and
were assessed/balanced against each other by 7. 2 was highly significant
in that you could float ideas and get a yea/nay check, but that only
happened once a year, so was not as usable all the time. 6 requires some
more detail. The guys on these lists were the extreme of the
"self-selecting" dynamic and were very intense fans, ravenous even. You
could always go to these guys and ask, "should we do this," but as you
guys know from modern boards, you'd get a thousand answers and maybe start
a flame war. So 6 was hard to use, and there was a tendency to try it, get
burned, then back away. The big thing at the time was "Traveller Done
Right" (TDR), but there were as many different versions of that as
posters, just about. It could have been a full-time job for someone just
to keep up with them.
What? No statistical, evidence-based market research? Back then the only
game companies who could afford professional market research were people
like TSR, and WotC after 1994. The market wasn't big enough to make it
worthwhile. This was the Mom & Pop wargame cottage industry days. Also, it
was accepted that SPI had pretty much put itself out of business by too
much focus on the statistical feedback of the S&T feedback cards, because
these had the scientific flaw of being self-identifying individuals,
therefore were non-representative of the whole. And that was the problem
with almost all of our methods above, it was mostly self-identifying, and
the people who decided they had the most to say outweighed those who
didn't sound off.
So that was the flawed basis of our understanding of the world, but as
someone who was there, I think it was accepted by everyone that the way
you made a living was by cranking out supplements:
1. Because the distributors demanded them. They wanted to pump out new
releases on a regular basis to keep your line in the public eye (and keep
their cash flow up). BTW, this was the Comic Book distribution trade, who
delivered stuff weekly to the stores, so they wanted stuff from us weekly
if possible.
2. Our players said they wanted them. They wanted to see new releases, new
sourcebooks, new equipment books, new adventures, etc. And if there was an
existing story-line (as there was with Trav), they wanted to know, "what
is happening next?" Does Margaret win the Rebellion? Who won the 5th
Frontier War? What happens with the Empress Wave? Basically stuff that
once you said that is happening, they had every right to want the answer
to.
Obviously if you are going to be pumping out supplements it is MUCH easier
for them to be about campaign background, rather than writing new rules
for things, because you run out of new things to write rules about a lot
quicker than you run out of stories, and rules are harder to write and
take longer. You could make the case that if a game company wanted to stay
in business, it had to put out campaign background stuff, that's the only
way to keep the production up.
Also, this was the period of time when TV story-arcs were really getting
big, and everybody loved that. Episodic stuff that bore no relation to the
other episodes was not satisfying. Gamers also wanted that in the RPGs,
and game designers thought that was pretty cool too.
So really, no one argued against it, everyone thought it was a good idea.
And if there were Grognards back then, there weren't many. I think the
anti-RPG background grognard movement came about after this period, and
probably largely in response to it. I suspect that the "proto-grognards"
were the people that would complain, "you just see us as a bunch of cash
cows, that will buy all your new stuff. You suck. When's the next Twilight
module come out? It's late, you suck." I'm hyperbolizing, of course, but
there was that contradictory nature to it.
So, was having a storyline at all even a good idea? That wasn't even a
live question back then. Everyone did, and Traveller already did.
Meanwhile, back at Jim's point. Once you start a storyline, you set up an
expectation that you will follow through on it, that is part of the
contract that you explicitly make with your players: "if you buy into this
game, we will tell you an interesting story that you can play in." By 1991
the players were telling us that GDW had broken that contract with MT. MT
was released in 1987 with the three-book boxed set. Rebellion SB was 1988,
and it was a GREAT
supplement. But it was the last one that advanced the WHOLE storyline
until Hard Times at the end of 1991. So by the time I got there, GDW had
put out 8 MT products in five years, but the last one that advanced the
plotline was three years prior. (Ref's Companion 1988, COACC 1989 was
aircraft design, Fighting Ships 1990 was a ship catalog, Knightfall 1990
was set in the Rebellion, but was an adventure and not a full supplement
that told us how the war was going elsewhere, and moreover was set in the
no-man's land of Massilia sector so did not really cover a faction. DGP
also put out four books in the period 1988-1991, or one per year, but only
one of these, Flaming Eye, was a Rebellion faction sourcebook, covering
Vland; the two races books covered a couple races which coincided with
factions.) So, in five years of MT, GDW had only put out 1.6 books a year,
none of them covering a faction or the storyline since 1988. GDW and DGP
together put out 2.4 books a year, but since 1988 only about 1/3 of the
~9-11 factions (which were counted sometimes varied) had been covered in
any detail. (Jim, check my math, I may be missing something.) The players
said, "this is not enough, you gave us this great new rebellion, told us
to pick sides, and now you've left us hanging. Most of us have had no
information on our factions for three years. (There was stuff in Challenge
and DGP's magazine, but that's not the same.)
In the meantime, around the time MT came out, Marc established HIWG. I was
not a HIWG member so will not pretend to know how that all worked, I can
only say what my impression was. There were a bunch of really dedicated,
serious Traveller guys who wanted to be involved in the game, most of whom
were also regular Challenge contributors, and Marc knew that MT/Rebellion
was going to require a lot of detailed work, so he set these guys up as
the "History of the Imperium Working Group," and they divided up Charted
Space (not "Known Space," a common error, "KS" is Larry Niven, "CS" is
Traveller) into areas which were assigned to HIWG members who would work
up their details and histories, work together to sort out higher-level
plots, and principles, etc. However, the HIWG work was not official
("canon") until it was published as an official Traveller product.
(Challenge articles were similar, they were not necessarily considered
official.) Why is that? To try to run a coherent game/story, you need
centralized direction which also needs to be pretty detailed. A whole
bunch of energetic HIWG guys can produce way more material than one
central guy (some called him the "guru," I preferred the more pedestrian
"line manager") can read, comprehend, and hold in his head while still
meeting his own production deadlines. I imagine that Marc set up HIWG not
only because he knew he would want the detailed assistance, but also
because he couldn't necessarily read, understand, approve, and use all
their stuff at once, and he didn't want to just rudely fend them off. Marc
valued the fans, and the enthusiastic ones that much more. Instead, he
recognized their talents and efforts by making them this semi-official
Traveller contributor group, which of course made them even more energetic
in developing stuff. I suspect that being part of a semi-official group
whose work had not yet been accepted as official was not that much more
fun than the way it was before HIWG, and maybe less fun, given the higher
expectations. Probably that was no one's fault, but the result of a decent
impulse on Marc's part to let these guys get involved, but Marc couldn't
necessarily use their stuff "as is" without reading and agreeing with it
detail by detail, and that takes a lot of time, and the members probably
got frustrated that their stuff wasn't getting used the way they had
hoped. There is a huge amount of information that goes into creating a
sector with all its worlds, races, histories, relations with the one next
door, meta-histories that you've worked out with the neighboring sector
"analysts," etc., and there may be assumptions or ideas that the center
guy won't want to pull into the official material, because it's probably
tied in with a bunch of other stuff so he can't be sure what all of the
downstream impacts will be. So creating HIWG may have been a case of, "can
God create a rock so big he can't lift it?"
(Note that I said HIWG was KINDA similar to the BBS/mailing lists. Similar
from the standpoint that these guys were MONSTROUSLY self-selecting,
dedicated, detail hounds, so were the antithesis of the "no history
homework for the new players" principle we were trying to open up the game
with. NOT similar in the sense of Flame Wars. These guys were gentlemen,
and were as helpful as they could be. They even paid their own way to come
out to GDW for a Traveller writer's conference to prepare to start writing
TNE adventures and Challenge material. But as I said, the sort of thing
that they specialized in, highly detailed settings and histories, was hard
and time-consuming to assimilate, and given the fact that we had a lot of
work to do on TNE that was not centered on that level of detail, it was
difficult for us to know how to use their input, as much of it as there
potentially was. Add to that that their working relationship had been with
Marc, so Frank and I didn't know them, so didn't have an existing ability
to know who to reach out to for stuff. And as I've said innumerable times,
I was trying to keep lots of balls in the air and tried to be careful to
not add more to my plate than I could handle. Working with free-lancers is
pretty labor intensive. I'm sure these guys do not remember "working" with
me fondly, as there was not a whole lot of it, and it was probably not
like it was working with Marc. I'm sad about that, I wish I could have
figured out a way to use them better, but I also can't go back and change
anything. As a final frustration for them, Harold Hale wanted to do a TNE
Solomani thing, and I told him to go ahead, knowing that we may not be
able to use it as he intended. In the event, Frank took on that project
and decided to go in a different direction, so "Children of Earth" was
published by Sword of the Knight.)
Jim, you were in HIWG, maybe you can check my impressions, correct them,
tell me on their behalf that I'm lucky you didn't kill me when you met me
in 2012. And I may be mistaken above, and a lot more of their stuff was
pulled in officially than I realize, but I got the sense that it was not
as much as they would have liked. Roger was in HIWG as well, and maybe
some other people on this list, so if I have paraded my ignorance, fix me
up.
So why did I bring up HIWG at all? I didn't want to leave them out of the
discussion (someone would probably say, "did you ask HIWG?"), and they
also provide an idea of the effort that is put into a storyline the size
of Traveller's. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
And that is where we stood at the end of 1991, into 1992. And back to
Jim's point, players have a right to hear how it turned out. They agreed
to play in this, invested themselves, so...what now?
Fast-forward to Celesticon 2011. Frank Chadwick was doing a Celesticon
"War College" talk, maybe about Striker, but he did three that year. He
was asked about TNE, if he would do anything differently if he had it to
do over. He said that instead of 1200/Virus/collapse he would have set it
in the Long Night. (I got the MP3s off the Celesticon website, they may
still be there, or KRIS MILLER who is on this list can provide links.)
This piqued my interest, so when I saw Frank at CCon in 2012 I discussed
it with him. My points were two: 1) I honestly don't know if that would
have occurred to anyone in 1992 as a real option. Prequels were not the
obvious idea then that they are now (although T4 did it in 1996), they
really took off after Star Wars Ep 1 came out in 1999. 2) Even if it had
been, I would have argued against it, not only because it seems
counter-intuitive to say "you're making a difference" in a past that is
already written and you know how it ends, but it would feel like a
cop-out.* For us humans, time only runs forward, and to take a game and
defy that, and say, "we set this thing in motion, but we don't like it
anymore, so forget it, we're going someplace else" is not "grasping the
nettle." In my opinion GDW had no choice but to grasp the nettle,** and
move the timeline forward in a way that tried to make sense, take
responsibility for the things we had already said instead of just dropping
them for someone else to clean up later, and do justice to the players who
trusted us to take seriously what we had already said. By 1992 the
Rebellion was not pretty. RSB in 1988 had already established "the Black
Wars," "the Rape of the Hi-Pop worlds," and Hard Times had all kinds of
rules for killing off the people on marginal worlds as the life support
gave out. The Hard Times of the Rebellion were going to be one tough sow's
ear to turn into a silk purse. But if we started it we should see it
through. Why? It's just a dumb game, just ink on paper, throw it out. But
we said we were going to tell a story, so we have to finish it. Time only
runs forward for people and I think we owed it to the players and to
simple narrative honesty to try. If it was a mistake for the fictional
people of the 3I or the real people of GDW to set off on the Rebellion,
they and we still have to see it through and try to find something better
on the other side. It might be stupid of me to get all principled about
fiction, but it makes sense to me. And maybe history proved, "boy was Dave
a dumb-a$$, shoulda dropped it like a hot potato." Fortunately, I didn't
have to make that argument to Frank in 1992 (which would have made it all
my fault). A prequel never occurred to us (not seriously at least, I don't
remember it coming up), we both figured we had to proceed forward, like
Arthur's knights, "through the thickest part of the hedge."
When I made those remarks to Frank at CCon 2012, Frank thought about it
for a moment and smiled in that slow way he does when you give him a
chance to think of something he hadn't thought of before. It doesn't
happen often, but the times when I've done it, it's pretty cool. Frank
said, "All the best stories are about redemption." This was 2012, 20 years
after we made those decisions, 17 years after GDW went down,*** but it
was still about redemption.
*Am I saying T4 copped out? No, I think that was a different issue. In
1996 the Traveller rights had reverted to Marc from GDW, and my
understanding is that he was not sure for a while if he wanted to embrace
(i.e., make official) the TNE storyline, which he didn't participate in,
or not. (I could be wrong, but that's what I heard at the time.) I believe
that was a reasonable position for him to take, so going the prequel route
was a different issue for T4. By going to the Long Night he did not
require himself to make a decision right away the way he would have if
he'd said, "we're restarting at 1120 and overwriting TNE" for example,
which allowed him to later approve 1248.
**You will note that I speak of GDW as if "I am GDW." Damn right, I was
GDW. I wasn't a founder or owner, but it was my company. In my opinion GDW
was the finest game company out there, and the only one I ever wanted to
work for. No other game company had the equivalent credentials in board
wargames, RPGs, and miniatures. SPI, AH made boardgames but no decent
RPGs. TSR was all about RPGs but couldn't make a boardgame. Only GDW
spanned the whole spectrum, with iconic, leading products. I was proud to
work for GDW, my honor was bound up in maintaining the reputation GDW had
earned. That may sound cheesy, but it's simply the truth. I busted my a$$
to make Phase Line Smash the best I could because GDW had established
itself as the leading Gulf War experts, and I was going to keep that up. I
busted my a$$ to make Harpoon and Command Decision and Dark Con and T2K
and Dangerous Journeys the best I could because they were GDW products.
And I busted my a$$ to make TNE the best I could because it was one of
GDW's crown jewels. It was there for 14 years before I got there, and it
deserved the best I could give it. So when I say above, "GDW has to grasp
the nettle," that wasn't me making that someone else's problem, that was
me making it my problem, because that's why I was there.
***Officially 1996, but when I had to leave in Sep/Oct '95 Frank came by
my house and told me they were closing down because without me they no
longer had enough manpower to keep producing.
So yes, Jim, I agree with you 1000%.
This line of thought has reached the point where I will insert it back in
to the response to Bardbear where we last left it, at "nuance," between
Star Viking and Longship.
Thanks for bearing with me. If I didn't have people that appear to want to
hear this stuff I would probably never write it down, and I think it's
worth writing down. Thanks for listening.
Dave
I wrote this this morning, but then my internet connection dropped and
webmail dumped this whole thing so I'm writing it again. A lot of this is
not really a response to you, I do get to that down near the bottom, but I
took your e-mail as an invitation to discuss "why a storyline" in general,
so I unpacked a bunch of stuff that might be of interest to other list
members even though you're familiar with a lot of it.
> Traveller is the original Moving Timeline RPG, so a strong argument
would
> have to be made for moving to a new period and not at least telling the
tale of the age. Just because the nightly news isn't all that
interesting
> to the inhabitants does make it useless to us, the outsiders looking in.
"Why a storyline at all?" is a significant discussion, and one which gets
a lot of attention nowadays. The short answer is, "In 1992 that's just
what was done." But you know me and short answers.
There are a group of gamers, self-described "grognards" (French for
"grumblers," a Napoleonic term synonymous with "Old Guard" that Jim
Dunnigan of SPI popularized back in the '70s for old-school wargamers) who
basically believe that all RPGs are ruined once they get an official
campaign setting, because the energy, production budget, release schedule,
etc., gets eaten up with background which sucks attention away from rules,
and also undermines the rules by getting them stuck to a particular
scenario. They have a point. I have mentioned here that TNE often got
stretched between the two poles of open SF rules and the campaign setting,
for example the space combat missiles. Another example is UWPs where Frank
started using them to mean TNE Wilds/TED specific things instead of their
universal meanings, and I realized it too late to smooth it over or
provide a clear warning/translation to the readers. (I also found out over
the weekend that related to this, Leroy Guatney dislikes me for suggesting
that we do something similar with "X" starport ratings in his Hiver world
generation, I'm pretty sure that was related to the Wilds thing above, and
perhaps even my suggestion to Terry McInnes that he merge 2300 into WTH.)
Frank used to say "vox populi, vox dei," but how many voxes does it take
to make a dei? This relates to recent stuff about the goals we had for
TNE, and the input we got convincing us of those goals came from these
sources. From 1991-95 they were:
1. Letters and phone calls from players. These would be first opened or
answered by the business office, who would tabulate them, and then pass
them on to us as time permitted. (We tried to spend an hour or so a week
answering letters.)
2. Input from players at Cons, which really means only a three-month
period each year.
3. Guidance/input/Demands from distributors and the retailers they claimed
to represent (often the distributors would screw us, and by extension the
gamers, but that's a different discussion) and the information they
gathered from the retailers. We would talk to them all the time as they
made their regular orders.
4. Association with other game companies and professionals. Frank was the
president of GAMA through most of this period, so he got a lot of gouge
this way.
5. Word-of-mouth and direct input at local gamestores and from playtests.
Les did a lot of this, and used to beat me up for not making more time to
get out on a regular basis and playing.
6. The electronic BBSs, like Xboat, TML, a few others. This was before the
Internet proper, and these were done via dial-in list servers like GEnie.
However, the phone lines at the GDW offices were old and would not support
modem connections, so we could do none of this at the office, it all had
to be at someone's home "after work." HIWG is KINDA similar to these, but
I'll get to them in detail farther down.
7. Gut feeling from a design staff who had been doing this since 1973, so
had a sense of what worked.
The primary voices were probably 1, 3, 4, and to a lesser extent 6, and
were assessed/balanced against each other by 7. 2 was highly significant
in that you could float ideas and get a yea/nay check, but that only
happened once a year, so was not as usable all the time. 6 requires some
more detail. The guys on these lists were the extreme of the
"self-selecting" dynamic and were very intense fans, ravenous even. You
could always go to these guys and ask, "should we do this," but as you
guys know from modern boards, you'd get a thousand answers and maybe start
a flame war. So 6 was hard to use, and there was a tendency to try it, get
burned, then back away. The big thing at the time was "Traveller Done
Right" (TDR), but there were as many different versions of that as
posters, just about. It could have been a full-time job for someone just
to keep up with them.
What? No statistical, evidence-based market research? Back then the only
game companies who could afford professional market research were people
like TSR, and WotC after 1994. The market wasn't big enough to make it
worthwhile. This was the Mom & Pop wargame cottage industry days. Also, it
was accepted that SPI had pretty much put itself out of business by too
much focus on the statistical feedback of the S&T feedback cards, because
these had the scientific flaw of being self-identifying individuals,
therefore were non-representative of the whole. And that was the problem
with almost all of our methods above, it was mostly self-identifying, and
the people who decided they had the most to say outweighed those who
didn't sound off.
So that was the flawed basis of our understanding of the world, but as
someone who was there, I think it was accepted by everyone that the way
you made a living was by cranking out supplements:
1. Because the distributors demanded them. They wanted to pump out new
releases on a regular basis to keep your line in the public eye (and keep
their cash flow up). BTW, this was the Comic Book distribution trade, who
delivered stuff weekly to the stores, so they wanted stuff from us weekly
if possible.
2. Our players said they wanted them. They wanted to see new releases, new
sourcebooks, new equipment books, new adventures, etc. And if there was an
existing story-line (as there was with Trav), they wanted to know, "what
is happening next?" Does Margaret win the Rebellion? Who won the 5th
Frontier War? What happens with the Empress Wave? Basically stuff that
once you said that is happening, they had every right to want the answer
to.
Obviously if you are going to be pumping out supplements it is MUCH easier
for them to be about campaign background, rather than writing new rules
for things, because you run out of new things to write rules about a lot
quicker than you run out of stories, and rules are harder to write and
take longer. You could make the case that if a game company wanted to stay
in business, it had to put out campaign background stuff, that's the only
way to keep the production up.
Also, this was the period of time when TV story-arcs were really getting
big, and everybody loved that. Episodic stuff that bore no relation to the
other episodes was not satisfying. Gamers also wanted that in the RPGs,
and game designers thought that was pretty cool too.
So really, no one argued against it, everyone thought it was a good idea.
And if there were Grognards back then, there weren't many. I think the
anti-RPG background grognard movement came about after this period, and
probably largely in response to it. I suspect that the "proto-grognards"
were the people that would complain, "you just see us as a bunch of cash
cows, that will buy all your new stuff. You suck. When's the next Twilight
module come out? It's late, you suck." I'm hyperbolizing, of course, but
there was that contradictory nature to it.
So, was having a storyline at all even a good idea? That wasn't even a
live question back then. Everyone did, and Traveller already did.
Meanwhile, back at Jim's point. Once you start a storyline, you set up an
expectation that you will follow through on it, that is part of the
contract that you explicitly make with your players: "if you buy into this
game, we will tell you an interesting story that you can play in." By 1991
the players were telling us that GDW had broken that contract with MT. MT
was released in 1987 with the three-book boxed set. Rebellion SB was 1988,
and it was a GREAT
supplement. But it was the last one that advanced the WHOLE storyline
until Hard Times at the end of 1991. So by the time I got there, GDW had
put out 8 MT products in five years, but the last one that advanced the
plotline was three years prior. (Ref's Companion 1988, COACC 1989 was
aircraft design, Fighting Ships 1990 was a ship catalog, Knightfall 1990
was set in the Rebellion, but was an adventure and not a full supplement
that told us how the war was going elsewhere, and moreover was set in the
no-man's land of Massilia sector so did not really cover a faction. DGP
also put out four books in the period 1988-1991, or one per year, but only
one of these, Flaming Eye, was a Rebellion faction sourcebook, covering
Vland; the two races books covered a couple races which coincided with
factions.) So, in five years of MT, GDW had only put out 1.6 books a year,
none of them covering a faction or the storyline since 1988. GDW and DGP
together put out 2.4 books a year, but since 1988 only about 1/3 of the
~9-11 factions (which were counted sometimes varied) had been covered in
any detail. (Jim, check my math, I may be missing something.) The players
said, "this is not enough, you gave us this great new rebellion, told us
to pick sides, and now you've left us hanging. Most of us have had no
information on our factions for three years. (There was stuff in Challenge
and DGP's magazine, but that's not the same.)
In the meantime, around the time MT came out, Marc established HIWG. I was
not a HIWG member so will not pretend to know how that all worked, I can
only say what my impression was. There were a bunch of really dedicated,
serious Traveller guys who wanted to be involved in the game, most of whom
were also regular Challenge contributors, and Marc knew that MT/Rebellion
was going to require a lot of detailed work, so he set these guys up as
the "History of the Imperium Working Group," and they divided up Charted
Space (not "Known Space," a common error, "KS" is Larry Niven, "CS" is
Traveller) into areas which were assigned to HIWG members who would work
up their details and histories, work together to sort out higher-level
plots, and principles, etc. However, the HIWG work was not official
("canon") until it was published as an official Traveller product.
(Challenge articles were similar, they were not necessarily considered
official.) Why is that? To try to run a coherent game/story, you need
centralized direction which also needs to be pretty detailed. A whole
bunch of energetic HIWG guys can produce way more material than one
central guy (some called him the "guru," I preferred the more pedestrian
"line manager") can read, comprehend, and hold in his head while still
meeting his own production deadlines. I imagine that Marc set up HIWG not
only because he knew he would want the detailed assistance, but also
because he couldn't necessarily read, understand, approve, and use all
their stuff at once, and he didn't want to just rudely fend them off. Marc
valued the fans, and the enthusiastic ones that much more. Instead, he
recognized their talents and efforts by making them this semi-official
Traveller contributor group, which of course made them even more energetic
in developing stuff. I suspect that being part of a semi-official group
whose work had not yet been accepted as official was not that much more
fun than the way it was before HIWG, and maybe less fun, given the higher
expectations. Probably that was no one's fault, but the result of a decent
impulse on Marc's part to let these guys get involved, but Marc couldn't
necessarily use their stuff "as is" without reading and agreeing with it
detail by detail, and that takes a lot of time, and the members probably
got frustrated that their stuff wasn't getting used the way they had
hoped. There is a huge amount of information that goes into creating a
sector with all its worlds, races, histories, relations with the one next
door, meta-histories that you've worked out with the neighboring sector
"analysts," etc., and there may be assumptions or ideas that the center
guy won't want to pull into the official material, because it's probably
tied in with a bunch of other stuff so he can't be sure what all of the
downstream impacts will be. So creating HIWG may have been a case of, "can
God create a rock so big he can't lift it?"
(Note that I said HIWG was KINDA similar to the BBS/mailing lists. Similar
from the standpoint that these guys were MONSTROUSLY self-selecting,
dedicated, detail hounds, so were the antithesis of the "no history
homework for the new players" principle we were trying to open up the game
with. NOT similar in the sense of Flame Wars. These guys were gentlemen,
and were as helpful as they could be. They even paid their own way to come
out to GDW for a Traveller writer's conference to prepare to start writing
TNE adventures and Challenge material. But as I said, the sort of thing
that they specialized in, highly detailed settings and histories, was hard
and time-consuming to assimilate, and given the fact that we had a lot of
work to do on TNE that was not centered on that level of detail, it was
difficult for us to know how to use their input, as much of it as there
potentially was. Add to that that their working relationship had been with
Marc, so Frank and I didn't know them, so didn't have an existing ability
to know who to reach out to for stuff. And as I've said innumerable times,
I was trying to keep lots of balls in the air and tried to be careful to
not add more to my plate than I could handle. Working with free-lancers is
pretty labor intensive. I'm sure these guys do not remember "working" with
me fondly, as there was not a whole lot of it, and it was probably not
like it was working with Marc. I'm sad about that, I wish I could have
figured out a way to use them better, but I also can't go back and change
anything. As a final frustration for them, Harold Hale wanted to do a TNE
Solomani thing, and I told him to go ahead, knowing that we may not be
able to use it as he intended. In the event, Frank took on that project
and decided to go in a different direction, so "Children of Earth" was
published by Sword of the Knight.)
Jim, you were in HIWG, maybe you can check my impressions, correct them,
tell me on their behalf that I'm lucky you didn't kill me when you met me
in 2012. And I may be mistaken above, and a lot more of their stuff was
pulled in officially than I realize, but I got the sense that it was not
as much as they would have liked. Roger was in HIWG as well, and maybe
some other people on this list, so if I have paraded my ignorance, fix me
up.
So why did I bring up HIWG at all? I didn't want to leave them out of the
discussion (someone would probably say, "did you ask HIWG?"), and they
also provide an idea of the effort that is put into a storyline the size
of Traveller's. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
And that is where we stood at the end of 1991, into 1992. And back to
Jim's point, players have a right to hear how it turned out. They agreed
to play in this, invested themselves, so...what now?
Fast-forward to Celesticon 2011. Frank Chadwick was doing a Celesticon
"War College" talk, maybe about Striker, but he did three that year. He
was asked about TNE, if he would do anything differently if he had it to
do over. He said that instead of 1200/Virus/collapse he would have set it
in the Long Night. (I got the MP3s off the Celesticon website, they may
still be there, or KRIS MILLER who is on this list can provide links.)
This piqued my interest, so when I saw Frank at CCon in 2012 I discussed
it with him. My points were two: 1) I honestly don't know if that would
have occurred to anyone in 1992 as a real option. Prequels were not the
obvious idea then that they are now (although T4 did it in 1996), they
really took off after Star Wars Ep 1 came out in 1999. 2) Even if it had
been, I would have argued against it, not only because it seems
counter-intuitive to say "you're making a difference" in a past that is
already written and you know how it ends, but it would feel like a
cop-out.* For us humans, time only runs forward, and to take a game and
defy that, and say, "we set this thing in motion, but we don't like it
anymore, so forget it, we're going someplace else" is not "grasping the
nettle." In my opinion GDW had no choice but to grasp the nettle,** and
move the timeline forward in a way that tried to make sense, take
responsibility for the things we had already said instead of just dropping
them for someone else to clean up later, and do justice to the players who
trusted us to take seriously what we had already said. By 1992 the
Rebellion was not pretty. RSB in 1988 had already established "the Black
Wars," "the Rape of the Hi-Pop worlds," and Hard Times had all kinds of
rules for killing off the people on marginal worlds as the life support
gave out. The Hard Times of the Rebellion were going to be one tough sow's
ear to turn into a silk purse. But if we started it we should see it
through. Why? It's just a dumb game, just ink on paper, throw it out. But
we said we were going to tell a story, so we have to finish it. Time only
runs forward for people and I think we owed it to the players and to
simple narrative honesty to try. If it was a mistake for the fictional
people of the 3I or the real people of GDW to set off on the Rebellion,
they and we still have to see it through and try to find something better
on the other side. It might be stupid of me to get all principled about
fiction, but it makes sense to me. And maybe history proved, "boy was Dave
a dumb-a$$, shoulda dropped it like a hot potato." Fortunately, I didn't
have to make that argument to Frank in 1992 (which would have made it all
my fault). A prequel never occurred to us (not seriously at least, I don't
remember it coming up), we both figured we had to proceed forward, like
Arthur's knights, "through the thickest part of the hedge."
When I made those remarks to Frank at CCon 2012, Frank thought about it
for a moment and smiled in that slow way he does when you give him a
chance to think of something he hadn't thought of before. It doesn't
happen often, but the times when I've done it, it's pretty cool. Frank
said, "All the best stories are about redemption." This was 2012, 20 years
after we made those decisions, 17 years after GDW went down,*** but it
was still about redemption.
*Am I saying T4 copped out? No, I think that was a different issue. In
1996 the Traveller rights had reverted to Marc from GDW, and my
understanding is that he was not sure for a while if he wanted to embrace
(i.e., make official) the TNE storyline, which he didn't participate in,
or not. (I could be wrong, but that's what I heard at the time.) I believe
that was a reasonable position for him to take, so going the prequel route
was a different issue for T4. By going to the Long Night he did not
require himself to make a decision right away the way he would have if
he'd said, "we're restarting at 1120 and overwriting TNE" for example,
which allowed him to later approve 1248.
**You will note that I speak of GDW as if "I am GDW." Damn right, I was
GDW. I wasn't a founder or owner, but it was my company. In my opinion GDW
was the finest game company out there, and the only one I ever wanted to
work for. No other game company had the equivalent credentials in board
wargames, RPGs, and miniatures. SPI, AH made boardgames but no decent
RPGs. TSR was all about RPGs but couldn't make a boardgame. Only GDW
spanned the whole spectrum, with iconic, leading products. I was proud to
work for GDW, my honor was bound up in maintaining the reputation GDW had
earned. That may sound cheesy, but it's simply the truth. I busted my a$$
to make Phase Line Smash the best I could because GDW had established
itself as the leading Gulf War experts, and I was going to keep that up. I
busted my a$$ to make Harpoon and Command Decision and Dark Con and T2K
and Dangerous Journeys the best I could because they were GDW products.
And I busted my a$$ to make TNE the best I could because it was one of
GDW's crown jewels. It was there for 14 years before I got there, and it
deserved the best I could give it. So when I say above, "GDW has to grasp
the nettle," that wasn't me making that someone else's problem, that was
me making it my problem, because that's why I was there.
***Officially 1996, but when I had to leave in Sep/Oct '95 Frank came by
my house and told me they were closing down because without me they no
longer had enough manpower to keep producing.
So yes, Jim, I agree with you 1000%.
This line of thought has reached the point where I will insert it back in
to the response to Bardbear where we last left it, at "nuance," between
Star Viking and Longship.
Thanks for bearing with me. If I didn't have people that appear to want to
hear this stuff I would probably never write it down, and I think it's
worth writing down. Thanks for listening.
Dave