Thanks again, Mike.
The "rubber suit" speech just made a lot of sense to me at the time. I
think as part of the process of updating all of the legacy Traveller
content into TNE I was poring over a lot of old GDW product and seeing
things that made me think, "that isn't true." And if GDW wrote it, can't
GDW take it back? (Note to self: apparently NOT!) But seriously, what more
can you aspire to than being a HUMAN BEING using your HUMAN faculties to
do
things in a different way? Besides, it's just only true. We ARE "only"
people, we aren't aliens, else the word "alien" really doesn't mean
anything except like Canadians are aliens in the US, which doesn't mean
much at all. Maybe I could have chosen softer words, but whatever. And
trust me, I've been punished for it. "Let me up, I've had enough."
Another one people didn't like was the thing about "so long as they have
white officers." Well, that was a real quote from the real British Army
about Scottish regiments, and the people who knew anything about that era
understood it as the unconcious self-parody it was.
Did you know I had such a thin skin? Man, I was in the wrong line of work.
Thank you for the remarks about RSB, KotF. (You know what's one of the
things I enjoy? The people that hate TNE, who call themselves keepers of
the flame, they're using the line I wrote over my 1992 Christmas
"vacation.") RSB is one of the things I was very proud of, but it was HARD
to write, because there was SO much information to cram into it, and I
mean
CRAM. But I really knew that anything that got cut out might not see the
light of day the way things were going, and we could not expand the page
count because of cost, so I kept driving the point size down. And any
errors in the maps was mine, because by then, we no longer had an art
department to do that. I'd just move over to the next room to the art
department's Mac and plunk away. Thanks for noticing the little subtle
things being saved for later. You probably realize this, but one of the
places I put most of my cool, secret idears to save for later was in those
appendices/glossary things, because they didn't really fit into the
narrative, but we needed to get the readers thinking about the reality of
these things. And I got to design brand-new starships to fit new RAFM
miniatures they sent me.
And, you've probably read me say this before, RSB showed one of the
symptoms of the decline of GDW and the hobby during the CCG dementia.
Although it was one of the densest, crunchiest, sourcebooks we'd put out,
and thereby showed our commitment to Traveller, lots of people never saw
it. We were getting letters and phone calls months later saying, "how come
you never put this out? Why aren't you supporting Traveller?" We did, but
the hobby industry was just not paying attention to traditional games,
because the volume of CCG that they could pump through much more
efficiently was just dwarfing our traditional stuff, and we got drowned
out. Frank was president of GAMA at the time, and he was getting stories
constantly about distributors who were spending their time moving pallets
of MTG cards from truck to truck, and stores moving cases of MTG carts
outside their front doors from truck to car trunk, and not even bothering
to worry about 12 copies of a new sourcebook, because why bother? Granted,
this was anecdotal and doesn't "prove" a trend statistically, but it did
show that something was happening that had not happened before. The hobby
was changing, and change happens.
God, I do go on, don't I? Apparently I'm dying or something, and some
voice inside me is saying, "get this all off your chest while you still
can."
Hopefully some of this is interesting.
So, when you said the "rubber suit" rant helped you crystallize some
thoughts about that, what do you mean? Is it the kind of stuff you were
trying to figure out for yourself, or stuff you were trying to explain to
your players? I know that different RPG groups have different styles in
what they are trying to accomplish, and one of them is the aesthetic of
role-playing and staying in character, which I think is very interesting.
In my groups we were kind of a bit more "Method," like when a guy would get
mad or excited and blurt something out we all felt, "Yes! THAT'S what your
character would really say!" After one long harangue among the crew, the
captain quietly observed, "The ebb and flow of command."
On Sat, 9 Jun 2012 22:40:50 -0500, "Mike West" <>
wrote:
>> But first, you, Mr. West, may be my favorite person of the month for
> > loving H&I. As you know, that is the most reviled of my reviled TNE
> > efforts, but I still maintain there's something to it.
>
> If it makes you feel any better, one of my favorite parts of H height:
> 0;">
>