MHO
I think there were probably few, if any real options available to you
other than the one you made with the creation of RCES and the star vikings
with Virus as the overarching villain. Any other approach would have been
in the nature of another long night scenario, which would have been very
difficult to propagate with "The problems from A to Z" along all of the
Imperiums borders. The Imperium might have suicided, but the vargrs are
great scavengers and the Aslan are consumate land grabbers. The K'Kree
wanted to save the galaxy from the evils of Meat, and the Hivers would have
simply manipulated events around them for generations of AMUSEMENT! Not to
mention the ,by then, cultural imperative for the Solomani to punish the
Imperium for it's unforgivable occupation of Mother Terra generations ago,
and grab back all of the old sphere and the vegan autonomous district in
the process.
The Only way hard Times could end is with a long night scenario in
which humans were trying to escape domination by one of the bordering alien
Empires.
Virus was the external super threat that brought the galaxy to it's
knees and preserved a gaming universe in which even little fish in a vast
ocean can have an influence on events that happen far beyond the scope of
the players end of the universe.
My greatest dis-like of classic Traveller (and I still love it BTW)
was that even a group of players in which there was a Marquis and a Baron
and 2 Knights had little or no direct impact on events beyond the scale of
the local landmass, or at most a planetary scale.
One of the things that I believe some people cried about in COTI was
the inclusion of the concept of pocket empires, allowing for a wide
deviation from "Empire as we like it"
However, Pocket empires per se allowed for a GMs dream if they had a
creative bent, total freedom to deviate from empire and create an entire
NEW dynamic in Interstellar Diplomacy. EVEN, if the players were ambitious
enough, to found one of there own.
On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 1:03 AM, <> wrote:
> **
>
>
> Here's something I've often wondered over the years.
>
> The argument has been made that one of the flaws of TNE is that it ruined
> the Imperium. (A subset of that is that is was okay to ruin the Imperium,
> but Virus was the wrong choice. We'll save that for a different
> discussion.)
>
> What do you think, or what do you think other Traveller players in 1993
> think we should have done instead?
>
> And I'll start with why we went the way we did.
>
> For my money, we had no choice. When I sat down my first day at GDW, I was
> presented with the finished maps of the "Hard Times" maps of the Imperium
> spiralling down the toilet. Hard Times was already on the schedule, the
> cover had already been printed, and 5000 copies of it were sitting in the
> warehouse, and by the way, the book was due to the printers THE DAY AFTER
> my first day. Obviously it wasn't going to make it, but just as obviously,
> "Hard Times" was going to go out pretty close to the way it already was.
>
> To me, it was not intellectually, emotionally, or ethically honest to
> claim that somehow a Miracle Happens and it could be pulled back together.
> More logically, the act had been done when MT was launched, and the Hi-Pop
> worlds were being raped, and there would be no happy ending. So we had to
> let man's foolishness run its course and then start again with a bunch of
> plucky souls determined to build a better world. People accused that of
> being a "dark setting," but again, I always felt like I had inherited a
> "dark setting" and I had to figure out what to do with it. (And yes, as an
> aside, Frank had already floated ideas of a computer virus and Star
> Vikings, which is whence came DGP's theatrical announcement that they were
> leaving. But for the moment, let's assume those were not givens.)
>
> Short of the "shower scene" resolution, which we published in Challenge 59
> 1/2, and which SJG appropriated for GT, what is another way that we could
> have, or should have moved forward? Because to me, the editions of
> Traveller which keep moving into the past don't make a whole lot of sense.
> The historicity is all wrong. How can characters "change the world" in a
> history that is already written?
>
> But that's my analysis, which I applied 20 years ago. What other good
> options would you have liked to see, or do you think others would have
> preferred?
>
> Dave
>
>
--
"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for
it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their
kids pay for it."