I'm curious what you mean about "flattened the history."
Do you mean "made it irrelevant to the average player?"
If so, that was a deliberate design decision. Part of the input we were
getting was, "Traveller is too hard for new players to get into, they feel
they have to learn too much history, and the names of all the emperors, you
need to fix that." While I didn't necessarily agree, it was a perception,
so we felt like we had to deal with the perception.
So the idea was the RC is for new start-fresh players who are intimidated
by having to learn the names of the emperors, and the Regency is for those
who want that history intact. We were trying to kind of "have the best of
both worlds."
But maybe I'm missing your point.
On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 00:43:19 -0500, "Mike West" <>
wrote:
>> What do you think, or what do you think other Traveller players in
> 1993
> > think we should have done instead?
>
> Really, I think you were screwed. I completely agree that MT
> irretrievably
> eliminated the Imperium. Hard Times basically meant it could never have
> a true successor state.
>
> I also believe that the Hard Times fans were missing one huge point:
> without the Virus (or something like it) there was no change for any
> Imperial recovery. Why? Because the neighbors would have picked the
> bones
> clean. Without something that leveled *everyone*, then the Aslan,
> Solomani,
> K'kree, and Vargr would have just moved in and cleaned up. There would
> never have been the chance for a Fourth Imperium because the tiny and
> weak successor states would have been crushed and eliminated by their
> powerful neighbors. The only successor state that had any chance to
> live
> was the Domain of Deneb because their big opponent (the Zhodani) had
> no interest in taking them over, and the Vargr had better targets.
>
> So, you had to flatten *everyone* and start over. Really, I don't
> believe
> you had a choice. (In fact, I thought that the Empress Wave was solely
> there to flatten the Zhodani, since the Virus couldn't get to them. So
> even the one major power that escaped Virus unscathed still got
> hammered.)
>
> My biggest complaint was that the way chosen to flattened everyone
> eliminated the history. Sure, you had to flatten everyone, but the
> way I saw it done meant that the whole history of what went before
> was completely swept away, meaning that everything was starting over
> completely fresh. (That was one of the things I really liked about
> how Martin recast everything for 1248. He made sure that the pre-
> collapse history was still in the background and still fully leveraged
> in the setting.) I freely admit that I could have misunderstood that
> point.
>
> Mike West
> [1]
>
>
>