I am humbly pleased by that, no idea why though, but still cool 8-)
As I sit here lovingly holding my TNE mark 1 mod 1 rulebook 8-)
On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 2:10 AM, <> wrote:
> **
>
>
> Thanks. Yeah, I always thought the pocket empires would be really cool.
>
> Me, personally, as a GM, I had never run a campaign in the Imperium. But
> the idea of a pocket empire could have allowed someone like me to lift up
> my bundle of worlds, drop them into the TNE universe as a pocket empire,
> and be part of the big thing.
>
> By the way, did you know your last name was the secret code name for the
> Gygax Dangerous Dimensions--oops, I mean--Journeys project? "The Carpenter
> Project." Loren has observed on his website, I think rightly, that the
> Carpenter Project pulled a lot of energy away from GDW's own in-house
> projects that could have made them more successful. Now, had DJ succeeded,
> that point would be moot, its cash inflow could have buoyed up the rest.
> But since it got swallowed up in litigation, it made all of that investment
> of time and energy a net loss to us.
>
>
> On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 01:50:29 -0400, Allen Carpenter
> <> wrote:
> > 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."