I'm glad you said that and not me, although I rather implied it.
Yes, I didn't even get into the social part of the UPP. IIRC, the system
changed subtly in the various editions of the original LBBs, where at first
the pop number was completely independent of Diameter, Atmo, Hyd, and in
later editions there were some pluses if you had a good ecosystem. And if I
do recall correctly, I naturally have to wonder which version of the
generation rules were used by the DGP script.
I remember spending a lot of time thinking, "Why, why, why, WHY did anyone
think it was a good idea to generate ALL of that? And why did they have to
let anyone know they did?" But like I said, the Traveller way of life is
that was what people did, and a player who wants to run a campaign in the
Whozit Subsector wants to use data that didn't get overwritten by some
published book later.
But then why publish the world generation rules if all we're going to do
is publish all the real stats anyway? No one will ever randomly generate an
Imperial world, because they're looking for the real numbers. So the only
people who use the world generation rules are the people who don't use the
setting, so why do we publish the setting and the generation rules in the
same books at all? Well, because we always had, and if we stopped doing so,
people would be upset that we had taken stuff out, and the new version of
the game didn't have everything in it.
In some ways, we were hostages to a game system that was bigger than us.
By the way, I admire your analysis at the end there, especially that fine
turn of phrase on the Berlin Wall. Nicely done.
Dave
On Thu, 14 Jun 2012 22:42:36 -0400, Jeff Dougherty
<> wrote:
> Not that anyone asked me, but: I always thought this emphasis on
> randomly generating large amounts of data was a major weakness of the
> original Traveller universe. I can understand fans wanting to see all
> 11,000 world and I'm really not trying to take a dig at anybody, but you
> ended up with too much stuff that just didn't make sense. Besides the
> physical improbabilities of garden worlds around dim stars and the
> question of why a billion people were living under domes on a vacuum
> snowball when there was an empty Eden planet J2 away, it lead to some
> wacky and weird governmental stuff too. Supposedly Imperial citizens
have
> freedom of travel between the various worlds, so why is there a heavily
> populated soul-crushing dictatorship J1 away from Happy Fun Freedom
> Planet? In real life, there's a reason the East Germans built the Berlin
> Wall, and it wasn't just to stun the world with their taste in
> architecture.
> -JTD
>
> "It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over an area you have
> just bombed." - U.S. Air Force on public relations
>
>
>