>And this leads me to one of the major changes to existing data that I made
>in TNE, the wholesale stellar change. <SNIP>
>1. Just out of curiosity, what did the folks on this list think of that? I
>don't think I had any choice.
Anything that enhances the reality of the setting without drastically increasing complexity
is fine by me, or, as my thoughts at the time were: "Cool!"
>Lastly, this dovetails full circle into "collapsing worlds" with Virus.
>This was something Frank was really adamant about, getting rid of all of
>the marginal worlds where you had to come up with all kinds of complicated
>rationalizations for how people were living there at all, much less by the
>billions. And I think his reason for this was really largely aesthetic,
>that it didn't make sense when you looked at it at the gross level. With
>jump drives, where we'd already established that starships run around with
>holds full of low-cost junk from world-to-world, we have Cheap Travel. So
>why do so many people stay on deadly worlds? Didn't make no sense. But it
>also had the effect of pruning out of TNE the need to run adventures on so
>many worlds where you had to spend so much time explaining how people could
>even live there to begin with.
I think a lot of worlds could be rationalised as perhaps hold-overs from older days, settlements
that once made sense, but now do not. Traveller though did have too many inhospitable inhabited
worlds in relation to the truly hadbitable worlds that had minimal habitation.
That said, I always allow inhabited inhospitable worlds which had too low a tech to be affected by Virus
to have a good chance of surviving in some manner the direct effects of the Collapse - whether they survive
into the New Era is another thing. Same holds for worlds which have a Hard Times tech that is less or not
susceptable to Virus.
Eamon