To me, a serious flaw is one that means the setting just makes no physical sense. I guess other people can ignore those more easily, but with my science background I can't.
(things like:
- the tiny cannonball worlds with breathable atmospheres
- the apparent non-existence of rogue planets (contradicted by the rules in book 6, which require there to be a LOT of rogue planets to allow the required 1 in 3 systems to be able to have at least one captured planets)
- the broken stargen tables that allow habitable worlds to be preferentially found around white dwarfs and subdwarf stars
the stars that inexplicably gain mass when they age (brought about by a lack of research on stellar evolution)
- the ridiculous amount of systems with close white dwarf companions
- habitable worlds around high mass giants and main sequence stars with lifespans too short to allow them to exist
etc... )
There's only so many times (once or twice maybe) that you can blame the Ancients for this sort of thing. Fact is, there's no 'in-setting39; reason for these - it's all down to the authors failing or not bothering to do their research (this was all known in the 1970s).
What gets me isn't so much that these problems are still in the worldgen system (even in T5, from what I've heard), it's that some people will acknowledge that these issues exist, and then happily make up reasons to explain them that make even less sense than the problems themselves.
As I said elsewhere, the scientists in the OTU must be so confused by their inconsistent, contradictory physical universe. How on earth could they explain it all?
--- In , "James" wrote:
> Depends on the definition of "serious flaw" I suppose.
>
> To me, a serious flaw would be something that was both difficult to ignore or remove from the setting AND prevented the setting from telling the sorts of stories/sessions/campaigns that the game is intended to tell.
(things like:
- the tiny cannonball worlds with breathable atmospheres
- the apparent non-existence of rogue planets (contradicted by the rules in book 6, which require there to be a LOT of rogue planets to allow the required 1 in 3 systems to be able to have at least one captured planets)
- the broken stargen tables that allow habitable worlds to be preferentially found around white dwarfs and subdwarf stars
the stars that inexplicably gain mass when they age (brought about by a lack of research on stellar evolution)
- the ridiculous amount of systems with close white dwarf companions
- habitable worlds around high mass giants and main sequence stars with lifespans too short to allow them to exist
etc... )
There's only so many times (once or twice maybe) that you can blame the Ancients for this sort of thing. Fact is, there's no 'in-setting39; reason for these - it's all down to the authors failing or not bothering to do their research (this was all known in the 1970s).
What gets me isn't so much that these problems are still in the worldgen system (even in T5, from what I've heard), it's that some people will acknowledge that these issues exist, and then happily make up reasons to explain them that make even less sense than the problems themselves.
As I said elsewhere, the scientists in the OTU must be so confused by their inconsistent, contradictory physical universe. How on earth could they explain it all?
--- In , "James" wrote:
> Depends on the definition of "serious flaw" I suppose.
>
> To me, a serious flaw would be something that was both difficult to ignore or remove from the setting AND prevented the setting from telling the sorts of stories/sessions/campaigns that the game is intended to tell.