Yeah, I'll put my oar in the water here, and in the process stake out an even more heretical position. I always thought the system/world generation rules were one of the biggest mistakes Traveller made.
If you've just staked out an Imperium of 11,000 worlds I can certainly understand the appeal of a procedural generation system. Problem is that if you care about scientific accuracy, you run into all the problems previously referenced, and your system needs to take them into account. Your spectrum type table needs to take into account Pop I and II stars, you have to let that modify stellar age, and stellar age and a bunch of other things determine whether you can even have habitable planets, let alone what their composition is in terms of metals, nitrogen, oxygen, and so forth. Note that we're not talking about a system that's going to generate 100% accurate planetary systems to a level that would satisfy a Ph.D astronomer, because I don't think that's what's being asked for (even by our resident Ph.D astronomer!) We're just talking about a system that will not generate physical absurdities like sunny garden planets circling eensy weensy small white stars. We haven't even gotten to the people yet, where we will need to prevent other absurdities like the overpopulated North Korea planet one jump away from Happy Fun Freedom Planet in an Imperium that supposedly allows free star travel.
I think the only possible response here is "Oy vey". Such a project might have appealed in my college days but I no longer have quite the same desire to hurt myself in the name of gaming as I once did.
On the other hand, if you're going to do a space opera setting, it makes a helluva lot more sense to do planets the way Path of Tears did. Subsector map indicating the stuff PCs care about at a glance, which is basically gas giants Y/N, water Y/N, people Y/N, starport Y/N and type. Most planets get a one or two sentence writeup sketching out what they're like and maybe giving a plot hook, a few cooler planets get one or two pages full of adventure hooks. None of the stat generation is necessary, because space opera don't care what the mass of your planet is, its hydrography, or anything else in the UPP. It cares about the story, so you toss everything out, get to that ASAP, and then exit stage left.
Traveller ended up doing neither of these. They created a random system in which the various factors didn't really inter-relate, which meant that a lot of the maps as written were just stupid. *But* that same system enabled GDW and its various licensees to run through entire sectors of space at high speed, leaving UPPs and not much else in their wake. The result is that most of the described space in the OTU has neither science behind it, nor any hooks on which to hang a story- just strings of hexadecimal waiting out there in the darkness to pounce on the unwary writer trying to make sense or a story out of the whole mess.
It bears repeating: oy vey. This is why I stay inside the AO, kids. It may be infested with Puppeteers, Soleans, and (worse) technarchs, but at least things in there make some *sense*.
-JTD
"I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark
When he made Pearl Harbor
I miss you more than that movie missed the point
And that's an awful lot, girl"
- Team America: World Police
If you've just staked out an Imperium of 11,000 worlds I can certainly understand the appeal of a procedural generation system. Problem is that if you care about scientific accuracy, you run into all the problems previously referenced, and your system needs to take them into account. Your spectrum type table needs to take into account Pop I and II stars, you have to let that modify stellar age, and stellar age and a bunch of other things determine whether you can even have habitable planets, let alone what their composition is in terms of metals, nitrogen, oxygen, and so forth. Note that we're not talking about a system that's going to generate 100% accurate planetary systems to a level that would satisfy a Ph.D astronomer, because I don't think that's what's being asked for (even by our resident Ph.D astronomer!) We're just talking about a system that will not generate physical absurdities like sunny garden planets circling eensy weensy small white stars. We haven't even gotten to the people yet, where we will need to prevent other absurdities like the overpopulated North Korea planet one jump away from Happy Fun Freedom Planet in an Imperium that supposedly allows free star travel.
I think the only possible response here is "Oy vey". Such a project might have appealed in my college days but I no longer have quite the same desire to hurt myself in the name of gaming as I once did.
On the other hand, if you're going to do a space opera setting, it makes a helluva lot more sense to do planets the way Path of Tears did. Subsector map indicating the stuff PCs care about at a glance, which is basically gas giants Y/N, water Y/N, people Y/N, starport Y/N and type. Most planets get a one or two sentence writeup sketching out what they're like and maybe giving a plot hook, a few cooler planets get one or two pages full of adventure hooks. None of the stat generation is necessary, because space opera don't care what the mass of your planet is, its hydrography, or anything else in the UPP. It cares about the story, so you toss everything out, get to that ASAP, and then exit stage left.
Traveller ended up doing neither of these. They created a random system in which the various factors didn't really inter-relate, which meant that a lot of the maps as written were just stupid. *But* that same system enabled GDW and its various licensees to run through entire sectors of space at high speed, leaving UPPs and not much else in their wake. The result is that most of the described space in the OTU has neither science behind it, nor any hooks on which to hang a story- just strings of hexadecimal waiting out there in the darkness to pounce on the unwary writer trying to make sense or a story out of the whole mess.
It bears repeating: oy vey. This is why I stay inside the AO, kids. It may be infested with Puppeteers, Soleans, and (worse) technarchs, but at least things in there make some *sense*.
-JTD
"I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark
When he made Pearl Harbor
I miss you more than that movie missed the point
And that's an awful lot, girl"
- Team America: World Police