Yes, you are of course correct. And in getting distracted by the shiny
object of how so many people wanted to collect "All of the UWPs for All Of
Charted Space(TM), And We Must Have Them All Now!" (the chant of the mobs
outside my window) I didn't touch on the REAL, and (semi) USEFUL purpose
of the UWPs all along. Which you all know, so why am I wasting your time
saying this? Idunno, stimulus response, I guess. Struck a nerve.
Since I'm not plowing any new ground here, I'll try to hit the key point
and back out.
UPPs certainly do serve to "prod the imagination" to guide (force) the Ref
to make different worlds different in the way they "realistically" "would
be." (Annoying finger quotes because we don't really know any of this, but
it's SF so we make the best effort we can.) And in this they were helpful,
but became a problem because they were not helpful enough. In Kantian
style I will say that "there were those who experienced this," and those
who did not, so I am really only speaking to those who did. And I think
there were always Traveller fans who were mostly or exclusively Refs,
mostly or exclusively players, and mostly or exclusively
readers/collectors. And those groups were always going to need/want
different things, and it was very hard (impossible?) to know who was who,
and what the demographic breakout was.
As someone who was almost exclusively a Ref, I also knew what many others
did, that the UPPs were "not helpful enough," because of an almost
universal Traveller effect that we have also discussed, the great mobility
of players. They were always seeing the planet whose UPP you HAD carefully
and painstakingly, and with great effort fleshed out, and saying, "screw
that, we're flying someplace else," to a UPP you had NOT yet worked out.
(Frank and I and Glenn Goffin and Jim Kundert were discussing this at this
last Celesticon, and I think it was Jim who pointed out, "Starships, hell,
it's worse than that. With air rafts the players just fly over everything,
what's the good of animal encounter tables?") So you had to hastily work
out what that UPP meant, and over time you felt this frustration that the
UPPs weren't really making the worlds different, they were just making
them "more of the same," in the form of a collection of tortuously weird
stereotypes that you had to fall back on: the domed Hi-Pop world, the
"Agricultural" world with no sunlight, the water world with (and it was
easier to mix this one up) floating cities or islands with dense cities,
or sub-surface domed cities, or the world you ripped off from one of the
double adventures and simply re-used every time they landed on a world
with a similar UPP. And this was creatively frustrating, because in some
essential way way the wide variation and random nature of the UPPs was
inherently "indigestible" in the fast-paced way that Traveller
allowed/required them to be used. Where you WANTED to be Poul Anderson,
you felt more often like a plagiarizing hack. And how many times did we
ask ourselves the question, "what the hell does Feudal Technocracy mean
this time?"
This issue was semi-obscured by the way UPPs were ALSO designed to be
used, in the mathematical Free Trader campaign using the trade tables,
where the group would skip from one world the next, spending five minutes
to consult the trade table, calculate their profits, use their JOT or
Admin or Trading skill (depending on which generation of the game you were
using) and move on.
And that really ends my observation on "the trouble with UPPs", but I will
give you two "choose your own adventure" endings to this, because I'm
tapping a vein of memory and am on a roll.
Ending 1, "Quick and Get Outta Here":
This led to various attempts to "fix" this over the years, like the 2300
system with stylized Garden worlds, Hot House Worlds, etc. However, the
lure of the UPPs kept sucking us back to them. First, because they were
published Canon (this usage began life as a pejorative term, by the way),
but also, and more insidiously, there is just something so damned
attractive about the numerological beauty of all that compacted data in
the subsector and sector data (like in Star Trek's "By Any Other Name"
where the Kelvans push the button on their belts and turn the crew into
gypsum/drywall/ceiling tile cuboctahedrons [I just looked that up on
Wikipedia; I wanted to say "icosahedron" but knew they weren't]--I still
watch one scene very carefully, because I am convinced that Rojan mixes up
the yeoman and security guard before he kills one), so we kept sticking
with it.
The End
Ending 2, "More Dave Chunky Hooey Yammer Dance Re-Mix":
This led to various attempts to "fix" this over the years, like the 2300
system with stylized Garden worlds, Hot House Worlds, etc. When I said to
Terry McInnes, "Yes, go ahead and write World Tamer's Handbook," (Terry
was like a one-man mob outside my window, and I mean that in a charming
and affectionate way) I also instructed him, "try to cross-breed the
world-generating system with the 2300 system," not realizing what a stupid
meaningless instruction that was. Terry, being the true gentleman that he
is, suffered in silence and never once called or wrote me to say, "You
idiot!...." When I got the MS, I looked at the system Terry had come up
with and thought, "What a mess, I'll have to re-do this." And then sat
down and pulled out my books and realized that all of the 8 or 10 2300
world types were basically two UPPs, the medium size full-atmo, and the
airless rock, and screamed at myself, "You idiot!" (I can only hope that
Terry felt my scream rippling Vulcan-USS-Intrepid-style through the
space-time continuum and felt some small measure of satisfaction.)
Then Frank took over some of the development of World Tamer's (I was
scheduled for something else that was already running late, I came back to
finish WTH later and added stuff like acclimatization, not as much as I
wanted to, but better than nothing) and decided that Terry's
colony-building system was too loosey-goosey (i.e., player-scaled, not
wired up to world-scale economics) and created the more complex economic
development system. Which I liked, but it also reminded me of another
issue we always ran up against in Traveller.
You know how I'm always whining about how we always felt stretched
(crucified) between two poles? And there were several sets of these:
Campaign background vs. open-ended "any universe" rules, How it "would
really work" vs. Player-expected SF (or established Traveller) tropes,
Player-scale actions vs. Bigger storyline, Detailing individual worlds vs.
skipping across whole sectors, whatever I called the two cross-cutting
poles in my long post about space missiles, and so on. Well here's another
one: Mathematical, systematic, economic-scale models vs. Player-scale "I'm
gonna build me a village" scale.
The economic-scale stuff Frank did was always good, but had the danger to
me of feeling too deterministic. It is absolutely correct and logical and
utterly unassailable, but can complicate some of the story-telling nature
of the background and not give players adequate "hooks" to get or feel
involved. As examples, you see early examples of this in the "battalions
per world" tables in LBB Book 4 (Mercenary) which is endlessly useful to
refs trying to work out local military forces in a campaign (and for which
I used it many times), continued on into Fifth Frontier War, the similar
"ships per world" calculator (in what, Path of Tears?) and continuing on
to the WTH colony-building economics model.
AS AN ASIDE on economic models vs. storytelling backgrounds... Every
incompetent writer who writes a "how to write compelling characters"
column always gets to the gaggy cliche, "when you find your characters
getting up off the page and talking to you, and acting in ways you didn't
expect..." (I have one particular incompetent writer in mind, but s/he's
dead now.) Every once in a while Traveller would do that to us (insert
your speculation on whether we were incompetent writers here). In this
specific example, you take the "ships per world" calculator, and one day
Frank came in and announced, "Oh crap, Solee." So the choice we had was:
hand-wave it away ("a particular virulent form of Virus hit here..."--and
there's nothing wrong with that, who here really believes that the whole
3I went kaflooey after one lousy assassination--they never thought of
that?), or say, "okay, let's follow our own rules and ride this out, it
will be interesting." You know how we went.
Meanwhile, back at determinism, I loved Frank's economic model, and tried
to marry it (i.e., cross-wire it down to player level) with some of
Terry's player-level stuff. My recollection is that I was unhappy with the
seamlessness of the marriage, but such is publishing to deadline so you
can keep the lights on. I would say, "the rest is history," but it
sometimes feels like, "the rest is an unmarked grave off to the side of an
old battlefield where they're getting ready to build a shopping mall."
Did anyone ever try playing a WTH campaign? My guess is that those who
bought it mostly used bits and pieces of it as generalized resources, and
I think there were some good multi-purpose resources in there. And YES, a
lot of that was as good as it was because it was recycled DGP WBH stuff,
which I documented in the credits but am repeating again here.
The (other) End (Have I said all this before? I'm getting this sick
feeling...But I also feel like I don't have time to research my old posts
beforehand.)
> ---In , <dcndcn13@...> wrote :
> )
> Yes, PoT is remarkably dense, and represented the standard we intended
> to
> follow for future "here39;s the area of space we're telling stories in
> now"
> products. Just to try to make you feel as badly as I still do.
>
> UPPs tend towards suckingness!* But they are part of what I call the
"Traveller collector obsession" where there is this illusion that you
> can
> distill all of the knowledge of the universe into these strings of
> digits
> and somehow when you have that you own something. DGP was the worst in
this regard, or I should say, they took it to its farthest extreme
(remember their universal cultural profile? which included "religious
fetishes"?). I would say "logical conclusion," but given how useless
> those
> strings were, it was an irrational conclusion.
>
> *Actual UPPs (the original short string from the LBBs) aren't so bad.
> It's
> when they got expanded to the UWPs which REQUIRED the addition of the
> star
> for no discernible ROI that they got really corrosive, because they
embedded bad logic, bad tables, and buggy code into "Eternal, Timeless
Encyclopedia Galactica" information which, although no one used it, had
become "Canon". Like OCRing the 1 AD Galileean Phone Book and adding it
> as
> an appendix to the Bible.
> ==============================
> Yes, PoT is probably one of the best 'area' sourcebooks ever written in
any system.
>
> As for UPP and UWP they actually are a good idea as a guide. You really
need a compact way to rough out large amounts of systems or to reduce a
system to more quantifiable values to do broad brush stuff. The problem
is the tendency to obsess over them and get carried away.
>
> Matt
>
>
>
object of how so many people wanted to collect "All of the UWPs for All Of
Charted Space(TM), And We Must Have Them All Now!" (the chant of the mobs
outside my window) I didn't touch on the REAL, and (semi) USEFUL purpose
of the UWPs all along. Which you all know, so why am I wasting your time
saying this? Idunno, stimulus response, I guess. Struck a nerve.
Since I'm not plowing any new ground here, I'll try to hit the key point
and back out.
UPPs certainly do serve to "prod the imagination" to guide (force) the Ref
to make different worlds different in the way they "realistically" "would
be." (Annoying finger quotes because we don't really know any of this, but
it's SF so we make the best effort we can.) And in this they were helpful,
but became a problem because they were not helpful enough. In Kantian
style I will say that "there were those who experienced this," and those
who did not, so I am really only speaking to those who did. And I think
there were always Traveller fans who were mostly or exclusively Refs,
mostly or exclusively players, and mostly or exclusively
readers/collectors. And those groups were always going to need/want
different things, and it was very hard (impossible?) to know who was who,
and what the demographic breakout was.
As someone who was almost exclusively a Ref, I also knew what many others
did, that the UPPs were "not helpful enough," because of an almost
universal Traveller effect that we have also discussed, the great mobility
of players. They were always seeing the planet whose UPP you HAD carefully
and painstakingly, and with great effort fleshed out, and saying, "screw
that, we're flying someplace else," to a UPP you had NOT yet worked out.
(Frank and I and Glenn Goffin and Jim Kundert were discussing this at this
last Celesticon, and I think it was Jim who pointed out, "Starships, hell,
it's worse than that. With air rafts the players just fly over everything,
what's the good of animal encounter tables?") So you had to hastily work
out what that UPP meant, and over time you felt this frustration that the
UPPs weren't really making the worlds different, they were just making
them "more of the same," in the form of a collection of tortuously weird
stereotypes that you had to fall back on: the domed Hi-Pop world, the
"Agricultural" world with no sunlight, the water world with (and it was
easier to mix this one up) floating cities or islands with dense cities,
or sub-surface domed cities, or the world you ripped off from one of the
double adventures and simply re-used every time they landed on a world
with a similar UPP. And this was creatively frustrating, because in some
essential way way the wide variation and random nature of the UPPs was
inherently "indigestible" in the fast-paced way that Traveller
allowed/required them to be used. Where you WANTED to be Poul Anderson,
you felt more often like a plagiarizing hack. And how many times did we
ask ourselves the question, "what the hell does Feudal Technocracy mean
this time?"
This issue was semi-obscured by the way UPPs were ALSO designed to be
used, in the mathematical Free Trader campaign using the trade tables,
where the group would skip from one world the next, spending five minutes
to consult the trade table, calculate their profits, use their JOT or
Admin or Trading skill (depending on which generation of the game you were
using) and move on.
And that really ends my observation on "the trouble with UPPs", but I will
give you two "choose your own adventure" endings to this, because I'm
tapping a vein of memory and am on a roll.
Ending 1, "Quick and Get Outta Here":
This led to various attempts to "fix" this over the years, like the 2300
system with stylized Garden worlds, Hot House Worlds, etc. However, the
lure of the UPPs kept sucking us back to them. First, because they were
published Canon (this usage began life as a pejorative term, by the way),
but also, and more insidiously, there is just something so damned
attractive about the numerological beauty of all that compacted data in
the subsector and sector data (like in Star Trek's "By Any Other Name"
where the Kelvans push the button on their belts and turn the crew into
gypsum/drywall/ceiling tile cuboctahedrons [I just looked that up on
Wikipedia; I wanted to say "icosahedron" but knew they weren't]--I still
watch one scene very carefully, because I am convinced that Rojan mixes up
the yeoman and security guard before he kills one), so we kept sticking
with it.
The End
Ending 2, "More Dave Chunky Hooey Yammer Dance Re-Mix":
This led to various attempts to "fix" this over the years, like the 2300
system with stylized Garden worlds, Hot House Worlds, etc. When I said to
Terry McInnes, "Yes, go ahead and write World Tamer's Handbook," (Terry
was like a one-man mob outside my window, and I mean that in a charming
and affectionate way) I also instructed him, "try to cross-breed the
world-generating system with the 2300 system," not realizing what a stupid
meaningless instruction that was. Terry, being the true gentleman that he
is, suffered in silence and never once called or wrote me to say, "You
idiot!...." When I got the MS, I looked at the system Terry had come up
with and thought, "What a mess, I'll have to re-do this." And then sat
down and pulled out my books and realized that all of the 8 or 10 2300
world types were basically two UPPs, the medium size full-atmo, and the
airless rock, and screamed at myself, "You idiot!" (I can only hope that
Terry felt my scream rippling Vulcan-USS-Intrepid-style through the
space-time continuum and felt some small measure of satisfaction.)
Then Frank took over some of the development of World Tamer's (I was
scheduled for something else that was already running late, I came back to
finish WTH later and added stuff like acclimatization, not as much as I
wanted to, but better than nothing) and decided that Terry's
colony-building system was too loosey-goosey (i.e., player-scaled, not
wired up to world-scale economics) and created the more complex economic
development system. Which I liked, but it also reminded me of another
issue we always ran up against in Traveller.
You know how I'm always whining about how we always felt stretched
(crucified) between two poles? And there were several sets of these:
Campaign background vs. open-ended "any universe" rules, How it "would
really work" vs. Player-expected SF (or established Traveller) tropes,
Player-scale actions vs. Bigger storyline, Detailing individual worlds vs.
skipping across whole sectors, whatever I called the two cross-cutting
poles in my long post about space missiles, and so on. Well here's another
one: Mathematical, systematic, economic-scale models vs. Player-scale "I'm
gonna build me a village" scale.
The economic-scale stuff Frank did was always good, but had the danger to
me of feeling too deterministic. It is absolutely correct and logical and
utterly unassailable, but can complicate some of the story-telling nature
of the background and not give players adequate "hooks" to get or feel
involved. As examples, you see early examples of this in the "battalions
per world" tables in LBB Book 4 (Mercenary) which is endlessly useful to
refs trying to work out local military forces in a campaign (and for which
I used it many times), continued on into Fifth Frontier War, the similar
"ships per world" calculator (in what, Path of Tears?) and continuing on
to the WTH colony-building economics model.
AS AN ASIDE on economic models vs. storytelling backgrounds... Every
incompetent writer who writes a "how to write compelling characters"
column always gets to the gaggy cliche, "when you find your characters
getting up off the page and talking to you, and acting in ways you didn't
expect..." (I have one particular incompetent writer in mind, but s/he's
dead now.) Every once in a while Traveller would do that to us (insert
your speculation on whether we were incompetent writers here). In this
specific example, you take the "ships per world" calculator, and one day
Frank came in and announced, "Oh crap, Solee." So the choice we had was:
hand-wave it away ("a particular virulent form of Virus hit here..."--and
there's nothing wrong with that, who here really believes that the whole
3I went kaflooey after one lousy assassination--they never thought of
that?), or say, "okay, let's follow our own rules and ride this out, it
will be interesting." You know how we went.
Meanwhile, back at determinism, I loved Frank's economic model, and tried
to marry it (i.e., cross-wire it down to player level) with some of
Terry's player-level stuff. My recollection is that I was unhappy with the
seamlessness of the marriage, but such is publishing to deadline so you
can keep the lights on. I would say, "the rest is history," but it
sometimes feels like, "the rest is an unmarked grave off to the side of an
old battlefield where they're getting ready to build a shopping mall."
Did anyone ever try playing a WTH campaign? My guess is that those who
bought it mostly used bits and pieces of it as generalized resources, and
I think there were some good multi-purpose resources in there. And YES, a
lot of that was as good as it was because it was recycled DGP WBH stuff,
which I documented in the credits but am repeating again here.
The (other) End (Have I said all this before? I'm getting this sick
feeling...But I also feel like I don't have time to research my old posts
beforehand.)
> ---In , <dcndcn13@...> wrote :
> )
> Yes, PoT is remarkably dense, and represented the standard we intended
> to
> follow for future "here39;s the area of space we're telling stories in
> now"
> products. Just to try to make you feel as badly as I still do.
>
> UPPs tend towards suckingness!* But they are part of what I call the
"Traveller collector obsession" where there is this illusion that you
> can
> distill all of the knowledge of the universe into these strings of
> digits
> and somehow when you have that you own something. DGP was the worst in
this regard, or I should say, they took it to its farthest extreme
(remember their universal cultural profile? which included "religious
fetishes"?). I would say "logical conclusion," but given how useless
> those
> strings were, it was an irrational conclusion.
>
> *Actual UPPs (the original short string from the LBBs) aren't so bad.
> It's
> when they got expanded to the UWPs which REQUIRED the addition of the
> star
> for no discernible ROI that they got really corrosive, because they
embedded bad logic, bad tables, and buggy code into "Eternal, Timeless
Encyclopedia Galactica" information which, although no one used it, had
become "Canon". Like OCRing the 1 AD Galileean Phone Book and adding it
> as
> an appendix to the Bible.
> ==============================
> Yes, PoT is probably one of the best 'area' sourcebooks ever written in
any system.
>
> As for UPP and UWP they actually are a good idea as a guide. You really
need a compact way to rough out large amounts of systems or to reduce a
system to more quantifiable values to do broad brush stuff. The problem
is the tendency to obsess over them and get carried away.
>
> Matt
>
>
>