Derek--
My response to the note below is, "thanks," and "amen brother." It is
always nice when "my experience, which I think is shared by others" is
confirmed by others. In other words, "I may be crazy, but this case is not
the proof that will put me away."
Your observation on PoT is correct in what we were trying to do: open up
the former 3I from at least two directions (RC and Regency, MAYBE add a
pocket empire or so as time permitted) so we could articulate, "here's
where we're looking right now," and do them with a better level of detail.
Re: Your comment on G-raft and G-belt, I will make a differing observation
on design choice. In a SF game, you had to have those to represent the
expected flavor. If anything, including the animal encounter tables was
the mistake, as no one would ever meet them. But on the other other other
hand, the animal encounters were necessary to provide that other-worldly
flavor that SF demands. Traveller always bit off more than ANYONE could
chew, but that is an essential part of a) its charm, and b) the
dissatisfactions it has always prompted. Other SF games always had a way
to say, "yeah, but that's not what we're doing." Traveller never met a
"we're not doing that" that it didn't try to turn into, "yeah, we're doing
that too." And I think that Quixotic, tilting at windmills quality is in
Traveller's DNA and the DNA of those who prefer it to the more proscribed
vision of a Star Wars RPG. Dreaming the Impossible Dream and all that.
> I've always thought, and thus agree with you, that he collection and
> creation of UPP / UWP codes simply for the sake of creating data or
> completionism was a perfect example of "just because you can doesn't mean
> you should" taken to the Nth degree.
>
> The typical player is unlikely to ever have more than a passing moment of
> influence on even 1% of the stars in the 3rd Imperium. Why do you need
> to have ALL of them? I suppose there's a small amount of comfort in
> being able to hold up a peice of paper and say I know what's out there and
> you do to but to be honest that's never really appealed to me. The small
> "B reaking News" stories in Survival Margin gave me far more useful
> information on what was going on in the Imperium than 10,000 UWP codes
> ever did.Â
>
> I can also understand the GM's frustration in fully realizing a hand full
> of worlds to the left only to have the players decide to exit stage right
> and thus render a weeks worth of blood sweat and tears into a pointless
> pile of paper. I've probably done this to more than one GM on more than
> one occasion over the years. All the games I ever did typically started
> with me picking a subsector and then detailing every subsector that
> touches that one. So basically you end up with 9 sub sectors and a few
> pages of info on the worlds contained there in. PoT was smart in that it
> focused the players attention in 2 cardinal directions and then focused on
> those areas.
>
> I feel the frustration that the G-Raft and G-Belt introduced into the
> game, shame MMO designers didn't figure this out before they let the genie
> out of the bottle.
>
> I had another point but... I'm falling asleep at my desk here so I have
> no clue in which direction I was headed...  Blast...
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
> From:
> To: "Traveller TNE" <>
> Sent: Friday, March 7, 2014 1:06:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Re: interesting question on telekinesis.
>
> Â
>
>
>
> 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
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
My response to the note below is, "thanks," and "amen brother." It is
always nice when "my experience, which I think is shared by others" is
confirmed by others. In other words, "I may be crazy, but this case is not
the proof that will put me away."
Your observation on PoT is correct in what we were trying to do: open up
the former 3I from at least two directions (RC and Regency, MAYBE add a
pocket empire or so as time permitted) so we could articulate, "here's
where we're looking right now," and do them with a better level of detail.
Re: Your comment on G-raft and G-belt, I will make a differing observation
on design choice. In a SF game, you had to have those to represent the
expected flavor. If anything, including the animal encounter tables was
the mistake, as no one would ever meet them. But on the other other other
hand, the animal encounters were necessary to provide that other-worldly
flavor that SF demands. Traveller always bit off more than ANYONE could
chew, but that is an essential part of a) its charm, and b) the
dissatisfactions it has always prompted. Other SF games always had a way
to say, "yeah, but that's not what we're doing." Traveller never met a
"we're not doing that" that it didn't try to turn into, "yeah, we're doing
that too." And I think that Quixotic, tilting at windmills quality is in
Traveller's DNA and the DNA of those who prefer it to the more proscribed
vision of a Star Wars RPG. Dreaming the Impossible Dream and all that.
> I've always thought, and thus agree with you, that he collection and
> creation of UPP / UWP codes simply for the sake of creating data or
> completionism was a perfect example of "just because you can doesn't mean
> you should" taken to the Nth degree.
>
> The typical player is unlikely to ever have more than a passing moment of
> influence on even 1% of the stars in the 3rd Imperium. Why do you need
> to have ALL of them? I suppose there's a small amount of comfort in
> being able to hold up a peice of paper and say I know what's out there and
> you do to but to be honest that's never really appealed to me. The small
> "B reaking News" stories in Survival Margin gave me far more useful
> information on what was going on in the Imperium than 10,000 UWP codes
> ever did.Â
>
> I can also understand the GM's frustration in fully realizing a hand full
> of worlds to the left only to have the players decide to exit stage right
> and thus render a weeks worth of blood sweat and tears into a pointless
> pile of paper. I've probably done this to more than one GM on more than
> one occasion over the years. All the games I ever did typically started
> with me picking a subsector and then detailing every subsector that
> touches that one. So basically you end up with 9 sub sectors and a few
> pages of info on the worlds contained there in. PoT was smart in that it
> focused the players attention in 2 cardinal directions and then focused on
> those areas.
>
> I feel the frustration that the G-Raft and G-Belt introduced into the
> game, shame MMO designers didn't figure this out before they let the genie
> out of the bottle.
>
> I had another point but... I'm falling asleep at my desk here so I have
> no clue in which direction I was headed...  Blast...
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
> From:
> To: "Traveller TNE" <>
> Sent: Friday, March 7, 2014 1:06:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [Traveller_TNE] Re: interesting question on telekinesis.
>
> Â
>
>
>
> 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
>>
>>
>>
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