You're correct, it is by the example being set, and we at GDW may have
been guilty of that as well, but I'll get to that as my second point. And
at this point I observe that this will likely end up being a REALLY long
meditation on the self-inflicted wounds embedded in the philosophy of
Traveller.
My first point is that I was writing that e-mail in the airport and wanted
to finish it and hit "send" as they started calling my flight to board, and
the glare on my screen was so bad that I could scarcely read what I had
typed to proofread it, so I hastily hit "send," and there are a couple of
things I said that I don't like.
When I wrote, "nothing but negative feedback," that sounds really
negative, so I'd like to expand on that. I am pretty confident that I never
heard anyone say, "hey I really like all these rules on the impact of
different environments on vehicle performance, human metabolism, laser
performance, aerodynamics, etc.," but I did get a lot of negative remarks
about the game being marred by too much attention to different environments
which people found dense and off-putting. And I get that, because it IS
hard. Traveller always tried to bite off an awful lot (11,000 systems, all
randomly generated, and you were supposed to be able to go to each one with
the same set of equipment and operate there), sometimes more than was
practical to handle in a way that didn't make a lot of work for designers
and a lot of work for GMs and players. Now, I will say that it is possible
that we never quite hit upon the way to handle this with rules that were
both detailed and elegant, but I'm always asked to design software
interfaces that "show everything," but "are easy to learn and understand,"
and "aren't cluttered." Just because you can say you want a thing, doesn't
mean that thing can be built on-time and on-budget.
So, having since original Traveller published hundreds/thousands of
UPP/UWPs, and having to present rules that show how this differences really
do impact people and machines, we had to make some attempt, and that
attempt ended up being very detailed, because Traveller was already very
detailed.
So, negative feedback about how a system already committed to high detail
would get even more highly-detailed when it attempted to take seriously the
high detail that was already there.
When I wrote, "the impression that I have of Traveller players is that
they pretend that they like the idea of different atmosphere types, but
they want to play them all the same way" that was an unfair generalization
with a negative implication as well. That would certainly not be true of
all Traveller players, but appeared to be true of those who didn't like the
rules about different environment types. And honestly, it IS hard to have
to re-jigger your mental model of the local relationships of all of the
laws of physics when you're a GM everytime your players land on a new
planet. We only live on the one and only 12 of us have been to the other,
and it is natural that we instinctively think in terms of what we know. It
makes it hard to tell a story.
So my second point, which I mentioned above, about your being right that
the GM must set the example, the publications must also set that example. I
am not aware that GDW ever published anything that treated a world as
Earth-like when the UWP clearly showed otherwise, but for all I know, we
did. Part of the example we tried to set that "these planets really are
different, because since 1977 Traveller has been saying so," was to write
the cross-environment rules discussed above. But the other part was that we
needed to write adventures and source materials that carried that through
as well. And I know from memory how many Traveller adventures had to begin
with a whole lot of rationalization about how, "This world has a trace
atmosphere, but human habitation is at the bottom of these really deep
basins with almost standard atmospheric pressures," so that there could be
some "normal" behavior without having to second-guess every activity, or
figure out how it had to be done locally. And this stuff was interesting,
though difficult and time-consuming. The problem is that Traveller was
about travelling between star systems, so the players could run off to some
new planet, and another and another faster than the GM could figure out how
they all worked.
And I will break this message here and continue on in part 2.
On Thu, 14 Jun 2012 09:58:05 -0700, John Potter <>
wrote:
> I have found this reluctance to gloss over setting points
> when inconvenient also. For example book keeping tasks in other RPGs
> like food/water supply, material components for spells, ect.
> The only solution as a game master I have found is that player's take
> their que from the Game Master. If I keep track of time so will the
> players. If I keep track of X thing it signals to the player's I think
> its important regardless if it ever becomes an issue.
> If a GM says "The planet has a tainted atmosphere, what equipment are
> you going to use to get around with?" prompts the player's to think and
> plan for this. But first it takes the effort of the GM to ask about it
on
> a regular (maybe not always) basis to clue the player's into this aspect
> of the setting.
> Its a little bit of psychological training of the player's but harmless
> over all and in most cases, in my opinion, make the quality of
> storytelling better.
>
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 9:32 AM, wrote:
>
>
> The reason the movement system, and the grid system, was the way it was
> was to preserve compatability with existing systems that they were
> supposed
> to be interchangeable with, namely the "House System," AKA Twilight
> 2000. I
> never really liked the 2-meter grid because of the violence that it did
> to
> Traveller ship deckplans. It was impossible, in my opinion, to move
> satisfactorily from 1.5 meter deckplans to 2 meter deckplans. However,
> in
> the pressure of all of the good reasons and bad reasons--and the big
> deal
> was that we told people that for all intents and purposes T2K and TNE
> combat would be interchangeable-