For those just joining us, "WTH" may or may not stand for "What the Huh?"
the lost TNE book.
> Fair point. The WTH mass combat system essentially has the players acting
> as commanders back at headquarters.
>
> But on page 63 of WTH you (or another author) put some rules for trying
> to integrate PCs into the mass combat system. These assumed a PC was
> acting as commander or military advisor for a particular mass combat unit
> in the field.
That sounds like the sort of thing I would do (either assigned or seeing a
gap, throw myself on, usually the latter) and leads to my recollection
"there were gaps between the poles." If I made the time to dig WTH out I
could tell you who wrote it, as it's obviously easy-ish to pick out my
writing from Frank's or Terry's.
> WTH also had the black powder design sequences that were an addition to
> FF&S.
Yes, I do remember those. I think Terry made a stab at it and then Frank
re-did it. There was also a "choo-choo train design system" that I dropped
because it mostly got at the visual appearance of a locomotive and didn't
adequately touch on their engineering-physics (tractive effort, wheels for
speed vs. pulling power, size of boiler vs. combustion unit), and for the
ROI was not worth the design time. Someone probably also tried a
"sword-pike-pointy stick" design system at one point.
One "design system" that I definitely try to avert my eyes from is the
"battle dress design system." It was one of those bad ideas where someone
from the Art Dept said, "hey, shouldn't there be a design system for
this?" "Yeah, we don't have to send this to the printer until 5:00, and
it's 2:00 now, so we've got time," so it was written half at the
conference table and half at someone's desk. When asked, "whaddaya think?"
there wasn't enough time to form specific logical objections, the best
one, "there39;s not enough time" having already been excluded.
There was a spaceship design system made for Hard Times that was extremely
detailed and fiddly and mostly seemed to be made to allow players to
design "every rocket propulsion system you've ever heard of," but it had
that two-fold TL problem where 1) it focused on all of these different
approaches that only fall into a fraction of one TL, and therefore from
the standpoint of the larger game don't haul much freight, and 2) the
top-down logic that says TL ultimately has to be focused on "what was
found to work," not things that were tried but failed. But HT is arguably
a MT product, so doesn't belong here. Spiritually it was a transition
product, but game system is obviously MT. There are a large number of "MT"
products that are spiritually TNE products: Arrival Vengeance,
Astrogator39;s Guide to Diaspora, Assignment: Vigilante, some other stuff I
can't think of. It makes it hard for me to remember "when did you start
work on TNE" because it literally goes back to my first day at GDW in one
form or another.
Last thought, there was always a typical error on the part of
"design-system designers" to mistake "when we on Earth got around to
thinking of a logical solution" for an actual TECHNICAL change (e.g.,
superfiring guns, ballast tanks in submarines, multiple locomotive units,
etc.), which caused me to reject a lot of design sequences over the years.
I would rather not have a thing than publish one that is wrong. In
fairness, it is easy to see how this confusion begins, as it's not always
easy to separate "this is now possible/embedded technically" from "there39;s
now enough related technical that it's easier for people to say, 'oh
yeah...'". That is especially the case where TL is saying two utterly
different things in the "pure" Traveller rules, where it is merely
descriptive and can be (theoretically) based on multiple parallel
technology systems (think tech for an aquatic species vs. tech for a
terrestrial species) all governed by the same laws of physics, vs. what it
is saying in the 3I campaign background where it tends to reflect the
dissemination of core Imperial technology. There's also the understandable
tendency of writers to fall back on real world or Star Trek examples:
"this was solved by Thomas Edison or Dr. Richard Daystrom with the XXX,"
but TL is not defined by a guy, that guy is just the expression of that TL
"fact" (a.k.a. "hooey assertion") in that timeline.
To conclude, some TL vs. discovered principles things ARE easy. The best
example of this is germ theory. The benefits of germ theory do NOT arise
at TL...(whatever late 1800s Earth is). You can tell TL 0 people, "don't
build your toilets next to your drinking fountains" and it works just
fine. If you're describing an isolated species with no transmission of
knowledge from more advanced people, yes, they probably have to invent
microscopes first to figure it out on their own. But you could just as
easily posit that they are psionic and can sense the presence of tiny life
forms all around them so don't need microscopes, or say that they just
evolved to be neat freaks so gain the practical benefits of germ theory
(at least in prevention of disease) without having to reach a certain TL.
It's SF, if you're not confounding someone's pre-suppositions somewhere,
you might as well stick with crossword puzzles.
the lost TNE book.
> Fair point. The WTH mass combat system essentially has the players acting
> as commanders back at headquarters.
>
> But on page 63 of WTH you (or another author) put some rules for trying
> to integrate PCs into the mass combat system. These assumed a PC was
> acting as commander or military advisor for a particular mass combat unit
> in the field.
That sounds like the sort of thing I would do (either assigned or seeing a
gap, throw myself on, usually the latter) and leads to my recollection
"there were gaps between the poles." If I made the time to dig WTH out I
could tell you who wrote it, as it's obviously easy-ish to pick out my
writing from Frank's or Terry's.
> WTH also had the black powder design sequences that were an addition to
> FF&S.
Yes, I do remember those. I think Terry made a stab at it and then Frank
re-did it. There was also a "choo-choo train design system" that I dropped
because it mostly got at the visual appearance of a locomotive and didn't
adequately touch on their engineering-physics (tractive effort, wheels for
speed vs. pulling power, size of boiler vs. combustion unit), and for the
ROI was not worth the design time. Someone probably also tried a
"sword-pike-pointy stick" design system at one point.
One "design system" that I definitely try to avert my eyes from is the
"battle dress design system." It was one of those bad ideas where someone
from the Art Dept said, "hey, shouldn't there be a design system for
this?" "Yeah, we don't have to send this to the printer until 5:00, and
it's 2:00 now, so we've got time," so it was written half at the
conference table and half at someone's desk. When asked, "whaddaya think?"
there wasn't enough time to form specific logical objections, the best
one, "there39;s not enough time" having already been excluded.
There was a spaceship design system made for Hard Times that was extremely
detailed and fiddly and mostly seemed to be made to allow players to
design "every rocket propulsion system you've ever heard of," but it had
that two-fold TL problem where 1) it focused on all of these different
approaches that only fall into a fraction of one TL, and therefore from
the standpoint of the larger game don't haul much freight, and 2) the
top-down logic that says TL ultimately has to be focused on "what was
found to work," not things that were tried but failed. But HT is arguably
a MT product, so doesn't belong here. Spiritually it was a transition
product, but game system is obviously MT. There are a large number of "MT"
products that are spiritually TNE products: Arrival Vengeance,
Astrogator39;s Guide to Diaspora, Assignment: Vigilante, some other stuff I
can't think of. It makes it hard for me to remember "when did you start
work on TNE" because it literally goes back to my first day at GDW in one
form or another.
Last thought, there was always a typical error on the part of
"design-system designers" to mistake "when we on Earth got around to
thinking of a logical solution" for an actual TECHNICAL change (e.g.,
superfiring guns, ballast tanks in submarines, multiple locomotive units,
etc.), which caused me to reject a lot of design sequences over the years.
I would rather not have a thing than publish one that is wrong. In
fairness, it is easy to see how this confusion begins, as it's not always
easy to separate "this is now possible/embedded technically" from "there39;s
now enough related technical that it's easier for people to say, 'oh
yeah...'". That is especially the case where TL is saying two utterly
different things in the "pure" Traveller rules, where it is merely
descriptive and can be (theoretically) based on multiple parallel
technology systems (think tech for an aquatic species vs. tech for a
terrestrial species) all governed by the same laws of physics, vs. what it
is saying in the 3I campaign background where it tends to reflect the
dissemination of core Imperial technology. There's also the understandable
tendency of writers to fall back on real world or Star Trek examples:
"this was solved by Thomas Edison or Dr. Richard Daystrom with the XXX,"
but TL is not defined by a guy, that guy is just the expression of that TL
"fact" (a.k.a. "hooey assertion") in that timeline.
To conclude, some TL vs. discovered principles things ARE easy. The best
example of this is germ theory. The benefits of germ theory do NOT arise
at TL...(whatever late 1800s Earth is). You can tell TL 0 people, "don't
build your toilets next to your drinking fountains" and it works just
fine. If you're describing an isolated species with no transmission of
knowledge from more advanced people, yes, they probably have to invent
microscopes first to figure it out on their own. But you could just as
easily posit that they are psionic and can sense the presence of tiny life
forms all around them so don't need microscopes, or say that they just
evolved to be neat freaks so gain the practical benefits of germ theory
(at least in prevention of disease) without having to reach a certain TL.
It's SF, if you're not confounding someone's pre-suppositions somewhere,
you might as well stick with crossword puzzles.