> Date: Sun, 25 Nov 90 18:20:53 EDT
> From: jpb [email removed] (Joe Block)
> Subject: (1843) Trillion Credit Squadron
>
>
> I am getting ready to run a Trillion Credit Squadron campaign (I want to
> generate my campaign political history) and have a few questions.
>
> First, how are you doing tech level increases? How much should I charge to
> increase a planet's TL? This is never covered in the rules, (At my players
> and I haven't seen it) but is necessary.
We never generated any rules (because we never got the TCS game going),
however the tech levels were to be broken down into sub-categories as
mentioned in the World builders handbook. This also implies which
categories depend on others, eg: most depend on the power Tech Level.
We had decided to make the improvment of a category a multi-part
research project (reserch projects as described in the referee's companion).
The players would buy research groups (actually fund them), who would then
try to complete the stages to improve the tech levels of each category.
This is fine in isolation but there are two other complications to consider
1) Influence of higher tech worlds. (Research should be a lot easier if
you can just take a trip to your higher tech ally, and get copies of their
research papers, working examples, etc).
2) Population inertia. Just because the world develops a new tech level
doesn't mean that the population will use it and move the world to the
new tech level. Take a look at the Vilani culture as described in the
Vargr and Vilani supplement from DGP. We come from a culture that seems
to embrace technological advances, not all will, especially if technology
caused the culture some pain. (eg: many post-nuclear war stories have
people rejecting technology in case history repeats itself).
-Dan Corrin.