The best thing about Traveller

Chuck McKnight writes:

>               ... if the Task system in Traveller was so horrid, how
> could it have last 15 years?

The background. The detailed painstakingly-worked-on-for-15-years
background that GDW now feels is too intimidating for new players.
I dunno. Maybe it is. But I do know that a science-fiction game
set in a universe with many worlds is inevitably going to be pain-
fully short of data. The player characters should be able go get
lots and lots of information about any planet they visit. But in
Real Life (tm) the referee usually just don't have the time to
work out lots and lots of detail. So what can he do? He can fall
back on a computer-generated list of numbers ("Well, it's got a
class A starport, it's roughly earthsized with a dense atmosphere
and it's about 1/3 covered with water. What? A map? No, sorry.").
Or he can use what other people produce. The Traveller universe
were just approaching a reasonable level of information (at least
in a few select sectors). And now they're going to 1) not fill out
what's missing, and 2) invalidate half of what's already there...

|-( Pfui! :-P


      Hans Rancke
University of Copenhagen
     [email removed]
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