Re: The best thing about Traveller

> From: Hans Rancke-Madsen [email removed]
> 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.

  If it was, then TSR wouldn't sell any Forgotten Realms gameworlds and
accessories. It is well known that I think that the background is the best
part of Traveller, and I'll reinforce that statement and say that Traveller has
the *best* background measured in consistency and amount of background
available for *any* SFRPG that I know of.

  The trouble has been that there has never been any proper compilation of it.
No one source were you could go to find out if the stats for Norris had been
defined, or if the UPP for Deneb had been produced. So confusion and internal
consistency went down over time (IMHO, it started with MegaTraveller).

  For a good example of this, look up the UPP for Deneb in the Imperial
Encyclopedia. I think it is under 'Travellers Digest' or 'Digest'. Compare
with the UPP given in the sector data from GEnie or in Digest the realworld
paper...

> 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...

  The tactics adopted by the Traveller General Command seems to be "Make
internal inconsistency the normal state" which looks to me as making morals
out of necessity (That was a poorly translated Swedish proverb:)

- -bertil-
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