mainworld generation

Re: World-Building with history

Bruce Pihlamae [email removed] writes:
>Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that we've only got one set of generation
>rules that are trying to generate everything based on either too many
>random variables or restricting ourselves to too few variations.

<stuff deleted>

>It's sort of like a character generator for worlds
>    - roll the stats            (generate the world),
>    - determine initial hobbies (generate local society),
>    - determine professions     (generate external influences), and
>    - generate skills           (iterate to determine changes).

This is a really bizarre/amazing/wonderful idea. At first glance,
I was a bit taken aback by the amount of work it would require, but
I can envision how such a system could come together, providing
not only the UWP but a history to go with it (analogous to the
character history provided in advanced character generation).
This is really one of the fundamental differences (character
generation-wise) between Traveller and many of the other popular
RPGs. In others games, characters are created. In Traveller,
they evolve, giving them an entire career history before the
game even begins. Transfering this concept to world generation
is a great idea.

Still, I really don't want to go to all the work that this would
require. I'd rather work within the structure of the
"official" basic mainworld generation system. However, if I
ever decide to create a new SF-RPG (heaven forbid), I'd definitely
come back to this idea of yours and put some serious thought
to it.


Re: Remembering the stars in mainworld generation

[email removed] (alistair) writes:
>I don't use extended system generation, so star type doesn't worry me.
>But maybe you could add generation of an appropriate stellar type to your
>system, purely as an extension for 'feel', to go with gas giants,
>asteroids, bases etc.

Hmm... the question, of course, is how far do you go with the "feely"
additions? Since the sunbane-format for sector listings provides an
area to note the star type, I think your suggestion can be easily
accommodated. Go beyond this, however, and we run into problems
concerning compatibility with the existing sector and subsector
viewing programs already out there (the ones I'm thinking of being
provided to us by Mark and Cynthia).

Also, as several TMLers have noted recently, star type does effect
the rest of planetary generation (yes, I'm flip-flopping on my
rebuttal to Arthur Green who suggested that the combinations of M-V
stars and hospitable (even agricultural) worlds was not realistic). So
if we do add this data in for 'feel', we should take care not to
make the same mistake as GDW. I.e., we should first generate star-type
according to known stellar frequency data and then generate the
mainworld, applying DMs to the UPP data as applicable (Arthur had
it right). This would probably make the "inhospitable" worlds even
more common than in the modified system I presented a few days ago.
That's fine with me if it's fine with you (though we can't know for
sure, it's probably closer to the true situation).


Re: More die modifiers for the modified system

[email removed] (Jeff Zeitlin) writes:
>  Why exclude law level from the tech modifier?  The more
>  oppressive a society is, the less likely it is that the geniuses
>  will appear and create the new technology.  Earth history bears
>  this view out; the cultures that made the largest advances in
>  technology were the ones with high levels of personal freedom.
>  Certainly, other, less free cultures may do a better job of
>  exploiting some forms of technology, but they'll probably get it
>  from a culture that is more free.  I'd hardly expect a totally
>  oppressive theocracy to be innovative...

This is a good point. If you send me your suggested modifications,
I'll try 'em out on the program. Another TLMer mentioned via email
that he uses three different tables for determining the government
type of a world. Which one he uses depends on the world's population.
I don't know if this is going too far or not, but the best way to
find out is to try out the idea and see what sort of UWPs it results in.


Re: Standards & Assumptions

Mark Watson [email removed] writes:
>interesting, btw, how the world generation affects and is affected by the
>game background.

I'm sorry to disect your article down to this one sentence, but it's
the one I found most interesting, and I really wanted to focus on it
for my conclusion tonight.

One of the things that always impresses me about Traveller is that
despite the wealth of background material GDW/DGP/FASA/Gamelords/etc
has provided for the "official setting", there is still a great
degree of variation between game masters in terms of the "feel" of
the game, i.e. the hardness of the science, the extent of minor
alien races, the local politics, etc. Just talking with people over
the TML brings out some of these differences. Then there are the
people (the few, the proud :-) who have chucked the "official"
setting in favor of staking out some entirely new territory,
with a new history, new poltical figures, and in short, new standards
and assumptions. I feel that because of these reasons, it's going to
be impossible to build one world generation system which will satisfy
everyone. However, if we stay fairly close to the official system which
we all know and which most of us accept and just try to fix its more
obvious problems, then I'll be able to consider this whole thing a
success.

Comments welcome,

           _   /|       Jim Vassilakos
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