Jim:
Jim> I'm sorry to disect your article down to this one sentence
Hey - no problem - I pay to see all this stuff quoted and requoted!
world building with history:
Werrrlll, to a certain extent this is what the DGP WBH does with
terraforming, only in reverse ... ie instead of playing out the changes, it
attempts to infer them, albeit in a limited area. This also relates to the
discussion about whether to do the star type or the mainworld generation
first. We are pretty well stuck, and for fairly good reasons, with the
sector data for the Imperial milieu. So "official", or wannabe official,
systems also need to start at that point (I realise we don't all wannabe
official, there will always be two systems, the better one and the one we
are stuck with ...). Point being, if you want to stay with the main thread
of what is likely to issue forth from GDW it may be worth looking more at
the world building by inference method.
trade values:
Yeah, none of these ever made any sense to me either. I think they were
created merely in order to provide a set of variations for the trade system,
which is broken anyhow. I hope this lot gets fixed.
Traveller and O/B and Ia/Ib stars:
Yes, that is irritating. I'm not sure whether the "not more than one or two
per sector" recommendation holds true or not (I also was a humanities
major). Is there any occurrence of such a star in the official sector data?
I just had a quick skim of the Deneb domain data in MTJ 3 and there's none
there. (I guess the non Marches data was just mass generated. Deneb sector
in particular was badly generated if so - the DM for the secondary star does
not seem to have been applied).
SpaceMaster and Dwarfs:
If you look at the bottom of para 1.3.1 in the SM GM Book, it says that a
negative score on the companion star roll results in a dwarf, and the
companion star is automatically a dwarf if the primary is a dwarf (which is
as you point out impossible under the SM rules). So I would guess that the
absence of dwarf stars in the rules is a typo rather than deliberate.
There's a repackaged version of SM out, maybe they fixed it now.
Wildstar's extra UWP stats:
My head says no, my heart says yes. I'd use them ... What would be
interesting to know is whether GDW is planning to provide a World Builder's
Handbook equivalent for TNE, or indeed any extended World generation
mechanism which then precludes enhancements to the basic one. For example,
just moving from the basic to extended system generation, you have no mod
for within/outside the habitable zone.
The other point goes back to star types - if we have star types as now which
suddenly turn attractive worlds into iceballs, then generating life stats on
the basis of atm/hy is not going to be so useful. (And also is this stat
useful for non-carbon based life forms ...).
[ also, using the score to throw against in the way you suggest would surely run against the way the other UWP stats are used - eg life sta
3 - ie low life score, whatever that may mean - I throw 2, showing sentient
life, but then we need another stat to indicate this ... surely its better
to match the score to rungs on the evolutionary ladder, similarly to the TL
... so multi-cell life forms on a 3, up to sentient life form on 12, say
...?]
Cheers
Mark