On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 11:08 PM David Johnson < xxxxxx@zarthani.net> wrote:

T om Barclay < xxxxxx@gmail.com > wrote:

My thought would be many of us might like to salvage the parts and maybe some core concepts for flavour, yet try to modernize the most clunky bits and update a few bits to feel less 1970s.

I can get behind that project but I don't believe things like UWPs--and other "paper and pencil" parts--are the clunky bits. ;)

They are just not what they can be. They are inadequate to come close to describing any balkanized world. You have to go well beyond the UWP to get any sort of idea.

I'll say that the physical values may not be bad (maybe a few more need added from Scouts/WorldTamers/WorldBuilders) but the attempts to get anything useful out of population (what sort? Oh, doesn't say...), government (much better expanded), and law level (ditto). With gov't type 7, you don't even come close to having any sort of meaningful idea... 2 polities, or 200?

The real point being that a better system can be generated and stored with great ease now. Even T5 is adding on extra stats (3?) to the UWP.

They rebooted Battlestar Galactica

I'll steer clear of the ~Galactica~ thread but you seem to have shifted here from game mechanics--like UWPs and other dice-generated information which might be expanded and better managed by automation today--to the "milieu," which is something different and much less technologically time-bound.

It was to the broader point of modernization, not so much changed story or mechanics, etc. There were modernizations that improved things (IMO).

Not sure I follow the jump here from "paper and pencil" vs. automated game mechanics to differences between and original and rebooted milieus. . . .

The point was the updated product can be better than the original or at least as good but with a different way of looking at things. That still applies to game system as much as milieu. It wasn't meant to be a comparison of mechanics vs. setting.

There's a reason most of us might play games about Colonial Africa or Age of Sail... but wouldn't want to live in them. Little concepts like human rights, indoor plumbing, medical science, and so on.

I don't know, I think it might be interesting to play the "colonized" in a somewhat differently envisioned "Colonial Africa" campaign. It would be like a ~Star Trek~ campaign where the PCs were the folks on the "new planet" and the aliens materializing in their midst--or landing in a shuttlecraft--were NPCs. . . .

It's really all about the construction of the campaign environment, right? I mean, one of the cool things about a sci-fi game like ~Traveller~ is the way it lets us "re-envision" historical circumstances in new ways (if that's our thing).

There are lots of scenarios. Most attempts to fit a future situation to a past situation (age of sail in space, Napoleonic wars in space, Vietnam in space, Romans in space) often have very weak and forced aspects. Not saying it could not be fun, but you have to put a lot of work into it to make it much other than a pastiche.

In a way, Traveller is like that - it has some fun bits but it also has some things that have grown long in the tooth and don't make as much sense as they once did.

I think I might agree--some details might help--but I don't think you're talking about game mechanics here. For example, the idea that the Ine Givar were the "good guys" is one of the ways I might like to revisit the Imperium milieu--but no changes or expansions of the UWP are needed for that.

I never thought of them as 'bad guys' in their own eyes or the eyes of those who support them. To those folks, the Imperium was the bad guys. It all comes down to viewpoint.

Or another way to see it: Both are 'bad guys' in degrees and at times in aid. From a moral/ethical perspective, the aims of polities or factions usually tend towards self-interest rather than morality or ethics.

Every time something different is envisioned, there's a lot of us that have a somewhat reactionary perspective - "What we have works for me". That's fair, but it is evoked in part at the notion that something new and different would wipe away what is already there. That's not necessarily the case. Contrary to some VIP that thinks all interactions have only one winner and one loser, it is possible to have an outcome that integrates well enough to give multiple parties what they wish.

In the case of an automated, more complete generation tool and a different approach to storing, handling, etc. the data, ultimately if it leads to the option if you wish to press a button, make some choices about the sort of system/subsector/sector/universe you want, then let the machine to its best... then it's one more approach. Nothing stops you using the old 2D6 and Book 3.

It's like art - once it is out there, it doesn't disappear. A new take does not delete the existing method. It augments or adds an alternative.

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