On 11/18/2015 11:36 AM, Jeffrey Schwartz wrote:

> I dunno, a lot of that just doesn't completely add up.
> I saw someone write up a "review" of WWII as if it were a novel, and
> they pointed out the places the author had unbelievable stuff.  Ah,
> found it: http://squid314.livejournal.com/275614.html?page=1

All of those things /have/ been analyzed.  In considerable detail, over
and over through the decades (unsurprising, given that that's how
academic reputations and careers are made and toppled), dwarfing even
the amateur musings of this list and others.

As noted by at least one other poster, real history has the advantage
that - while it had even more actors, and some parts of what we "know"
are likely to be extrapolated/interpolated/guessed at/made up - it
mostly actually happened, unlike the OTU, which is *entirely* made up,
by a succession of writers with widely varying levels of knowledge of
history, biology, physics, etc etc - most of whom were much much more
concerned with meeting deadlines and/or producing enjoyable,
understandable and easy-to-use game material over maintaining absolute
accuracy and consistency.

tl;dr:  reality rarely condenses down into a neat 2d6 table, but guess
which makes a better game?

> Given things like that, I figure that the Traveller books we have are
> just "incomplete" and "summary" for what actually happened/is
> happening/will happen.

Fair enough.  The problem, IMO, comes with some rules literalists /
fundamentalists I've run into, who claim that if it's in the books
("/which set?/", I sometimes ask; they can't ALL be correct and Holy
Truth), it must be exactly so, and if it's not in the books, it must not
exist.

--
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Kelly St. Clair
xxxxxx@efn.org