DaltonCalford said:
The biggest difficulty I see with changing the system is supporting existing UPP's.
Quoted for truth - I'd rather use 2D6-2 to generate governments and have only 0-10 as the government codes, but that would require a reduction in variety in comparison to previous editions, not to mention not supporting previous gov codes.
A good alternative is to generate government by rolling 3D6-3 without DMs; this way it won't depend on population. The weakness of this system is that the more dice you roll the higher the probability for median results - in this case bureaucracies and balkanization, which will fit pretty well into the OTU.
Rikki Tikki Traveller said:
Yes, my vision of a Feudal Technocracy is an expansion of the Corporate government type.
I've always considered FT's similar to the Japanese Zaibetsu type of corporations: high job loyalty, high degree of control over the employees lives even off the job (some Zaibetsus even decide whom the employee is allowed to marry or in which bar they should party in their off-time). In other words, the boss isn't just a boss but something more similar to a feudal lord, and the employee isn't just a wage-laborer but a bit like a vassal. Now add to this suicide committed by employees (or even CEOs) when they've failed their company... In other words, highly-monopolist capitalism with feudal features.
SableWyvern said:
There's no argument from me that the two could be combined into a single entry. The main differences seem to be that the TED has a concentrated power base and control of the most important tech, while the FT has a more distributed, interdependent system. The TED also carries the implication of rulership by force through access to military tech, although this need not be the case (nor does the FT preclude such).
The way I see it, a TED is based on relic technology - its tech-base is aging and isn't fully sustainable at the current TL. In other words, all those FGMP-15's used by the Royal Legion of Terror would eventually break down if the local TL would remain around 3 and no serious interstellar trade relations would develop. A 'classical' FT has a stable and sustainable tech-base, which means that the power-base is broader: lords control laboratories and factories, not just caches of left-over Imperial hardware from before the Fall. On the other hand, take away a TED's limited cache of relics, and all of its dictator's power falls apart (or, at least, is greatly reduced).
