Psion is HERE!

EDG said:
We all know that Mongoose are just releasing these black cover books to incense The True Fans of The Game Who Know What Traveller Is Better Than Mongoose And Marc Miller. ;) :twisted:

Truly. The goal is stated quite clearly in our contract.
 
msprange said:
Truly. The goal is stated quite clearly in our contract.

They won't let you get away with it you know. You can't go diluting Their Great Game like that! They'll keep tilting at windmills til the end of time!

(hnyuk hnyuk :) )
 
EDG said:
msprange said:
Truly. The goal is stated quite clearly in our contract.

They won't let you get away with it you know. You can't go diluting Their Great Game like that! They'll keep tilting at windmills til the end of time!

(hnyuk hnyuk :) )

Ah yes. The five Fusskateers, and the endless fight against evil Cardinal Mongoosileu ! Storm the fortress of mongoositute, mon infants ! ! AVANT !
 
Cardinal Mongoosileu's plans must continue, but really, someone else gets to be Milady next time. One can only jump off a cliff so often...
 
I do find it amazing (though perhaps not surprising) that some people will cling so hard to "Their Olde Game" and expend so much time and energy telling other people (like, the actual license holder) how it should be played and written and how it's wrong to add anything that violates their own personal expectations of how it should be.

TBH I'm not sure why Matt wastes his time talking to those people. They just seem to take anything that he says about it (like, attempting to correct their misinterpretations of MGT's direction) as an excuse to vomit out more bile and vitriol.

If some people are so attached to CT (or MT, or whatever) then I don't get why they don't just keep playing it and stop complaining about everything else. It's like TNE all over again, a very loud minority doing their damnedest to wreck any kind of new direction or change to the game. It's pure unconstructive nerdrage - I thought it was pathetic back then and I think it's pathetic now.

Or maybe if they don't like it so much, they should take advantage of the OGL and come up with something that is more to their liking. That's what it's there for after all.
 
EDG said:
Or maybe if they don't like it so much, they should take advantage of the OGL and come up with something that is more to their liking. That's what it's there for after all.

What's ironic is that four of five loudest would make a really kickin team of writers. They happen to combine the right types of talent, and have all contributed large documents to the TML or other lists in the past. Combining a dreamer/mechanist, a hard-analysing technical writer, and a top-notch creative writer, and adding a reasonable generalist to buffer the mix, could be a recipe for success. Will they try? Probably not.
 
Well, they could explain the current Mongoose Traveller story setting thus:-

"Twenty five years ago, a starship entered a solar system where there was what looked like a lightning storm in space ..."
 
GypsyComet said:
What's ironic is that four of five loudest would make a really kickin team of writers. They happen to combine the right types of talent, and have all contributed large documents to the TML or other lists in the past. Combining a dreamer/mechanist, a hard-analysing technical writer, and a top-notch creative writer, and adding a reasonable generalist to buffer the mix, could be a recipe for success. Will they try? Probably not.

I doubt that they have much talent between them at all actually - all I see are gigantic egos, a lot of noise, and no useful signal at all.

They're certainly not contributing anything useful to Traveller by ranting and railing about MGT. We get the hint, they don't like it and they don't like the direction it's going in. Well... if they don't like it then they can either ante up and negotiate for their own license with Marc Miller (good luck with that), or they can get off their arses and actually be constructive and do something under the OGL. But then that would distract them from their bile-spewing, and we can't have that now can we. ;)

But I think it really is a case of "Lead, Follow, or get the hell out of the way" - and right now they're very much "in the way", albeit just as an incredibly annoying distraction and a gaping black hole of useless negativity.

The funny thing is that a while back a whole bunch of threads were locked on that forum's MGT board for being too "negative" (though the impression I got was that it was done under duress). But yet again, the nay-sayers and haters are using that MGT board as a soapbox, and of course the moderators do nothing about it (but then that's not surprising when two of the moderators have admitted to disliking MGT, and so seem to think it's OK to allow others to slag it off there). I'm surprised that the Mongoose folks tolerate it, to be honest.

I guess it's self-reinforcing though. The naysayers drive away anyone who wants anything useful to do with MGT (to here, most likely), and their "community" becomes ever more insular, hatefilled, resentful, and paranoid as a result. It's become the internet equivalent of a Rafflesia, stinking of rotten meat and attracting only flies. And maybe that's a good thing, so long as everyone else just ignores them and gets on with it. Let them rot in their hate, as far as I'm concerned - nobody's going to persuade them to stop anyway so it's better for all concerned to spend time doing something more useful and constructive.
 
I have listened in to the "discussion" over there a few times, and the only
polite word that came to my mind was "irrelevant".

Almost nothing that is heatedly argued about there has anything at all to
do with my roleplaying, and I am a very opportunistic creature: If there
is not a single interesting or useful idea in something, I tend to find it ra-
ther meaningless, and turn away.

Looking at the slowly, but steadily declining number of active members,
now about 15 % less than when I last registered there, I am not the on-
ly opportunistic creature around.
 
EDG said:
I doubt that they have much talent between them at all actually...

Two of them were high volume contributors to the TML, and more worth reading than most of that crowd for the last 15 years. Another had, until recently, a highly regarded website for another game entirely. The fourth has done a fair amount of playtesting.

But if you just look at the visible stuff on CotI, yeah, your impression is hard to refute.
 
GypsyComet said:
But if you just look at the visible stuff on CotI, yeah, your impression is hard to refute.

Given the large amount of noise and low signal there, saying that someone is a "high volume contributor to TML" is neither a compliment nor a good point in my books. ;)
 
:lol: :roll:
Talk about going slight off topic. :lol:

LOL

Even if the vast majority of what was written was correct about that other website.

Dave Chase
 
EDG said:
GypsyComet said:
But if you just look at the visible stuff on CotI, yeah, your impression is hard to refute.

Given the large amount of noise and low signal there, saying that someone is a "high volume contributor to TML" is neither a compliment nor a good point in my books. ;)

I choose to distinguish between "Poster" and "Contributor". Quite a few of the high volume "posters" are simply wasting electrons...

But we digress...

I got the call from the FLGS today for Psion. Having had a bit too much psi in past games, I'm in no hurry to use it in my current ones. I'll still be picking up the book, though.
 
EDG said:
(but then that's not surprising when two of the moderators have admitted to disliking MGT, and so seem to think it's OK to allow others to slag it off there).

To be absolutely fair to them, I had a quick chat with a moderator about this. His answer was basically 'hey, while they are bashing you, they ain't bashing us!'

I had to smile at that :)
 
I know what you mean. If you did not stay absolutely canon, more so than the Jesiuts would allow you leeway, certain indivuals would jump all over you, even if you were asking a simple point for clarification, or pointing out historical facts and making good points about things. And God help you if the facts you pointed out disagreed with their sacred canon.

Just so the moderators will feel not so left out I have to do this:

BASH YOU!!!

There does that seem better. Besides I love the work the has been done on MGT and other games that Mongoose has done. At least when here when you ask a question it is not considered heresy. Or worse POLITICS!
 
towerwarlock said:
And God help you if the facts you pointed out disagreed with their sacred canon.

Well, some people there are going on about Traveller being a "religion", which shows how unhinged they are. IT'S A FRAKKING GAME, NOT A RELIGION. If anyone is thinking of it as a religion then they seriously need to step out of it for a while and get a life - but I guess that's how those crazy few can keep arguing about it over 25+ pages of bile and vitriol...
 
EDG said:
Well, some people there are going on about Traveller being a "religion" ...
Well, in a certain way ... :wink:

There is a canon, there is text exegesis of the acknowledged canonical
sources, "respect" is demanded for the content of the scriptures, there
are people obviously willing to verbally smite heretics ... :shock:
 
That's always been the problem. First it starts with "canon" then people start going on about "apocrypha" and "heresy"...

WTF, people. When did this stop being about having fun in a fictional SF universe and start being something to declare bloody jihad over?! How did people lose their perspective so badly?
 
EDG said:
towerwarlock said:
And God help you if the facts you pointed out disagreed with their sacred canon.

Well, some people there are going on about Traveller being a "religion", which shows how unhinged they are. IT'S A FRAKKING GAME, NOT A RELIGION. If anyone is thinking of it as a religion then they seriously need to step out of it for a while and get a life - but I guess that's how those crazy few can keep arguing about it over 25+ pages of bile and vitriol...

As I pointed out there, several pages ago, the issue of "Traveller: Setting or Mechanics?" appears to be behind most of the current objections. Mongoose's RPG line is based on that answer being "Mechanics", while the most strident of the opposition (which interestingly excludes one of the usual prime kvetchers; he's there but not the loudest) are arguing from the "Setting" answer, and at least two of them are utterly unshakeable.

That same argument hit the TML's "do not argue about it" list a looong time ago precisely because it gets this bad very quickly.

One of the points lost in the smoke and debris is a good one though. MGT is bringing in a lot of new blood that the OTU technological assumptions are not evident to. If the OTU is going to be a feature of MGT, its tech should probably be explicitly set out somewhere, even if its just an S&P article, or a TL table that segregates the non-OTU stuff. Heck, I'd even write it.
 
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