Blix said:
Fine. Like I said, I always thought the Rebellion was not a bad idea. The Core 3I is a kludgey, unbelievable, hotch potch that (like Topsy) "just grew" and really makes no sense at all for a body that is 1100 years old ...
There are good reasons for that. The original Traveller rules made all sorts of assumptions about "The Imperium" which later accretions actually contradict and mangle *really* badly ...
So even the Core 3I is basically crap - but it was changed slowly over many years, and didn't attract a lot of heat *because* it was added to/changed *slowly* over many years, I'd guess.
Even the changes Digest Group introduced to the Background, the *idea* of the Rebellion and breakup of the Imperium, weren't initially greeted with disbelief, disgust and hatred (though the crappy, unusable, typo ridden *rules* were, and that probably tainted any overall response).
It's really only when they started to get into Virus, the Empress Wave and stuff like that that people started to increasingly react with disgust and hatred.
Yes, you could well argue it was because it was the absolute, downright, asinine, ill considered and ill thought out anti-scientific crap that was their *explanation* of Virus (and, frankly, though better written, Avenger Game's tie up of the thing was downright silly and unbelievable too - but much better written, which is what I said when I reviewed it when it came out).
I could accept, on one level, the idea of silicon based life forms that could be converted into computer chips ... almost ... and, by extension, the idea that they could "rebel" and take over the computer systems they had become a part of was internally consistent, even if the base idea was marginal at best, but the idea that dead slices of silicon wafer produced at TL7-TL12 (assuming the tech of Virus was TL13) could magically be made to be "alive" *by *r*a*d*i*o* transmissions* was, frankly, such an insult to the intelligence that I had a hard time accepting the sanity of the people who came up with.
And what it said about their assessment of the intelligence of their audience was, frankly, downright insulting.
And then to claim that, in a period of a few years, this secret 3I technology would somehow be spread throughout the entirety of Known Space and magically destroy all the competing Empires as well, or damn close, because neither the 3I nor they had any computer security measures (stated explicitly somewhere in one of the early appearances/justifications of Virus) ... well, my estimation of the intelligence of the designers took a massive nosedive. And I felt even more insulted.
The other problem with the whole End of the Rebellion and Collapse of the 3I trope - and I noted this in my review of Avenger's tie up of the TNE's background - was that it compressed events that, based on the historical experience we have, as well as our understanding of technology or even previous Imperial "history" simply doesn't take place as *fast* as it does.
The events of the collapse, and the recovery, take place over, IIRC, about 200 years or less ... the collapse of the Roman Empire and the recovery of Europe to something like the same level of social and political organisation took around 1000 years (and, arguably, only the creation of the EEC has brought it back *really* to that level of organisation ... making recovery more like 1500 years) ... but even that's not accurate.
Only us western europeans (or those, like Ozzies, from a WE background) think the Roman Empire collapsed in 476 AD ... the Roman Empire, with Roman Emperors, continued for another 1000 years almost, to the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks.
Why, in a legal sense, the Holy Roman Empire was a sort of Successor state, and that really doesn't collapse till the late 18th century, from memory. And, of course, by virtue of marriage to a Romano-Greek princess of the Imperial Blood, the Tsars claimed that *their* state was a successor of the Imperium, so that would make the Empire a going concern through to 1917 AD!
And, arguably, there is still a pretender to the Imperial Throne in the person of the Romanov Heir (descended through the Dukes of Moscow, IIRC).
The absolute, utter collapse of most of an 1100 year old Imperium and its complete rebuilding from stone age savagery in less than 2 centuries is an insult to the intelligence as well.
The fact that Dave Nilsen "justified" these changes because they wanted to sweep away the 3I setting is neither here nor there ... the changes were complete crap, and nothing changes that.
Were there things they could have done to realistically change things dramatically *without* Virus or related crap? YES!!!
The sad thing is that they chose just about the most insultingly unbelievable way of doing it possible. I believe in TV they call it "jumping the shark" ...
"Jumping the shark is an idiom used to describe the moment of downturn for a previously successful enterprise. The phrase was originally used to denote the point in a television program's history where the plot spins off into absurd storylines or unlikely characterizations. These changes were often the result of efforts to revive interest in a show whose audience had begun to decline, usually through the employment of different actors, writers or producers"
--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
... which describes what happened to a T!!!
IMO anyway.
YMMV of course, and its fine if you think the sun shines from the nether regions of Virus ... we certainly won't be playing in either's Traveller campaigns, so it is moot :wink:
Phil
. Do you think you could perhaps accept that, or is that too much to ask?
