Unscientific Gut Feeling Feedback on EDG Worldgen

[Droptrooper]

This isn't what EDG wants to here and certainly isn't backed up by any evidence, statistics or reams of computer generated UPPs. :wink:

The system makes some sense and yet takes away some from the fun of creating a world to fit the UPP. I also feel that there is no need for a specific panthalassic atmosphere type, the world class is amply covered by Size A, Hydro A. The atmosphere on a panthalassic world will be either a variant on the standard atmospheres or a corrosive atmosphere (ie. Nitric Acid from the breakdown of the original ammonia). Leave the UPPs as they are (and thus backwards compatible, let's leave the "religious" imagery of canon behind)

I do not see any major issue with the social adjustments but do not find them to be any more than a very subjective view of Traveller society. But the idea is right, just needs more discussion and tweaking.

To some up it feels wrong despite looking right. I think EDGs system should be expanded and adjusted to create an OGL generic creation system and leave the "Traveller" system as is.

Thank you.

 

[EDG]

The system makes some sense and yet takes away some from the fun of creating a world to fit the UPP.

The point was largely to remove the "fun" of having to explain a nonsensical UWP generated by systemic errors, and just allow people to get down to coming up with stories to fit around UWPs that work. For example, I did a CT quadrant last night that I'll post hopefully later tonight and it had no less that five worlds with C+ starports and no population. Four of those worlds were Garden worlds and the other was a Very Thin atmosphere. Sure, you can stretch a wacky explanation to cover anything, and maybe you can explain it once or twice, but anything you come up with to explain five instances of "starport with no population" is going to be incredibly contrived. The reason for that is that it just makes no sense in the first place.

GMs can still be challenged and have fun by explaining UWPs in the EDG system, it's just that they'd actually make sense to start with now. So instead of thinking "why does this garden world have a type A starport but no population?" you can think "what sort of adventures can I run on this isolated Mars-like world with a small colony?".

I also feel that there is no need for a specific panthalassic atmosphere type, the world class is amply covered by Size A, Hydro A. The atmosphere on a panthalassic world will be either a variant on the standard atmospheres or a corrosive atmosphere (ie. Nitric Acid from the breakdown of the original ammonia).

A new atmosphere type is necessary because the Type E ellipsoid atmosphere is nonsense - atmospheres just don't work like that. Panthalassic fits as a "massive world extension" of a breathable water world atmosphere.

Leave the UPPs as they are (and thus backwards compatible, let's leave the "religious" imagery of canon behind)

It's called canon for a reason, because people insist on treating it like a religious text. Many canonical UWPs are badly in need of adjustment.

I do not see any major issue with the social adjustments but do not find them to be any more than a very subjective view of Traveller society. But the idea is right, just needs more discussion and tweaking.

The social stuff is subjective, so I'm not expecting people to agree with it. If you feel it needs more discussion and tweaking then by all means discuss and suggest tweaks and I'll consider them. I'll post a CT and an EDG quadrant side by side tonight and then people can see the difference.

To some up it feels wrong despite looking right. I think EDGs system should be expanded and adjusted to create an OGL generic creation system and leave the "Traveller" system as is.

If that's the case, none of the problems with the CT system will be solved in the main game, and the same errors that we've had to put up with for the past 30 years will be propagated forward yet again. The aim of this exercise was not to come up with a separate OGL system, it was to fix Traveller's worldgen.

Obviously it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and that's fair enough. But the fact remains that it does fix the most obvious of Traveller's worldgen problems.

 

[Klaus Kipling]

I'm pretty ambivalent about how useful UWPs actually are, but if we are to have them, then they should be as realistic as possible.

There's a couple of factors that seem to have been forgotten, and there's a lot of OTU tunnel-vision-ness.

If the CT system produces wildly unrealistic results (which it does), then what appears in MGT should look nothing like it, canon be damned.

After all, MGT is meant to be a generic sf tool-kit, useful for creating any kind of setting. If world-gen produces idiosyncratic CT style results, then every setting will resemble the OTU. This system has also got to produce results for SST, Strontium Dog, Dredd, potentially B5. If all these settings use the same system to generate planets, then yes, they will look similar, but isn't it better they look similar to reality, rather than CT wrongness?

The MGT one should reflect a baseline of reality; release a variant 'Traditional CT' worldgen system to create all those wacky truth-shredding worlds if you want.

(And I would define EDG's system, rather than being realistic, as eliminating the unrealistic )

Now one of the criticisms is that the EDG system adds more fussiness. Well, worldgen is already a ball-ache! Surely it's worth a teeny bit more faff and get good results, rather than almost as much fuss for unusable nonesense?

Another criticism is that it produces a homogenous sector. Well apart from being pure conjecture, the most homogenous part are the explanations for all those low-tech, mid-pop, unbreathable atmo worlds. The painful jumping through hoops to justify all the anomolies end up looking the same.

I'll have a final stab at OTU UWP canon. Most of it is just numbers. There's only a handful of world's that have been written up. Can anyone remember off the top of their head the UWP of Lunion? Or Miriam? Would it really make that much difference if a few numbers changed here or there? Would the OTU come crashing down? Nope, is the answer.

So we can debate the sociological elements, but the physical stuff is there, and unequivocal. The only reason not to adopt EDG's reforms seems to be some kind of traditionalist stubborness (don't mean the last sentence to come off as spiky as it seems - no offense intended )

Canon UWP's are half nonesense. There is no rational reason not to update them.

Anyway, that's my twopenneth.

[EDIT: I will also add I don't think Imperial measurements have any place whatsoever in a sci-fi rpg - that's my only criticism of EDGs system ]

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

There is also an effort by the people making the new Spinward Marches book to try to fix some of the worst offenders in this area.

So already, past canon will be changed by the MGT Spinward Marches book.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

 

[tneva82]

So instead of thinking "why does this garden world have a type A starport but no population?"

Planet is too dangerous(say very dangerous beasts) with no resourcial value so there's only advanced research station on orbit for research team to study the planet? That wasn't too hard or unrealistic(atleast doesn't sound to me unrealistic. Scientists are funny bunch so one can see why they would like to study new planet filled with dangerous beasts even if the planet has no mineral resources to speak of nor strategic importance).

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

OK, but there are 25 of those types of worlds in one sector, what is the explanation for all the others?

And a guy in Battle Dress with an FGMP-15 is not going to be afraid of any beastie...

 

[tneva82]

OK, but there are 25 of those types of worlds in one sector, what is the explanation for all the others?

And how many planets in total? Looking at how my subsector went there wasn't even one planet with 0 population let alone one with A starbase so for 25 planets like that there would have to be...how many planets? Hundreds? Thousands? Plenty of scope for science stations there.

And a guy in Battle Dress with an FGMP-15 is not going to be afraid of any beastie...

But is it worth it? If planet has no resources or other strategic importance what's the point? Eliminate them just for sake of elimination? Humans are warlike but even we tend to want some concretic benefit like resources or strategic objectives for wars...

Plus the scientists might object if military went to shoot all those wonderful creatures into extinction ;-)

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

Well, the fact that the air is breathable would seem to be a pretty good resource. You could come in, plant farms and raise cattle and a family without having to worry about seal failures and all that nasty death-by-vacuum stuff.

We seem to have a difference of opinion here, and I am the first to admit that mine IS an opinion, so perhaps to avoid this diving into a flamewar, we can leave it at that?

 

[tneva82]

Well, the fact that the air is breathable would seem to be a pretty good resource. You could come in, plant farms and raise cattle and a family without having to worry about seal failures and all that nasty death-by-vacuum stuff.

Is third imperium overpopulated then? Looking at hideously low population scores I ended up with seems generally more like UNDERpopulated. Like Elves in Lord of the Rings, a dying race...

Scores of garden worlds with population scores of 4-7. Huh? Earthlike world and population there about size of 2 Finland or less? Town I live has more people than some of these planets...

 

[AKAramis]

The truth is that the OTU does NOT resemble random generated sectors very tightly. This is because the Spinward Marches, the Solomani Rim, and the Islands set the standards: they were all hand crafted. It appears that the sectors in the Alien Modules may have been tweaked as well.

There is implication from analysis of the AOTI maps that the distribution there was specifically tweaked as well.

All of the DGP published sectors appear to be random plus tweaks, as well.

The Sunbane data not derived from the above does appear to be random... but tied to the High Pop worlds in the AOTI maps.

So no, the extant OTU data will not match EITHER of these.

 

[Klaus Kipling]

I'm quite sick of seeing hi pop tiny rockballs right next door to empty garden worlds, or even more marginal ones. There's far too many of these in any sector as to make any convoluted explanation pointless.

Dawnworld (D268), is on a main, fer gossake! How the hell is that still empty? Just a few parsecs away is (one of the) Tenalphi? Another near perfect world near hardly perfect ones (and on a main, again).

MJD did a valiant job in BtC, but there are just too many of these places knocking around to be credible in the first place.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

So, given that the OTU didn't stick to the world gen rules provided, then Why not change the rules to be more scientifically correct.

I personally don't mind the occasional hell-world with a big population and the occasional garden world without people, but the CT rules create too many of them for me (MY OPINION AGAIN) and I think now is the time to address them.

If MGT comes out with the CT world gen, I will house-rule it from the start. If it comes out with something that I think is reasonable, I will use it as is.

I DO tweak the government generation method all the time especially when I want a particular feel to a pocket empire or region of space, but I do not consider that house-ruling the system, only adapting it to a specific region.

 

[Gruffty the Hiver]

If the CT system produces wildly unrealistic results (which it does), then what appears in MGT should look nothing like it, canon be damned.

Indeed. MGT is an opportunity to revisit every aspect of Traveller, including (but not limited to) planet generation.

After all, MGT is meant to be a generic sf tool-kit, useful for creating any kind of setting.

.......which, of course, is exactly what the original LBBs were meant to be.

I see MGT as an opportunity to return to the generic system heart of Traveller. One of my long-time issues with Traveller is that the setting and rules and have always been inseparable since LBB 4 Mercenary. From that point onwards, the rules incorporated more and more aspects of the OTU until it became clear (to me at least) that Traveller rules = rules for the OTU. I would like to see MGT separate the setting from the rules - and I think it needs to do that to support Starship Troopers, Judge Dredd, etc.

Revising the planet generation system is just one of many, many steps that are required towards moving away from the "the rules = the setting = the rules = the setting =......." infinite loop that Traveller has been stuck in since LBB 4 was published.

 

[captainjack23]

OK, but there are 25 of those types of worlds in one sector, what is the explanation for all the others?

Without (hopefully) dropping myself right back in the barrel, I should point out that one possibility is that those type A/B ports on crap local worlds very much resemble coaling and fueling stations scattered around the globe in the 1870's thru WWii .

Both wake and midway had extensive facilities with absolutely no natives - the falklands (south atlantic) having a population is almost solely an artifact of this situation, also.

Also, there are more than a few concentrations of places on earth that the main population is specialists with advanced tools and tech -either military, research or commercial.

This isn't a panacea for the issue, just a suggestion that those situations have happened IRL, and (again without jumping in the barrel) a society very similar to the Traveller universe.

So, perhaps rather than dismissing them as anomalies out of hand, can we at least look at it for reasonable explanations that don't boil down to "this is wrong" or "this is fantasy".

25 is a lot, I suppose, but how many would seem reasonable ? Would zero ? I don't know the answer, myself, but zero seems wrong, also.

 

[-Daniel-]

One minor point that does need to be stated even though I am sure many already know this is: Once the random generation is done I can tweak it to what I want. So if I want a research station or fuel only starport on a lonely empty world I can still place it there as the GM.

What I want out of any random generation system is a sub-sector or system that I do not have to redo. because it is filled with real odd stuff. Rather the output from the random generation needs to be reasonable and believable as is. Then I can add in the odd or twisted things I want. I can add in the hollow world or Class A starport on the empty planet etc.

I realize this is just my point of view, but I think it is important in discussions about the extremes like a Class A on an empty world.

Daniel

 

[rje]

After all, MGT is meant to be a generic sf tool-kit [...]. This system has also got to produce results for [...] potentially B5.

That's an interesting setting. It seems gritty, yet the races all breathe the same air we do, apparently. (Hey, and they all speak English! And, except for the Shadows, they're all bilaterally symmetric... and have two arms... and two legs... and hands... and feet... Ain't Sci-Fi great?)

I think, no matter what MGT's mainworld gen system is, it will require adapters for every system it supports. Therefore, let it remain largely compatible with the OTU (a tweak or two won't hurt, if absolutely necessary).

But I think there may be playability issues for Mongoose to address instead.

 

[EDG]

That's an interesting setting. It seems gritty, yet the races all breathe the same air we do, apparently.

Well, apart from the ones that don't, like the Vorlons. Or (I think?) the PakMara? One of those minor races anyway.


As I mentioned elsewhere I think MGT is the last opportunity we're going to get to drag Traveller kicking and screaming into the 21st century. If people want a system that'll produce a clone of the OTU and that conforms to Marc's supposed "vision" of worldgen then they can get T5 for that. But if people want a product that will push the limits of Traveller and expand it into new directions, then that should be MGT. And a big part of doing that will be the worldgen.

 

[captainjack23]

OK, but there are 25 of those types of worlds in one sector, what is the explanation for all the other


<snip>

25 is a lot, I suppose, but how many would seem reasonable ? Would zero ? I don't know the answer, myself, but zero seems wrong, also.

Hmmm. Actually, 25/16 isn't even two per subsector .
Not too hard to see as coaling stations, and a few research bases.

Are we talking completely empty (pop 0) planets ? Or just really low planets ?

Its surprising if its the 0 pop/A port that is that frequent..- thats a pretty unlikely result . Let me check out the freq and prob info.

 

[EDG]

So, perhaps rather than dismissing them as anomalies out of hand, can we at least look at it for reasonable explanations that don't boil down to "this is wrong" or "this is fantasy".

25 is a lot, I suppose, but how many would seem reasonable ? Would zero ? I don't know the answer, myself, but zero seems wrong, also.

I would say that to have a D+ starport, you need some people there. Even if it's just 10 or 20 to man the pumps that lead to the local lake for unrefined fuel. But the place is at the very least an outpost.

Starports E or X don't need people. E is a bare patch of ground, and X is usually more "attempt no landing here" or just plain unexplored.

A-C definitely need larger populations. You don't just build a Heathrow or JFK airport in the middle of Siberia where there's nobody around for hundreds of miles, and then have it exist in a vacuum - you either need people to justify the starport's existence in the first place, or you'll get a whole bunch of people moving to the starport's location pretty damn quickly to be the people that actually make it function, who will basically build their own community around it if none exists already.

But having a type A, B or C starport on a garden world with no people on it is definitely wrong. And I don't buy the "dangerous wildlife" excuse - if people are going to spend the vast amount of money and effort to build starports on a planet then they're easily going to kill and clear out anything that gets in the way (we're good at doing that, after all) - if it happens to be big and fearsome then we'll overcome it with weapons that are bigger and more fearsome until it's all dead.

You really have to consider why the ports are there in the first place (which something that CT doesn't do and why we get these problems arising in the first place). If they're just rest stops and refuelling stations en route to somewhere else, then you're clearly going to be building a type D or E starport because it's not worth building anything better. If they're a place to trade and exchange goods and information, then you're obviously going to need people living there already to do that with, and you're going to want A/B/C starports - nobody is going to build a JFK-type affair when all you need is a shack and a pumping station.

 

[EDG]

Not too hard to see as coaling stations, and a few research bases.

Are we talking completely empty (pop 0) planets ? Or just really low planets ?

Zero pop planets - they're completely uninhabited.

Its surprising if its the 0 pop/A port that is that frequent..- thats a pretty unlikely result . Let me check out the freq and prob info.

IIRC one was an A starport, two were Bs, one was C and the last was D. And this was in a single CT quadrant with 147 systems.