This desire among gamers for less order rather than more order isn't universal of course. But others see the initial premise of the OTU Traveller setting as terrific setting "soil" to engender situations and adventures.
This is why when conversation about citizenship and rights come up there is often a tension between what the Imperium became through GDW's staff's desire for order and peace... and the siren call some of us hear of the earlier, more chaotic politics and policies of a different kind of empire found in the early books.
And so, again, the question is: When speaking of the qualities and policies of "The Imperium" which "Imperium" is one talking about? Since "The Imperium" has been several things, with very different policies and qualities, over time.
I shall touch briefly on this... as I think it is central/key/master to this discussion, many other discussion and many other games.
There is a tendency to "fill in the borders/color in lines" in all settings that last a significant amount of time. Sometimes this is just setting evolution (more books=more info), sometimes it is author-based (I like this one idea so I'm going to place it here in detail) and I suppose there are other reasons.
GDW (and lots of us here) were/are completists. Detail, complexity, realism etc... we want it. By the 1990's products were becoming specific, detailed (which is awesome) but also, due to detail, restrictive. The GDW people (IMO) were far more imaginative than I so it is of no real concern. But the more information out there, the less folks get to color in their own lines.
Example... Ars Magica, high magic/low fantasy in Europe. First book describes a loose organization of wizards that are marginally governed by some code and a few enforcers. You could do all sorts of crazy stuff so long as you hid from the odd visit by the enforcer.
By the time you get to 5th edition and all of their setting books, there is
no room to breathe seriously. Every region was overly stratified and controlled. People (authors) ran with really cool ideas. They created these orderly structures, rules, personalities etc. All of which was amazing... but colored in too deeply. They created closed systems and not open ones.
It's funny because in the main book, they give you three different versions of the controlling Order ranging from very powerful/involved, mildly powerful/involved and barely held together by tenuous bonds and outside enemies. Sound familiar?
But no setting book has EVER (5ed) been written using the premise of mild power or minimal power. For some reason, the authors all default to the first premise.
It seems to be a fine line in RPG's... people demand more detail which has the unfortunate effect of limiting possibilities. Sure, you can toss it all out, but there is something in many of us that struggles with that. We adhere to it even against our imaginative ideas.
That's one of the reasons I enjoy/get irritated by Traveller. There is a lot of stuff out there. And all of it, in some fashion, is excellent. But the drilling down of minutiae on many things makes it hard to go wild with ideas. Every one looks to one source or another and quotes it as gospel. Which it has been declared in some cases.
But every time we do that, we lose possibility.
Fiction can help us in that regard. As an example, after reading Space Vikings, I finally
grokked differing TL's, and how a Collapse (TNE) would actually manifest. Reading Agent (Miller) made me realize how much sci-fi potential was still present in Traveller. I have always approached Traveller as "wide-spanning, interstellar civilization, not-hard-but-not soft, pseudo-realistic" setting. But Agent has planetary plagues, invasive organisms, and other stuff I generally placed only in WH40K type fiction/settings. The library system alone is total space-opera.
But fiction can also inhibit... as Agent was written by Miller, and is canon, we now have this Imperium that is very rigid, invasive and controlling. The sheer notion of...
...is completely at odds with anything previously published. It also renders so much control to the Imperium that one cannot imagine what other invasive and oppressive controls they maintain over subject worlds.
Dang it, I'm rambling. Sorry. I've had a few beers so I will end this somewhat abruptly. This, IMO, is important:
creativehum said:
This is why when conversation about citizenship and rights come up there is often a tension between what the Imperium became through GDW's staff's desire for order and peace... and the siren call some of us hear of the earlier, more chaotic politics and policies of a different kind of empire found in the early books.
I think that siren call is heard by those who have spent a lot of time in the Imperium (or 3I). Everyone starts out in the civilized Imperium, mucks it up good, has tons of fun but... at some point it is only natural to start looking towards frontiers or "more unsettled times" and so on. Or maybe, just imagining the true possibilities of a such a vast empire and how big the cracks may be... The broadbrush description of "empire" renders our thoughts into some controlling entity but, even historically, it was very far from that. Is it because of Star Wars?
It doesn't matter. Pretty soon, we all want to start creating/monkeying and the published (GDW usually) material becomes a drag rather than a boon. Not because it's poor (which it absolutely is not IMO) but because it is orderly. It is neat. It makes sense. And once we start looking beyond those works, really thinking it through for how it works for us personally, we change our minds about the Imperium, even the 1105-1115i established one, in individual ways. As this conversation has shown, even in the established-orderly 3I, people interpret it differently.
Let's embrace that.
Let's explore that.
The Imperium is 10,000 worlds. Room for everyone.
