It wouldn't be discernable to the RCES, either.
Wilds Government Codes
- Thread starter LeperColony
- Start date
It wouldn't be discernable to the RCES, either.
The labels are both game artifact AND in universe labels.
Also, don't forget: a TED is inherently unable to manufacture the tech.
I still don't get your point.
Or this one. I know a TED is inherently unable to manufacture his tech. What does that have to do with whether a dictator is singular or plural?
Hans
unfortunately, that's QUITE obvious.
The point is you're looking at TED solely as a game system artifact, and expecting it to be a crystal-clear definition.
It's yet another issue you're ignoring in the definition of a TED. It's what makes it different from a feudal technocracy and/or a non-charismatic dictator and/or a non-charismatic oligarchy.
Any of those three based upon relic technology (imperial or otherwise) is functionally a TED.
And, since the game artifact UWP code is also "based" upon an in-character-universe set of labels affixed by the RCES and, "previously" the IISS, the inherent inaccuracy is a feature.
They are NOT, and never have been, discrete and non-overlapping. They are intentionally overlapping and intentionally non-discrete, so that GM's can make that TED a charismatic, non-charismatic, or even junta militaria, with a technological edge.
Sure, but he was de facto independent since 1117-18, while still caliming loyality to 'The Imperium' (not to any Emperor). This situation is what I intende to picture as example.
I'm affraid I didn't explain myself well. The situation I try to picture is one where the ship itself is the dictator and the relic at once. There's no capability to build more relics, nor a government under the ship's mind (at least, not more than any dictator has).
But this can also be seen as an outworld force that holds the planet's population captive.
No, I'm not. I'm quite willing to consider the possibility that the definition is unclear. But when you tell me flat out that I'm wrong, with no if, buts or maybes, then I do think you should be willing to provide a bit of evidence to support your statement. And if it's so obvious that I'm wrong, it shouldn't be difficult for you to do so.
Until you do decide to provide some evidence, you're just expressing an opinion.
And from a Totalitarian Oligarchy?
Fine. Give me some canonical examples of relic-based feudal technocracies and non-charismatic oligarchies that are labeled as TEDs. Don't bother with examples of dictators, non-charismatic or not -- I've already stated that relic-based dictators are TEDs.
And no doubt the errata (which I don't have) back you up? I'd really appreciate a quote here.
Fine. Give me some canonical examples of non-dictator-based governments with relic-based technological edges that are labeled as TEDs.
Perhaps I am wrong, but until you prove it, you're merely expressing an opinion. Telling me flat out that I'm wrong is not a decent argument.
Hans
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Sure, it's possible to have a transitional period before the formerly captive government realizes that it's not captive any more.
I dealt with that possibility. In this example the ship is the government. It doesn't answer to an outside authority. Thus it's not a captive government. That the ship is an immigrant, as it were, is irrelevant. Sure, the population (the rest of the population
) is enslaved, but government <=> population.Hans
LeperColony
Traveller Card Game Dev Team
I don't know why you feel outside always has to mean offworld. They could have used the word offworld if they wanted that to be a condition.
First of all, there's no reason to believe that's the only situation we can employ outside instead of offworld. You are assuming a purely geographical meaning which, even if it is the most common situation, it is by no means the exclusive situation.
For you, Captive Governments is all about geography, and not at all about the people running it. For me, the opposite is true.
When it says that the people in charge aren't from the native planet (in your reading, it's because they aren't even ON the native planet), that says something pretty clear about the origin of the rulers, I'd think.
No, what I'm describing is both. Though I don't doubt that the one results in the other.
If a population is captive, then any political or administrative systems imposed on them, or subsumed or adapted by the captors will be captive if the populace has no input and no participation.
First of all, let me say that I am not by any means a Traveller expert. Hence the flurry of questions on this board about things I'm not clear on. I also don't have an incredibly extensive Traveller library. I have access to the TNE product line, and a few MT and Mongoose Traveller books.
However, with what I do have, I do have an example. Montezuma, from Path of Tears. Specifically, page 108 where is talks about the fact that the world used to be owned by another world, and the current ruling class is descendant from the outsiders and that there is a social barrier between them and the natives.
Maybe I am reading it wrong (and I admit that is a distinct possibility), but the errata seems to indicate to me that if you generate a TED result, you roll on the TED chart. On that chart are Dictators, Oligarchies, Technocracies, Autocracies, and even a Captive government.
Again, I could be wrong, but I think you're putting too much emphasis on the "D" in TED.
Yes, it is. Or at least it could be. See errata.
Again, answerable does not only mean that one has a direct political or administrative superior. A government is answerable to the people if their explicit or implicit approval is a necessary condition for government survival. The TEDs do not require the consent of the governed, due to relic technology, so they are not answerable. An ordinary dictator is answerable to the people, even if they do not participate in government (look at the Arab Spring).
Yes, but if nobody else takes over CA, then is CA captive? This is the dilemma you have since your rationale is based solely on geography. If am a warlord who hops across the state lines, I alternate the governments of the two states between dictator and captive with every step. That doesn't seem a little silly?
Earth would not be balkanized. Fiji does not "compete for control."
Those governments are not captive because they are answerable to the people in a way TEDs are not, as I explained above. Just because a world has a relationship with an external group that is very influential or even determinitive in forming government policy doesn't mean it would receive a 6 but for some other factor.
That the classic example of Captive Government is one where another world calls the shots is not surprising. In a space faring society, that is going to be the most likely scenario. In organized space where there are still interstellar polities, you aren't going to have a lot of groups of people who can come in, set themselves up as rulers by virtue of technology, and have nothing to fear from the populace.
Remember, my definition of Captive includes everything yours does. It is simply more expansive, because it includes situations for which you have no applicable code (remember, A doesn't work for all dictators. It is for dictators who enjoy the confidence of the people).
Sorry to necro a post from page 3. This board moves too fast for me when I get busy.
LeperColony
Traveller Card Game Dev Team
Also Hans, you know the errata is available as a PDF from the sticky on this forum, right?
Just asking because you've said you don't have access to it.
Just asking because you've said you don't have access to it.
No, I didn't realize that. Thanks for the tip.
Chercking those errata, I notice that they're not official. They're Don's proposal for errata. Unless they were subsequently included in the DVD mentioned?
Anyway, even if they are official, they're optional:
"Page 191, Collapse Effects Determination, Step 7, Government, second paragraph (alternative, clarification and addition): The existing rules on TEDs caused problems with other rules. The mechanisms below have the cleanest approach to working within existing rules. These were drafted originally by Guy Garnett, then modified by GDW but not published prior to it’s closing. They are presented as an alternative to the published rules, not a replacement." [p. 21 of the document]
I invite you to read post #18 of that errata thread (by Starviking) in which he goes into more detail. Evidently they're not the option used in the OTU.
Hans
There's considerable reason to believe so. The list of captive governments in the Spinward Marches is one.
There's a lot less reason to believe that it isn't the only situation where 'outside' doesn't imply 'offworld'. Assuming that it is is logical, it's self-consistent and it's consistent with canon. Plenty enough reason in my opinion.
No, in my reading the captive government is on the planet. It's just answerable to an authority off the planet.
No, it's not. It can't be. A government is not a population, so the same description can't cover both.
Wrong. Flat out wrong with no ifs or buts or maybes. A popuklation that is subject to any form of repressive government is captive, whether the government is native or imposed from outside. The population is a captive of the government. The government is not captive unless it answers to some outside authority.
An example of what? We're involved in two different discussions here, about non-Wilds captive governments and about Wilds TEDs. Montezuma is not labled as a 6-TED but as 5-CO (Charismatic Oligarchy), so the nature of its ruling elite seems irrelevant.
That's quite correct. But the chart was quite evidently not applied to generating the Wilds we have descriptions of.
If I am, I'm in good company.
Now, if you ask me if it would be a good idea to retcon the information from Path of Tears and split up the technological elevation from the government form, I think it would be an excellent idea. But that's not the situation we're dealing with right this moment.
In this case the evidence says it is.
You mean if California still takes orders from me? Sure, in that case the Viceroy of California would be a captive government.
A world does not need its component states to compete for control in order to be balkanized. It just has to be balkanized.
Besides, how do you know that it's not competing? Obviously Fiji must have something going for it since the Martians left them alone.
Wrong. A government that is answerable to a megacorporation is not answerable to its people (Well, it could be answerable to its people TOO). The Border Worlds are not labeled as captive governments because of political considerations, not because they're not answerable to the Border Worlds Commission. They're captive governments all right. (Sword Worlders being as they are, their governments are ALSO answerable to their populations, but that's an additional complication, not mutually exclusive).
But that it's the only type found among the identifiable examples seems pretty significant to me.
You seem to be conflating our two different arguments here. One is about the nature of a captive government; the other is about governments that use relic technology to impose their will on their populations. Those are two very separate issues. There aren't any TEDs outside Wilds and there aren't any captive governments[*] in the Wilds.
[*] Not any that are labeled as such, anyway.
That's not thread necromancy. TN is ressurecting a long-dormant thread. And in any case our Moderators aren't all that intolerant of that sort of thing.
Hans
LeperColony
Traveller Card Game Dev Team
A list of possibilities is only sufficient to establish the exclusive nature of those outcomes if it is detailed and large enough to rule out other alternatives. The only thing that list establishes is that the most common form of Captive, in the Spinward Marches (and not counting Zhodani territory, since who know what's going on there) most captive governments are colonies and the others have been conquered.
In fact, the only thing the list does for you is establish that many captive governments are answerable to offworld governments. Since that isn't a contention I've ever disputed, it isn't particularly relevant. I take it you can't find any place that defines "outside" as "offworld."
Whether or not the government is presently ON the planet has never been the issue. It is whether or not the people in the government were FROM the planet. So again, 6 clearly deals with origins.
That's like saying if you use blue to describe a shirt, you can't call pants blue.
Not only can it describe both, it frequently will, as a captive population is more likely to have a captive government. The opposite isn't exactly true, as a captive corporate world's government need not have a captive population.
Sadly, this analysis is incorrect on a number of levels.
First, Captive governments answer to outside "groups," not authorities. Answering to a foreign band of mercenaries is a group, not an authority.
Second, the defining characteristics of captive government are 1) run by an imposed and 2) those outsiders being answerable to an "outside group" (not offworld authority). Thus, a government is captive when the populace has no input or participation, and cannot remove, change, or otherwise substantially affect the governmental system. That's it.
If the populace is captive and it has been excluded from participation and has no ability to alter the situation, the government is captive so long as it is run by people answerable to an "outside group."
This central point is the nexus of our disagreement, and as it is largely a matter of defining terms, I doubt we will be able to harmonize our interpretations.
Montezuma is labeled as a 5-CO, but it is described as a TED in many places ("Montezuma has most of the characteristics of a classic [TED]..." TNE, 101 "Seacost's TED... [Seacost being one of the 5-CO nations], PoT 108). In fact, PoT is not the bastion of consistency which your arguments assume (and require) it to be.
Hence my initial question that started this thread, as to what distinguished a TO "sustained by relic technology" from a TED who is a TO.
Not so good as you may think. PoT clearly conflates CO and TED where Montezuma is concerned, and may do so elsewhere too (not incredibly familiar with the other worlds, as I was making a Montezuma adventure when this came up).
TED seems to be a problem with TNE in general, and the developers got around that by combining it with different forms of government. Which is why the errata was apparently the direction they were going in.
The evidence says nothing of the sort. At best, it establishes that many captive governments are answerable directly to a higher political authority. But nowhere does it define it exclusively as such.
Even were every single case in all 11,000 worlds of the Imperium to show that only those types of captive governments are found, that would still be insufficient to prove the exclusivity of the principle. It would be like saying every MLB baseball game has ended in less than 40 innings. Therefore no baseball game of any type can ever go longer than 41 innings.
I sure hope you're just maintaining that for the sake of an argument, because otherwise a dictate on a merry go round placed on the state line has a continual and bizarrely substantial effect on government codes.
I prefer to base my definitions of political organization on something more substantial than the location of a person's foot.
A world does not need its component states to compete for control in order to be balkanized. It just has to be balkanized.
Besides, how do you know that it's not competing? Obviously Fiji must have something going for it since the Martians left them alone.
If it just had to be balkanized, the definition of balkanized government wouldn't say "competing for control." But it does.
Also, the bravery of the Fijian people notwithstanding, the example is handy to look at both ways.
Fiji not competing: Government not balkanized.
Fiji competing: In this case, it still may not be balkanized because Fiji may not be substantial enough to be a "rival" government to the otherwise total Martian authority. It'd be like saying I could take up boxing tomorrow, in which case I'd be a "competing" boxer. But would I be a "rival" for the Heavyweight Championship of the World? No (especially not at 135 lbs).
Hence the difference. A corporate world not answerable to its people is captive, whether or not it is classified as "corporate." A corporate world that is answerable to its people can ONLY be classified as "corporate."
The question is what the definition permits, contains, or excludes, not how it works out in practice. The identifiable examples are all a subset (possibly the largest one) of Captive Government, but they do nothing to establish their exclusivity.
They are not conflated, and that's the point. My definition of captive is more expansive than yours because it does not artificially narrow the words in the definition to one exclusive meaning.
At the same time, I proposed an alternative distinction for the TED government code to get around the problem I observed from the errata, which ended up making TO's reliant on relic tech and TED TO's at the same time.
In the first case, I was simply using the definition of Captive to point out additional scenarios where it applies.
In the second, I was adding to the book definition of TED in an attempt to make it distinct.
Then, I pointed out that as a practical matter, it was unlikely that a small group of people would be able to take over an entire world and rule it without the population having any other recourse in a true interstellar society, which is why I'm not surprised to see that the Marches captive governments aren't of this type.
In the end, our differences appear to be those of definition, thus rendering them largely irreconcilable to the extent that the sources do not determine things. I presume, given the length of this thread and the fact that you haven't already, that you are unable to establish that "outside" means solely "offworld," that "group" means only "authority" and so on.
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LeperColony
Traveller Card Game Dev Team
I don't know what the current state of the errata is, or even if the version linked bears any resemblance to the final produced version (if indeed there is one).
It shouldn't be a surprise that the errata was not used to generate the initial TNE universe since, by definition, errata is changes that come after the product.
The errata does state that it represents the direction GDW was going in before it closed, and elsewhere in the thread Don says that he got it from Frank's notes.
Starviking
SOC-13
And yet the errata matches word-for-word one unofficially suggested by HIWG members on the TML several months before the Mark 1 Mod 1 version of TNE was released to correct problems with the first version. Why would GDW, over two years later want to release an update for an outdated version of the rules, rather than the current one they'd been using?
Also, I think it's Don's notes, and I think they're in error.
(Sorry for the brief reply - busy, busy, busy day!)
And I take it you can't find any examples of captive world governments that doesn't answer to offworld authorities. Simple logic says a local group isn't an outside group.
We've reached the point where I could answer you by cutting and pasting from old posts. All government codes deals with how the goverment functions. It's not about where the people who run the government is from. It's about how the goverment works.
Yeah, I'll retract that one. You can use the same term to describe different things. You just weren't doing it in this case. You were describing a population, not a government. A population can't be a captive government, because a population isn't any kind of government (Even an Athenian Democracy doesn't include the entire population).
If you want, assume I used 'group' instead of 'authority'. It doesn't affect my argument one little bit.
No, it's not. A government is captive if it answers to an outside group. How it is formed doesn't affect that. Some hows are more common than others, that's all.
Montezuma is not a world labeled as a TED that is described as something other than a dictator. It's labeled as something other than a TED but shares many of the charateristics of one. If anything, Seacost is mislabeled the other way.
Yes. But if the competing for control aspect was germane, the rules would provide a different government code for balkanized worlds where the nations weren't competing for control. Since it only provides one code for balkanized worlds the defining characteristic has to be that no central ruling authority exists and the rest of the definition is moot.
My suggestion would be to drop the 'D' part of TED and just add 'TE' to the comment field of all technologically elevated governments.
Hans
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As a side note: MGT also provides for multiple governments outside of Type 7 "Balkanized" governments. MGT CRB p.173. Note also it says Government is the "dominant" government...
The various factions may or may not be governments of their own. It's clear that the Gov't 7 in MGT is made of the same kinds of factions as all others, but with a minimum of 2 factions... So those factions can in fact be separate governments.
ISTR that MT WBH also provided for separate sub-planetary governments outside type 7 as well...
Multiple governments thus is not the discerning quality.
The UN could be said to be the Terran Government at present... there is no current major war, all significant governmental bodies are members, and it exercises (very limited) governmental functions including criminal and commercial courts...
So, is Earth at present Balkanized with several major factions and each with high uniformity of law, or a loose republic, with a low uniformity of law?
I think you're interpreting the text to mean more than it can bear. The other factions it talks about don't seem to be sovereign nations. Can they actually be governments of their own? The text talks of rival political parties, cultural groups, religions, rebels, "and so forth" but it doesn't talk of rival nations. It also says that these rival factions have " 'minigovernments' " not governments. Note the quote marks. It doesn't seem to make much sense either way. If it does mean what you think it means, it is rather flawed. A maximum of four countries on a balkanized world? Perhaps it actually means that the nations on a balkanized world will be split into two to four alliances.
Not that I can find. You only roll for multiple governments for balkanized worlds. All the others get one government (except those with Gov 0, which doesn't get any).
So the defining characteristic of a balkanized world isn't that it's balkanized? That doen't make sense to me.
Hans
Balkanized inherently implies hostility of the subunits, if not outright warfare. Namely because the various balkan states have been at war more than peace throughout their histories.
And MGT explicitly says to roll a separate government type for each "faction." It does stop short of saying that they're autonomous, but given that balkanized worlds merely have MORE factions, not different factions... that's pretty conclusive that the factions may (not must, but may) be separate governments.
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So what label do you put on a world that is divided into several peaceful nations?
EDIT: Note that WBH explicitly allows multiple governments only for balkanized worlds.
Hans
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