David,

I understand well how we got to the various and disparate situations we acknowledge exist and I fault nobody (among other reasons, because fault is pointless to seek). That is not to say there aren't inconsistencies or information that isn't available to explain certain things. That's just what happens over time and with many cooks, as you and I agree.

I get that you prefer a very high level description in game-play terms, but the point that Kelly St. Clair made is really where my players would be coming at it from and thus why I think about these questions. The knowledge of how a thing works (not the black box itself most of the time, but the bits that feed in and out of it and how said black box can be used) in the game can offer new strategies or preclude them.  

At no point do I suggest your approach isn't valid for your group or groups who enjoy that level of detail (or looseness). If it seemed like I was arguing against your approach, I was only insofar as it didn't furnish the solutions I was seeking.

Tom



On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 10:31 PM David Johnson <xxxxxx@zarthani.net> wrote:
Tom Barclay <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

- What I have issues with:

  - various cannonical statements from THE creator and from others that were involved early that themselves lead to awkward questions in-universe.
  - with systems that don't align with one another in-universe.

Can we really expect these folks who have brought us so much fun for so many years to have consistently brought their "A game" every day for forty years? They couldn't have a "bad day" or a project where they "needed the money" or a licensee who did creative work but didn't aways follow directions well?

Last week I asked a subordinate to do a piece of work. I gave them lots of latitude but told them to be careful not to engage a colleague in another organization who often gets us off track. And yet, the ~first~ thing they did was engage that other colleague. . . .

We can't "undo" that engagement. We can't get back the time "wasted" doing it (or that will be "wasted" going forward trying to keep us on track). But the ~worst~ part is that now the dang jump drive rationale is going to be inconsistent! ;)

This is much the same concern as SF authors doing non-space-opera style of sci-fi writing have: 

You can usually have 1 or 2 McGuffins that defy our current understandings or imaginings of what is possible in a setting, but if  you do, you have to understand the corollaries and impacts that those have on how the created universe would unfold. If you don't consider those impacts well enough, you'll raise all sorts of questions about why any sane person or designer did not do X with that McGuffin when it was clearly a better solution (from what has been stated by the author or seems to be directly possible from the presence of that McGuffin).

Yes, this is a good rule-of-thumb for any ~single~ author, but even the best of them often break it, especially if their career spans four or more decades. But add in hundreds or thousands of ~other~ contributors and perhaps this simply isn't a reasonable expectation except for some big, over-arching themes. It's not "jump drive must work this way" but merely "communication cannot happen faster than the speed of travel."

I can live with an explanation (which contravenes past cannot and statements from the original creators) which said: 

"The jump drive is highly complex in its physics and few could understand its operations and nobody can really dumb that down except by choosing not to explain the internal mechanics and instead just understanding the inputs and outputs.
[snip]

What if the explanation went something like this: The jump drive is a game mechanic which enables travellers to get from one exotic location to another without otherwise being able to communicate with the other location. It has to be complicated enough that not just anyone can operate it--or fix it when it breaks--which might even mean sometimes that ~no one~ in the location where the travellers find themselves can fix it. And it has to be expensive enough to operate that ordinary folks who happen to be in possession of one need to keep moving in order to earn enough profit to keep it working and in something resembling decent repair. Oh, and it has to be able to replenish fuel in places that are so technologically impoverished that it can't be fixed or maintained there. And all of these things need to happen in ways that the travellers and referee don't spend the entire gaming session doing navigation, expense and fuel consumption calculations.

That's a sort of explanation that might be "handwavium" all the way down. . . .

Is it factual? Yes. Is it consistent? Mostly. Does it make for interesting game play? Seems to. Can it withstand decades of scrutiny by thousands of inconsistency-hunting fans? Very likely not.

The issue is when a creator is incomplete or contradictory in explaining the operations of the black box, then all sorts of blanks need filled in by players/GMs (sloppy) and the only basis to discuss those (not knowing what the creator wanted from gameplay in those areas) is some sort of science or ? (I can't imagine what else exactly).

The answer you're looking for is ~game play~. Your ~own~ game play. Imagine a scenario with some key element--something about music or archaeology or an alien religion or how to communicate with Shriekers--where neither you nor your players know anything about the actual subject at hand. You can still role-play it, can't you? Construct some reasonable die rolls modified by circumstances and some relevant PC abilities to determine success and, ~voila~, your safari ship's hunter has managed to "speak" Shrieker. It's all "squawk-tickle-zap-rub" but she manages to do it, barely.

Just because you--and your players--maybe can't make sense of jump drive yourselves doesn't mean that the PCs can't "make sense of it" ~themselves~ (just like none of us can actually speak Shrieker).

But I get it. That's not the sort of game you and your players like to play when it comes to the ("hard") "science" part of "science-fiction."

Sorry.

David
--
Victoria, British Columbia
48° 29' N, 123° 20' W

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