On 7/5/2020 9:37 AM, Catherine Berry wrote:
> Is something wrong here? Or are you just wanting a break?
>
> On Sun, Jul 5, 2020, 08:27 Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org
> <mailto:xxxxxx@efn.org>> wrote:
>
>     Starting to think I might need to take a leave of absence from the list.
>     Or just leave.

I think it's simply that I'm tired of Traveller.  After forty years of
reading it, thirty years of talking about it, and - sad irony - damn
little time actually playing it.

Traveller has gone through so many editions, and accumulated so much
cruft and often contradictory canon, much (if not all) of it based on
arbitrary and often short-sighted decisions made on the basis of
writers' personal preference, "cool" ideas stolen outright from favorite
book(s), and focus on how to get the PCs into criminal activities and
skirmish wargames against natives of various (usually much lower) tech
levels.  I've made a study of it - I can reel off "facts" about
"history" from Grandfather to Hard Times, and "space" from the Solomani
Rim to the Core Expeditions - and it's brought me enjoyment... in the
past.  And that's the thing; for me, at least, it's come to symbolize
the past.

To me, at least, the game and OTU have become a period piece - a time
capsule or snapshot of the last century's science fiction, scientific
knowledge, and first fumbling experiments in RPG design.  The clunky
rules and bits of setting that we spend so much time discussing (often
the /same/ bits, over and over and OVER, through the years) are now
decades old, and the source material is even older.  In some contexts, I
still find what I call "70s Futures" charming - rooms full of computers,
with CRT displays in black and white (or green, or amber), rocker
switches and little blinking lights everywhere, jackets and mustaches
and sideburns for the men and oddly-colored/styled hair for the women,
and everyone in bellbottoms - but when I try to take them at all
seriously, as a vision of how things might be in "the Far Future", I
just can't anymore.

It's 2020.  We're two decades into the 21st, and the cyberpunk dystopia
has, ironically, become more real than anyone really imagined or
expected.  Twenty years past TWILIGHT 2000, and the war that
(thankfully) never came.  When the LBBs were written, the Voyagers had
yet to reach and send back images of the gas giants and moons of our own
system; now we're detecting, or at least, inferring, the presence of
planets in dozens of others (and having to throw out at least half of
Book 6 as a result).  Computers were giant things owned by corporations
and universities, and telephones had dials; now I have a little flat
brick that fits in my hand and does both, whose ranking on the "1bis"
scale I can only begin to guess at.  But we still don't have fusion,
'cause it turns out that fusion is hard, and we still don't have AI,
'cause we keep moving the goalposts (and also it turns out the stuff we
thought was easy, for us, is hard for machines and vice versa).

Maybe it's the burnout talking, but to me, being into Traveller these
days is like being proud of one's complete collection of AMAZING or
GALAXY (all of which are now up on the Internet Archive and accessible
anywhere any time).  Like, cool, I guess... but what does that have
anything to do with /this/ century, or the one after that?  Between my
Star Wars/Trek fandom, or my love of synthwave (80s music being made
right now), I worry I spend too much time in the past as is.  Do I need
to spend any more picking apart the dodgy and/or outdated assumptions of
a game that's almost as old as I am (and just as full, it sometimes
seems, of the earnest mistakes of ignorant youth)?  A game that, again,
I have few prospects and little interest in actually /playing/ (or
attempting to)?  Or should I let it go, and try to move on?

--
---------------
Kelly St. Clair
xxxxxx@efn.org