I don't think it's so easy to conclude that TNE was a priori a bad idea. Its release coincided with my largely leaving active role-playing (for unrelated reasons), so I mostly read it as interesting background material. And while I never considered Virus itself to be at all plausible, I liked the effects of knocking the orderly system of the Imperium into chaos. As Littlefinger notes in Game of Thrones, chaos is a ladder. One of my ongoing problems with the 3I is that in anything like a consistent vision of an empire with thousands of member worlds, there was little room for large-scale adventure. Real adventure happens on the edge -- the edge of civilization, the edge of disaster, or whatever. TNE put Traveller on the edge, and there was suddenly scope for players to act as heroes or villains on a scale that was seldom plausible in the 3I. Crudely put, it made space opera work in Traveller.

I think if I'd been in creative control at GDW, I'd have stuck with the rebellion timeline, and let it become a bloody, destructive, and long civil war. That provides enough of an edge to support grand-scale adventure. I would not have added Virus, which transformed the setting a bit too much, in my view. But I definitely understand what GDW was trying to do.

On Thu, Apr 4, 2019 at 1:25 PM Phil Pugliese (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:

AMAZING!
Too bad it didn't make up for all the folks like me that it drove away.
Guess GDW figured they already had us on 'the hook' so it didn't matter what they did.

On Wednesday, April 3, 2019, 8:52:23 PM MST, Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

On 04Apr2019 1142, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) wrote:
> Which, of course, is why 'Virus' was such a crappy idea!Which is why
> the TML of that time resounded with quite a few posts expressing
> outrage.So much so, that LWiseman, who had made the initial
> disclosure, felt compelled to post his infamous, "Gentleman, we know
> what we're doing!" post.As it turned out, that really only meant that
> GDW was too far gone to recognize that they had opted for suicide.All
> the post-mortem excuses blaming anything & everything else
> notwithstanding, 'Virus' was a terrible, terrible decision.

It's been working for me as the backstory for a TNE campaign for getting
on for 15 years now, not considering all the TNE games I ran in the 90s.
Good to know that my players and I have been having badwrongfun all
these years.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief

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