I agree that likely is 'the nature of the beast'... yet.... if the jump drive can be a black box just judged by its external function (not internal logic or mechanics), then so can a game product or book be judged similarly (by the output, not the causes)... ;0)

Oh, BTW, big fan of Victoria!

TomB
(Ottawa)

On Sun, Jun 21, 2020 at 12:58 PM David Johnson <xxxxxx@zarthani.net> wrote:
Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:

> But as we see here (and with one of Roddenberry's own inventions, the transporter - which he created to serve the needs of the story, getting the crew into the action without having to pay for expensive footage of shuttles launching, landing, etc every time the crew left and returned to the ship), leaving something completely /un/defined, and/or pulling new capabilities for it out of your ass to solve some problem and then never mentioning or using them again, even when they could and logically should fix a later problem, is also Bad Storytelling (or Setting/Game Design).

Indeed, but what's also often going on is subsequent writers--in original Trek-era episodic television often with just a matter of days to prepare--working with existing material created by others. (D.C. Fontana couldn't catch ~everything~!)

That's been going on with Traveller--admittedly, often with a bit more time to prepare--for over four decades now.

In other words, not so much "bad storytelling / setting / game design" as, perhaps, "the nature of the beast."

I once wrote a story where an editor came back months and months after it was submitted for publication pointing out an inconsistency: asking why the autochthon name of a prominent landmark began with a "th" sound even though I'd written that the autochthon's mouths didn't permit them to make that sound. Turns out I'd named the landmark in a very early draft, long before I'd gotten to the bit about the autochthon's verbal limitations and it never occurred to me to adjust the name of the taken-for-granted-at-that-point landmark.

Thank goodness for that editor! (Though, of course, with Traveller, now even the editors have come to the effort long after the original creators of much of the material.)

One technique I've adopted to guard against this sort of thing it to try to present material from the point-of-view of someone "in the milieu." That leaves an opportunity for a subsequent, different point-of-view to present a different take of the same material. That seems both more "realistic" and a convenient way to recover from oversights. ;)

Cheers,

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

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