Exactly! Many of us have spent more than four decades being willing to overlook that one bit of keen insight into the ~game play~ intentions of the creators. It shouldn't surprise us, given our dedication to that oversight, that we can't "make all the pieces fit" now.

I start by looking at the most commonly understood, well defined option. 'Game play intentions' of each of us aren't necessarily common like how we all understand a kg or a Joule. And...

Agreed. It presents quite a challenge.

... here's the other problem: We don't quite know what the intentions were (maybe they didn't exactly as those involved have tracked in different directions over the years). We don't have access to those whys for the most part.

Also true.

So how can we really discuss what it is or should be to be more consistent with the rest of the game when we lack the ability to frame the discussion as you suggest?

I'm interested to see how you would arrive at a discourse with the aforementioned challenges even to be able to agree on what 'game play intentions' look like.

I think this means starting with a discussion that doesn't begin with a statement like "seems that the 'physics' of 'macguffin X' don't work" but rather with something more like "here's a place where the ~game play~ intentions aren't clear." The first approach leads directly to "science" while the second approach leads to a discussion of potential ~game play~ implications.

I'm not entirely against your approach, but it starts from a far harder place to build towards a language and a discourse than science and engineering as we know them.

Absolutely agree, but just because it's ~easier~ to jump to "scientific simulation" that may not be the most appropriate--or effective--impulse. We're talking about a science-fiction ~game~ here, not the "reverse engineering" of some bit of ~actual~ technology that's been brought back to us by a time machine or discovered in the wreckage of a crashed alien starship. . . .

Sometimes. I don't know about your players, but the majority of mine are tech or science people. They want to know how things work. That may be not a normal thing for other groups. Even our history major though wants to understand the in-game logics surrounding parts of the game to know how to use them to advantage.

That's your group's ~game play~ then. Nothing wrong with this sort of focus. I just think there are enough markers, especially in the early material, to indicate that this wasn't the primary focus of Traveller's creators. They came to Traveller as war-gamers, not as scientists and engineers (or even as science-fiction writers).

Wait a minute here... they spend that many column inches, designer time, etc. on very detailed physical construction systems for ships and vehicles (when just having a good assortment might do quite well).... and that has less impact than time and variance by version? I think that'd be a hard thesis to prove.

I'm not trying to prove any thesis but when you say "they" here you're not talking about a group of people who could sit around a table at a pub and have a discussion. You're talking about hundreds, perhaps thousands of folks, many of whom have never met each other, working on different bits, with different market incentives, over the course of four decades.

This is where the analogy to the episodic television format of ~Star Trek~ writing is so apt. Sure, there was a "writers' guide" (of sorts) but some writers looked at something like the "transporter" as a convenient stage direction prop while others may have looked at it as a fascinating bit of technology which had some interesting implications for storytelling.

Stuff like that has also been happening among Traveller's myriad "creators" for more than four decades now.

Each, not just one, of these generations has spent a lot of time re-inventing (and re-re-re-inventing, etc) these masses of tables and cross references in aide of producing something that you suggest could have been entirely 'for gamplay' vs. 'for detail'?...Why spend all that time pouring into those system and ship builds then, time after time, version to version....?

I'm certain many of these follow-on folks were just as invested in "scientific simulation" as your gaming group seems to be. I'm just suggesting that, in some ways, that perspective is a bit misplaced in a game setting that began with a focus on two-dimensional space and small bands of impoverished adventures wandering around in the remote frontiers of a huge galactic civilization.

Do those intentions exist?

One imagines so, but we have near zero access to them. We do have the *rules* they actually wrote and the things they envision playing a big part in the game (travelling, I suspect by Jump mostly). The rules are crunchy, complex, and detail oriented, not 'gameplay oriented'.

Not saying there is no value in looking at the gameplay side, but the artifacts we have (all these systems of building stuff) seem to be strongly focused on some sort of factual basis....

I think it just reflects the fact that follow-on creators faced the same challenges you've outlined--and that, perhaps, given production deadlines and such, they didn't have the time and space--and consensus-building opportunities--to develop a deep sense of the original ~game play~ intentions (or were labouring under the direction of a ~different~ set of intentions at the time).

My issue isn't of the value of this if it could be usefully accomplished. Militating against that are the lack of direct access to the minds of the designers (and a strong memory which may not be available even if you did have the right people alive and willing) and thus the current leading into subjective matters that can never be resolved due to not having any real data.

Science may be obvious, it may not be fully satisfying, but at least it has more of a factual presence.

It's not that science is "more factual" than those original ~game play~ intentions; it's just that, as you've laid out, it is more easily ~accessible~ to a wider group of folks. Nothing wrong with that but it does suggest that when "the 'science' doesn't work" the problem isn't with the ~game~ (material) but rather with the approach being used to "make sense of it."

Each time we run into a place where "the 'science' doesn't work" our response should be ~here~ is a place where the ~game play~ intentions aren't clear! Let's talk about what those intentions might have been (instead of running for our log tables).

Now, if you wanted to argue about what it 'should' do for a good game (plot/gameplay focused choices), you would immediately end up in a discussion (or argument) of what those objectives should be. Once you had some consensus, if that were feasible, you could then use those objectives as a good point to begin discussing what the approach was in game design to get to the desirable goals. 

I'd love to see those sorts of discussions showing up in my inbox from the TML every day. . . .

Cheers,

David