On 6/20/2020 3:49 PM, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:

>     Keen insight here (including the Roddenberry tag).
>
>
> I tried to find Rodenberry's Axiom, but Google and DuckDuckGo give me
> blank stares.

 From memory, it's essentially "people today don't constantly remind
their co-workers how automobiles work, so they wouldn't do that in the
future."  It's a justification and caution against stuffing clumsy "As
You Know, Bob" exposition into a story.

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).

--
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Kelly St. Clair
xxxxxx@efn.org