On 6/20/2020 5:09 PM, Kelly St. Clair wrote: > 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). > (adding on a bit) You don't have to (and probably shouldn't) spend five minutes/paragraphs every show/book explaining to the audience how it works, but the author/game master/showrunner SHOULD know and have worked it all out, so that when someone (a player, another writer, etc) asks, you can give confident and non-stupid answers which, ideally, won't end up breaking other things when taken to their logical conclusions. -- --------------- Kelly St. Clair xxxxxx@efn.org
