Thomas Jones-Low <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

> Marc Miller wrote a Governments in Traveller article which made this exact point. The design of the government codes was the ground view, what the PCs would see while interacting with world.

Yeah, I've read that piece from ~High Passage~ #5 but I don't buy it. For example, off-worlders would be unlikely to recognize the difference between a "Charismatic Dictator" and a "Non-Charismatic Leader" because much of the public messaging they would see and hear would appear the same. (The difference would be in how the people of the world ~interpreted~ that rhetoric--and people living under a dictatorship will generally be reluctant to speak freely to off-worlders.) Likewise, I would not expect off-worlders to be able to draw a distinction between "Participating Democracy" and "Representative Democracy"--or between "Representative Democracy" and "Self-Perpetuating Oligarchy" for that matter.

Still, it's a useful bit of retcon, which leads us to consider something we might better term "Officialdom Type" instead of "Government Type." Put that together with Law Level and you have a handy, useful shorthand for off-worlders (but it tells us very little about what Marc may have "recognized" about governance in the "real-world").

Cheers,

David
--
"Well, we don't use the word government very much. We talk a lot about authority and sovereignty, and I'm afraid we burn entirely too much powder over it, but government always seems to us like sovereignty interfering in matters that don't concern it. As long as sovereignty maintains a reasonable semblance of good public order and makes the more serious forms of crime fairly hazardous for the criminals, we're satisfied." - Lucas Trask (H. Beam Piper), ~Space Viking~