On Jul 24, 2015, at 6:12 PM, Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:

> Like I said in the immediately preceding thread:  one of the "problems" a GM must understand and deal with in any SF game is that pretty much any mechanism for pushing spaceships around makes a great weapon under the right circumstances, and PCs (being PCs) will try to use such weapons against people they don't like.  Nuke-hardening your plots and antagonists becomes essential.
>

Nuke-hardening your plots is one choice. It even happens to be mine. But when I GM Traveller, I usually end up being accused of wanting to run an elaborate physics simulation, not a role playing game. Many people seem to be more happy with a handwavium solution, some sort of magical drive that pushes things like spaceships around without being "dangerous" as in dangerous to a neighborhood or a city. One should be thinking of Niven's "The Ethics of Madness". When I end up playing in one of these handwavium settings, I sometime wonder aloud where we get the unicorn blood needed to lubricate the drive.

-- Chris