You thought Virus was bad?

[gridlore]

I am this close to unsubscribing from the Traveller Mailing List and sending my Traveller books to starving gamers in China.

Let's be clear: I have an encyclopedic knowledge of Traveller; especially about the Third Imperium setting. There is a mass of information written by dozens of writers at numerous companies over the past three decades. Some of it is contradictory, some has been overwritten by later products. We refer to this mass as canon. There are some things that have defined Traveller from the beginning: interstellar jumps take 168 hours +/-10%, The longest possible controlled jump is 6 parsecs. Those have been in every rule set (all six of them.) Also important is that the speed of information is the speed of travel.

Playing with the setting is a long-established tradition. We even have an acronym for it: IMTU "In My Traveller Universe." If your version of the setting differs from the official one, using this tag warns people that things are different. But changing the basic assumptions of the game will bring comment.

In response, folks like me have been called "strutting peacocks" and compared to screaming chimps.

Screw them.

Comments

[hasturcubed.livejournal.com]

If you don't mind a question from a lurker...is this the usual flaming over conflicting views of the Traveller universe (and lack of subject header etiquette), or is this about an official change, ala Virus? I haven't kept up with T5 for awhile.

[kengr]

Neither. Someone was posting about the rights people had under the Imperium. Some other people pointed out that he seemed to be transplanting current ideas of "human rights" into the far future.

Then some folks pointed out items in official background stuff that contradicted his. view.

He (or others on his side, I was only paying casual attention) then proceeded to claim that those were minor, or not really canon, and so on.

At some point "you're an idiot if you think that" type comments started flowing.

Alas, I contributed to part of it by challenging someone on some very off the wall comments. (I try not to respond to this person because he doesn't debate, he just makes statements that contain worlds semi-related to what you said and then says that's what you said and argues against *that*)

I've quit responding to him after wasting entirely too many hours trying to reason with him.

I *really* need a better killfile equivalent for my mailer...