gridlore: Doug looking off camera with a grin (Penguin - Exploding)
Douglas Berry ([personal profile] gridlore) wrote2007-01-03 05:42 pm
Entry tags:

You thought Virus was bad?

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.

[identity profile] pompe.livejournal.com 2007-01-04 08:37 pm (UTC)(link)
The attitude of some people, both canon purists and rabid recreationists on the TML and the flood of noise (or low content if not real noise) scared me off the list quickly long ago. Endless threads became fist-fights over minutiae and it didn't help some people seemed to have far too much spare time to devote to insulting others or simply overwhelm the lists with their personal hot-button topics.

Leave it and share your knowledge somewhere else, like on this journal. There's no point in staying in a place where you are being insulted.