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I was with you until here. The Sapphire Guard is arguably less interested in defeating Xykon and saving the world than they are in preserving their oath. In many ways, the story of the Sapphire Guild shows the inherent limitations of a paladin order with respect to actually defending the world...

The Traveller setting (and to a certain extent game assumptions) is essentially a grab-bag of Campbellian science fiction (as in John Campbell, longtime editor of Astounding Science Fiction). Campbell's two biggest protoges were Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein (although he alienated both of...

When I first started playing Traveller years ago (using the little black books complete with the old map of the Spinward Marches) I was worried about the 2D nature of the map too. I made a system for representing 3D space pretty much like the one in the starmap you provide. And I found it just...

Well, this thread probably isn't evil, but I may be. I did go to law school after all.

When Elan (thought to be Nale) and Thog were imprisoned in Cliffport, they were to be put on trial, with the suggestion that they would be executed. Miko announced that the penalty for treason in the Sapphire City was death (although her evaluation of the situation that led her to kill Shojo was...

The threat is probably not evil. The threatened action, if actually carried out, would be.

That would be a cogent argument, except that it has been established that the crimes a BBEG is guilty of are generally punishable by death in the OotS universe. Hence, avoiding lawful authority and executing a sentence that would be in line with that which would otherwise be handed out by lawful...

The setting for Traveller was clearly heavily influenced by a number of "Golden Age" science fiction authors, plus a handful of others who carried on the same style despite writing in a later era (such as Niven and Pournelle). The setting owes a lot to Andre Norton (interstellar...

However, by perfectly legitimate metagame thinking, V determined that Kubota was, in fact, a villain guilty of capital crimes. Now you are confusing lawful with good. Executing "justice" without paying heed to legitimate authority is neither good nor evil, it is chaotic. The fact that V didn't...

Lawful is the operative word here. Killing the prisoner wasn't lawful, that doesn't make it evil. Sure you can. Easily in fact. The only reason to have a fair trial is to determine the guilt of the accused and determine sentence. Full stop. A trial isn't in and of itself a good-aligned thing...

An act can be a non-evil act, and yet not a good act. An act can be a good act, and yet not a lawful good act. An act can be a lawful good act, and yet not up to the standards of an order of paladins.

Except that, in the context of the established OotS universe, what V did was based on certainty. As V pointed out, Elan would not take someone prisoner unless they were a consequential villain who had committed heinous crimes. Remember, this is a universe where dramatic convention is not merely...

In a real sense, they are - the Sapphire Guards' oath is what caused most of the troubles to begin with.

No, it isn't. The only reason to take a criminal prisoner is to place them on trial. A trial exists so that one can determine the guilt of the accused and determine sentence. V determined, accurately (albeit via the unorthodox means of a metagame interpretation of Elan's action, which in the...

Piffle. Those statistics are utterly meaningless because of small sample sizes and the fact that most of them don't actually measure anything worthwhile. (For example, GWRBI and BARISP are useless for any purpose). Never mind the fact that none of them have been shown to correlate in any way...

Nitpick: Larry Niven is a science fiction author. David Niven is an actor. And you are completely correct about the Man-Kzin Wars, the setting has a not very well disguised version of the Kzin in the Aslan (think bipedal, honor obsessed, warlike, intelligent Lions). The Hivers are a little like...

Here's the thing about the ST movie - it is so ham-handed that any attempt at satire is simply lost. Kelly's Heroes works as satire. MASH works as satire. The ST movie just doesn't. Why? Because in the movies that work as satire they simply heightened the oddness of military organizations until...

The problem with the argument that the ST movie was a satire concerning the nature of war propaganda films is that the "satire" is so poorly done, because the military organization depicted is so ludicrously inept. It is tantamount to saying that the Keystone Cops are a satire of police work...

The movie was horrendous, even if you ignore the book entirely. A current modern armed service wouldn't send its troops into combat without armor, artillery and air support, and yet we are expected to believe that the best we can do in the future is a couple thousand idiots running around at...

Yep, that'd be me. Here's the thing, a lot of people say things like "he's a great player and great to have around, except that he cheats". To me, that's not a great player, or even an acceptable player. To me, that's like saying "he's a great guy to hang out with, except that he pees on the...