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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 3456652" data-attributes="member: 9225">I think one of the big differences is that the 'Verse is set up so that you can't really go and carve out a place of your own with your money or otherwise gain real prestige. Improving your lot is possible in Traveller, but in the 'Verse? That's not possible without changing the setting. Plus, the 'Verse reflects the bizarre cognitive dissonance in popular culture about glorifying the Confederacy without acknowledging it's pining for one of the most despicable political movements in human history, and Traveller's topped by twee 1950s space opera conventions.Certainly, the same thing is true in The Riddle of Steel, for instance, but the fact that NPCs are also capable of killing you dead makes the advantage of Fightin' debatable. It's kind of like asking why anybody would stockpile conventional arms in the nuclear era. The answer is easy: People don't want to take their lives into their hands all the time.OTOH, the power of Fightin' means that even though firefight MAD is there, you can also scale back NPCs in order to emulate what goes on in the movie. It's kind of significant, as it shows that Fightin' *is* common in the millieu -- so why not take it? It's no offense against the setting.I know; my typing hands don't.OMG! The thing that I defined as happening happened! What a frickin' shock! Er, no. There is no sense that personal agency -- even in the form of a fictitious identity -- is ever lost. It's just kicked up from character control to a meta-narrative. And that sucks.Wash's death is the dirty, filthy, Sim interruption to the game that violates the Social Contract, Shared Imagination Space and lots of other Capitalized Terms. It's deprotagonization on the hoof and in a game, should probably involve some gnashing of teeth and taking a break -- and after that lack of surety and safety, people will remember it, because they actually *felt* something. They didn't just talk about pretend people feeling things or gushed about how terribly clever their interjection into the flow of events was.Sure, but that's a technique that doesn't really require any particular system. But within a system, there are ways of going about it that can model genuine sentimental reactions, or not.Unknown Armies strikes me as a good model. Combat is high risk and affects in-character play, and dice only get rolled for non-routine tasks, and maintain a high element of chance.</blockquote>

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