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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agemegos" data-source="post: 4487705" data-attributes="member: 18377">By the same token a chessboard does what is needed for the game to work, and as an abstract game chess is a lot more successful than realistic wargames. Realistic terrain is fiddly to represent, and getting all the units in each army to move and fight at once, making the outcomes of fights depend on the strength of the units, and all that stuff is complicated. Hundreds of millions of chess players find that it doesn't add much to game-play. But wargamers find that chess is so unrealistic that it just doesn't represent a battle.Your first Traveller game was set in the Spinward Marches, which is a fictional place. There can be no sense in the Spinward Marches that the astrography is just wrong. The first Traveller game I played in was set in Larry Niven's Known Space, which set in familiar space very near to Sol. Most of the action twenty years of play in my homebrew space setting has set in systems within 125 light-years of Sol, in imagined versions of real places. Those places aren't in a two-dimensional universe: they just aren't. On a clear night you can see Tau Ceti, Delta Pavonis, Zeta Tucanae, Lambda Aurigae, and you can point out the locations of CD -40° 898, BD -0° 2944, and the rest. (Well, not all on the same night, but you get the point.) You can see that they are set in a three-dimensional space.Traveller's Solomani Rim is supposedly set in local space near Sol. But nearly all the familiar stars are missing, and Space is supposed to be flat, which I can see every night is just not true. You might as well ask me to play in a WWII RPG campaign in which the battles are fought on 8-by-8 square grids by knights and bishops and flying castles. Sure the gameplay is easier, but the suspension of disbelief is much, much harder.</blockquote>

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