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Message: <blockquote data-quote="coyote6" data-source="post: 4772775" data-attributes="member: 1225">Really, to kill off civilization, you do need to have several improbable events pile up on top of each other (at least I hope you need that, otherwise we're in trouble in real life), so I don't have much problem suspending disbelief to allow various scenarios. Sure, there are some scenarios I would find improbable -- but since the point of the game is having a post-apocalyptic setting, you kind of need to have the apocalypse beforehand, no matter how unlikely the apocalypse might be. Of course, I'm sure one could come up with something that seems more probable than what the T2k13 authors came up with, but it would be tough to do and hit their timeline. I'm assuming they chose 2013 because it's post-"end of Mayan calendar", and thus the next most apocalyptic date. If you pushed your apocalypse out further, you'd have much more room to maneuver in terms of suspension of disbelief. (OTOH, I guess if you add current economic crisis + worst-case influenza pandemic + peak oil + something else -- upheval in some ICBM-armed government, asteroid strike, whatever -- you could get to WWIII really fast.)I kind of think that a Black Swan-fueled doomsday scenario actually makes it easier to swallow, in some ways. Yeah, it's unlikely, but if it were likely, it would be predictable, and that's the point of a Black Swan -- you can't really predict it beforehand.</blockquote>