Re: OT Genres & Backgrounds was GW

>I think the biggest problem *I* have with the background material for
game
>systems like WH40K (whick I've never played but watched a lot of games)
and
>Battletech (Which I played WAY too much) is not how dark or evil the
forces
>may or may not be - it's how little say I have over what the background
is
>like.	It's constricting.  That's the beauty of the generic nature of
GZG.
>Whether you play your take on a canon power, a non-canon power, or not
even
>in the Tuffleyverse, it's UP TO YOU.  The tone can bew as dark or light
or
>as many shades in between as you like.  You can fashion your power as
>despotic, enlightened, heroic, villainous, and as idealistic,
optimistic,
>realistic, pessimistic, or Mystic as you want.  I grew tired of having
to
>decide if I wanted to be a merc, a Davion, a Clanner, etc.... Now I can
be a
>Cascadian, and define what that means, or a NAC loyalist, or a Cylon,
or a
>Klingon, or a Moron...... OK, that one may be unavoidable.  But the
rest is
>up to me.

I assume Morons are from Moria, the heavy-gravity mining planet....?? 
;-)

Thanks for the comments, Brian, it pretty much sums up what I have
intended
all along. Aside from the obvious problems of the lack of eight brains
and
sixteen arms (or seven clones), lack of 36-hour days etc., this is why
I've
resisted the temptation to make the canon background too detailed or
intrusive - the more that gets published and adopted into canon, the
tighter things get defined and the less freedom the players have (IMHO).
This is why I don't intend to detail the places, wars or events of the
timeline TOO deeply - if you want to have a Battle of New Six Mile
Bottom*
in your Third Solar War campaign, then you can do so without some tw*t
(insert vowel of your choice) saying "but there's no such
colony/world/battle/whatever in the timeline, so you can't do that...."

You can't please all of the gamers all of the time, I know, and there is
a
lot more we COULD publish (and may do!) without tying things down too
much,
but I hope never to lose sight of the generic nature of the systems.

Jon (GZG)

* FYI, Six Mile Bottom is a real village not that far from here..... ;-)
>
>Brian B2
>
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