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Old 10-12-2017, 05:47 AM
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StainlessSteelCynic StainlessSteelCynic is offline
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And I pretty much agree with all you've said here Kato, I am complete agreement that canon material suffers from problems, misunderstandings, lack of knowledge and contradictions, some minor, some glaringly bad.

There is absolutely nothing wrong in having your own opinion on how the game history could, would or should have gone down and there's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to change it to make it more suited to your game group or to your own tastes or to your own beliefs.
As mentioned, I just get a little irked when the efforts of the original designers are belittled by people who have their own opinions about how it would really have happened when it seems they never stop to consider what the original design goals were.

The original designers were not striving for a perfect simulation of WW3, they were retroactively creating the history from the basis of another game. They did this so that they could create a military style game without constraining the PCs to total military control, they were trying to make a game where the PC group could go off on adventures like other RPGs and were also trying to make a game world that would still have the opportunities for adventure once the PCs left Europe for North America.
They weren't trying to create a game where the players play out the Cold War of NATO versus WTO in a fight to the death. They already had boardgames for that.
Given those three known concepts, I find criticizing the lack of realism misses the point of what they were creating.

I do not particularly advocate for changing people's use of words to convey their beliefs however. If someone feels that a particular aspect is bad or even wrong, there is nothing wrong or incorrect in that, I just find the statements that the GDW designers dropped the ball misses the point of what they were trying to achieve and by inference even feels like a bit of an insult towards them.
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