How dark is the future of the Morrow Project

[stormlion1]

Which is why I think things were a set up and Bruce Morrow had other plans for those teams. He knew such a small sized group couldn't really do anything but in the future when there were less people they would be a whole more effective.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by stormlion1

Which is why I think things were a set up and Bruce Morrow had other plans for those teams. He knew such a small sized group couldn't really do anything but in the future when there were less people they would be a whole more effective.

But why are you assuming "such a small sized group"? There are no canon answers as to the size of TMP, only answers as to the size of specific parts of it, and if those parts are extrapolated to cover the nation then it would suggest that there are tens of thousands of people in the project - a reasonable number for the tasks assigned!

There is the issue that the support structure is wholly inadequate, but the published material in 3rd edition was pretty thin and gives every evidence of simply having been poorly and perhaps inconsistently written. This is not unique to TMP, most fiction franchises run into this problem, it comes from putting specific objectives (like "exciting game play" and "meeting deadlines") ahead of creating a coherent fictional universe.

If you want to reinvent Morrow as a villain, go ahead, but I prefer to keep the tone of the game intact and change the details that are inconsistent with that tone.

[stormlion1]

Eh, maybe I'm just seeing a conspiracy were there is none. But then again when I look at the teams themselves, they sheer amount of total fails that happen you almost can't see not being deliberate you have to wonder.
Then again you can also see it as a game written by people who didn't serve in the military or didn't understand just what would be needed to actually work.

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by stormlion1

Eh, maybe I'm just seeing a conspiracy were there is none. But then again when I look at the teams themselves, they sheer amount of total fails that happen you almost can't see not being deliberate you have to wonder.
Then again you can also see it as a game written by people who didn't serve in the military or didn't understand just what would be needed to actually work.

Kevin Dockery is a Viet Nam vet...... I don't know if Richard Tucholka is or isn't, or for that matter Robert Sadler.

Richard is very approachable and I think Tri Tac games will be at GenCon this year too.

All the modules written by Timeline? I don't know anything about any of them. Joeseph Benedetto is a recent member here and could maybe answer that.

Most of the failures are simply a plot device to explain why the PCs are out there on their own.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Most of the failures are simply a plot device to explain why the PCs are out there on their own.

So much of the entire setting is just a "plot device to explain why the PC's are out on their own". It is an old and common gotta-finish-fast writing mistake - they needed a specific effect, fudged the cause, and hoped that no one will notice or care. You can see it all over the place, especially in the new Star Trek movies - nothing in those films makes sense, they even allude to that in the beginning of the second, but they hope that the fast pace and lens flare will keep you from noticing. RPG's don't have the advantage of fast pace and lens flare, so the oddities and apparent mistakes are all the more glaring.

[stormlion1]

Or they left up to us to figure out down the road and debate on a forum twenty some odd years later...

[kato13]

My biggest reason for needing to come up with a realistic failure scenario is that if I ever pulled my gaming group back together, they would ask questions and if they ever get to a point where they get answers (inside prime for example) I want the best possible answers.

Due to their real world jobs they have seen real world failures (one is a forensic accountant specializing in huge corporate bankruptcies). They will accept that failure can happen. However if their characters chose to give up everything for a project at a minimum I would expect they would have needed to have some confidence in the planners.

For example how did the project get Phoenix team to join if they could not handle basics concepts of redundancy? Phoenix are portrayed as pretty sharp dudes who would have not just accept "oh we have everything covered".

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by stormlion1

Eh, maybe I'm just seeing a conspiracy were there is none. But then again when I look at the teams themselves, they sheer amount of total fails that happen you almost can't see not being deliberate you have to wonder.
Then again you can also see it as a game written by people who didn't serve in the military or didn't understand just what would be needed to actually work.

Those are the two options: a great execution of a terribly flawed world, or a terribly flawed execution of a great world. Personally, I think TMP falls into the latter category, and I think that is the general perception of the game within the larger community. The authors simply did not spend the time to create a solid foundation for the game, and the game suffered for it. At the end of the day, they were doing this for money, and it is usually better to get paid something for a half-assed job than to produce a masterpiece at a net loss.

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

But why are you assuming "such a small sized group"? There are no canon answers as to the size of TMP, only answers as to the size of specific parts of it, and if those parts are extrapolated to cover the nation then it would suggest that there are tens of thousands of people in the project - a reasonable number for the tasks assigned!

There is the issue that the support structure is wholly inadequate, but the published material in 3rd edition was pretty thin and gives every evidence of simply having been poorly and perhaps inconsistently written. This is not unique to TMP, most fiction franchises run into this problem, it comes from putting specific objectives (like "exciting game play" and "meeting deadlines") ahead of creating a coherent fictional universe.

If you want to reinvent Morrow as a villain, go ahead, but I prefer to keep the tone of the game intact and change the details that are inconsistent with that tone.

Prime Base was half staffed when it died, CG Seattle is 79 persons, the AG base is 8 persons, the manned commo base was six persons........
There isn't any indications that the Project had thousands of people.

How do you get brilliant, productive, healthy, well adjusted people to give up their lives, and families to be cryogenically frozen and help in the recovery of a nuclear war?

That is a tough sell. I have always believed the Project has lots of equipment and very few people.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Prime Base was half staffed when it died, CG Seattle is 79 persons, the AG base is 8 persons, the manned commo base was six persons........
There isn't any indications that the Project had thousands of people.

Without knowing the rest of the Project organization or the demands expected to be placed upon them, the staff of no one facility is going to say much about the size of the Project. The indication, the only real indication we see of the size of TMP, is CG Seattle. That group was the frontline (and potentially vast bulk of) support for the people living in that area. Their area of responsibility was "the Puget Sound area and Seattle in particular", an ambiguous term that could mean as few as 500,000 people (the ~1987 population of Seattle), or as many as 3 million (2/3 of the 1987 Washington state population), or as I prefer, the 1.4 million 1987 residents of King County.

If we call the population they were meant to serve X, accept 242.3 million as the US population in 1987m and assume that the civilian-to-team member ration in Seattle is typical for the US, then the "group-level" staff of TMP is simply 79 * (242.3 million / X). Varying X from 0.5-3.0 million gives us a group-level Morrow roster between 6,381 and 38,283. A roster of less than a thousand becomes patently absurd by simple math, unless you concoct some reason why Seattle would have a substantially higher-than-normal concentration of team members, something that I do not believe is supported in 3rd edition and probably has not been addressed in 4th edition.

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

How do you get brilliant, productive, healthy, well adjusted people to give up their lives, and families to be cryogenically frozen and help in the recovery of a nuclear war?

To a certain extent, that can already be answered by recruiters for the military, Peace Corps, and clergy - many people are willing to sacrifice a lotfor what they perceive is a worthy cause. And considering that TMP only had to recruit between 250 and 2000 people a year out of the entire population that should not have been as hard as you think.

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

I have always believed the Project has lots of equipment and very few people.

So have I, but then I cannot see any reason why TMP would be cash constrained in any way - even if supporting the financial health of the project was only 10% of Morrow's time, they should have still held so much innovation and competitive advantage (even in a parallel-universes scenario) that Project funding should be at least in the hundreds of billions. Recruiting people should always have been the hardest part.