some thoughts on bruce

[natehale1971]

Originally Posted by StainlessSteelCynic

Personally, once I have the 4th edition I'll be purging any socio-political aspects of the Project from the game for two reasons.
1. Saving humanity from extinction is enough of a reason to convince people to join the Project. Some people don't actually need an appeal to patriotism to encourage them to help humanity - it just comes across as jingoistic, which leads me on to my second point.
2. Making the game so inwardly focused on the USA will definitely weaken its appeal to some new gamers, particularly those not from the US. RPGs have a global market and many of us not from the US aren't so interested in another game that is about playing American PCs doing the "mom and apple pie" thing for America. It's one part of the reason for the failure of 93 Games Studio's revision of Twilight: 2000.

Socio-Political aspect? I don't see how reestablishing a constitutional republic is either to far to the right or the left. It's a building block that created the American republic... a Republic that has become the world's superpower in just a hundred and fifty years. The constitution has inspired other nations constitution's as well. It's something that EVERYONE can read and see that those ideals are universal. Ask the people who are immigrating here why they're coming... it's because of the American Dream that ANYONE can become the next big thing.

I'm sorry if you think that's chauvinistic. But it's not. I've talked to to many immigrants to this country (both legal and not) who said they came here for the opportunities that our Republic provided.

The Morrow Project was focused on the USA, but the Atlantis Project was focused on the rest of the world. So if the game seems too centred on the USA... well, it was set in a shattered USA in a post-TEOTWAWKI. And they didn't describe what happened to the rest of the world in the main book or other sourcebooks.

The reason why T2013 failed to catch on was many. Not the fact it was focused so heavily on the USA market.

I'll also be toning down the time travel aspects because with today's knowledge of technology and potential future tech, you don't need to have Morrow travelling into the future to bring back the tech to make the Project work. You start mucking about with time and you get the mess that plagues Star Trek and the Terminator series.
I've never been too thrilled with the idea that Morrow had a lot of future knowledge of things such as that Prime Base was doomed because I've always been more than happy with the write up from the actual module itself that basically implies that he, along with the COT believed that a central command & control facility was needed and Prime Base was to be it. All the "might have beens", "could have beens" and "what ifs" of multiple time travels ends up making the situation very messy for the poor SOB running the game and there's already plenty of time travel RPGs out there for those interested in that stuff.

Actually the module stressed that Bruce DID NOT want Prime Base. That he was overruled by CoT when he was away and when he returned the base was already under construction and couldn't be stopped. Bruce E. Morrow wanted a decentralized command and control that would have been based on regional command bases.