Episode 61: It Still Feels Like Dying While You're Doing It

Well, the original idea was “John Winton in space”, and only later did “Star Trek if it were written by John Winton” come along. It’s certainly more TNG/DS9 than other Trek I’ve seen: the campaign’s much more embedded within civilisation than TOS or VOY.

The high general wealth of society doubtless tends to increase the cost of raising a child, as electronic toys, smart phones, and different sorts of special shoes for each sport become conventional necessities, and as ever more, ever pricier “education” is required for the better jobs. The cost of raising and educating a child will doubtless continue rise with increasing wealth, and whether it will rise merely in proportion to the general wealth of society is anyone’s guess. A lot of the cost is driven by competitive rent-seeking activity, as the way to get a professional job is not to have ample training but to have more than the next applicant.

Shifting the cost of raising, training, and educating children from families to society will lead more lavish trainings and upbringings, increasing the total cost but removing the disincentive to parents to bear children. That could diminish the tendency of population to fall.

Another thing to consider is the non-financial disincentives. Improved obstetrics, exowombs, wet-nursing robots with synthetic bio-identical milk, nannybots, nurserymaid-bots, laundry robots, robotic and software governesses, tutors, and teachers’ aides, and so forth might lead to an increase in birthrate by blunting the non-financial disincentives to parents. That complete set might bypass parental choice and the incentives that influence it. Indeed, the use of such robotics and similar tech in the care of the elderly might make societies able to support higher dependency ratios altogether.

Then you have memetic engineering, which might be employed by governments and churches to alter parents’ preferences and stave off population decline.

But will they be permitted to have an extended retirement? Given that our government keeps having to raise the retirement age, and we still have a pension crisis looming? (I saw a stat which said the entire national budget will be spent on pensions and care homes in 2050). If Roger’s wonder drugs keep you fit and mentally agile, then all the ‘traditional’ reasons for retiring (infirm, ill, can’t cope with work any more) will vanish. Therefore I predict this sort of chain of events:

  1. Scientist announces new medicine/s which ensures everyone lives to 200.

  2. Government immediately announces they are raising the retirement age to 170.

  3. Scientist wins Nobel Prize.

  4. Scientist assassinated by irate people who were just about to retire from jobs they hated, but now have to work another 100 years. :grinning:

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My mental model is sill that most people get bored with a career after 40-50 years and want to do something different, so they end up with three or four careers over their lifetime.

Well, some people probably join the Extremely Finicky Accounts Division of the Civil Service and just stay there.

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I think you’re being a bit conservative there. I reckon that most people need a change every fifteen years.

I haven’t read any John Winton, but my father did hand me a copy of Nicholas Montsarrat’s The Cruel Sea when I asked what he did in the War.

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Winton mostly wrote about the peacetime navy, in a somewhat light-hearted manner. The campaign reflects this: there are serious things to be done, but there is time for jokes, and less serious adventures. Two of the Royal Marines scored permanent kudos points, among marines, the time they found an excuse for dressing up a green sub-lieutenant as a new marine recruit, and getting him into a bar fight. For verisimilitude. They needed his hacking skills for a PDA that was “borrowed” briefly during the fight.

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I enjoyed the episode very much. I am still considering the narrative convention discussion and will have to think on that a bit more. A couple of very minor ideas I had while listening:

  1. Is part of the issue with anti-agapics in Traveler rooted in the lack of an advancement system in the original game? More careers which meant more age was the way to have more points on paper as I understand it. From my brushes with Traveler I had a feeling that forcing aging was an in-game artifact to limit character abilities.

  2. I know we are past the solstice game and I trust it was enjoyable. On the topic of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid I very strongly recommend a dive into the wikipedia article on Etta Place. Any article that includes “mysteries” as a sub-heading is always good grist. I have drawn from that a couple of times recently for inspiration around one-shots.

Uncharacteristically slow in getting around to this episode (because reasons, as the cool kids say, probably) but delighted to hear Michael’s impassioned Traveller health care rant. I’ve heard that the current edition is generally very good, but since I already have the GDW version I don’t expect I’ll ever pick it up.

I’m sometimes tempted to run the Mongoose first edition that I already have, but the usual “why not run GURPS instead” kicks in.

Traveller is an odd one for me in that I still think of it as a rules system, so GURPS Traveller is, to me, not Traveller.

Well, as I think I said in the episode, Mongoose Traveller feels like what you might get if you took a bunch of house rules for classic GDW Traveller and then threw them at a competent editor. Basically it splits off before DGP got their mitts on it (i.e. pre-Megatraveller) and stays fairly true to the original.

I have read WHEN THE DARK IS GONE.

My Monday night game is looking for its next adventure and a variant of that will be offered.

And yes, ‘Better for who?’ ought to be the standard reply to pure narrativists who forget there are other people at the table.

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