Terraforming the Solar System

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

It seems to me that many of the published Traveller adventures were written with the assumption that the PCs are freelance operatives or mercs. They might be hired to extract a fugitive, recover embarassing documents from a blackmailer, steal technical data from a corporation, break somebody out of jail, or even overthrow the local government on some backwater planet. Kidnapping and even assassination are not necessarilly out of the question, depending on the circumstances and the pay.

Traveller adventures tend to reflect the attitudes of 20th/21st century Westerners. There's a perfectly simple metagame reason for that, of course; they're written by 20th/21st Century Westerners. When such adventures call for breaking rules, the rules tend to either reflect Western rules or be explained in terms of differences from Western rules.

However, I was trying to come up with an in-game explanation.

Now, such characters might well have their own codes of ethics, as Jason has mentioned. It doesn't seem likely to me that they will generally be paragons of '20th century democratic idealism.'

Certainly not. But the attitudes they are not paragons of tend to be 20th Century democratic ideals.

Many are ex-military. The military is definitely not a democracy.

The militaries of present-day Western democracies are definitely not democracies, but it's my impression that they promote democratic ideals.

The social structure of the Imperium as a whole is strongly hierarchical, and not 'democratic' or 'egalitarian'.

That's just the point I was making. The Imperium is autocratic (or hierarchical, if you prefer), but that's because "everybody knows" that democracy can't work at interstellar distances. So the Imperium can afford to support democratic ideals, because no one is going to expect them to follow through as regards its own institutions.


Hans