Infinite question

[Mgellis]

Some thoughts on all this...

Homeline appears to have been created as a "gray hat" to create gaming potential...they're good enough that you can play an ISWAT campaign and not feel like you have to take a bath after every session but they are still capable of being bad enough to make interesting opponents (e.g., if the heroes are from a world being infiltrated by Homeline for its own reasons).

Homeline tries not to be a monster, but it is selfish. If it has to make a choice, it is quite willing to treat the other timelines as "children of lesser god" to further its own ends.

Centrum is also a "gray hat," and somewhat darker because while it has eliminated racism, etc., it clearly favors the state over the individual. Even merit is judged in terms of the state. Centrum is, in effect, an anthill where individual ants can be promoted...but in the end, they and their lives and their dreams do not matter, only the hive matters. And anything that threatens or appears to threaten the hive and its stability is forbidden. Centrum has chosen order and general welfare at any cost.

Centrum, in short, is a bad guy if you believe that freedom is more important than security, if you believe that the one is as important as the many.

And it insists that everyone else join the hive. This is what makes it easy to use Centrum as bad guys. If Centrum did not have parachronics, and were on a quanta where Homeline would encounter them, I think there is a good chance Homeline would simply study them and leave them alone. But the same cannot be said for Centrum; they will not leave others alone.

The Cabal is...sheesh, the Cabal is a freakin' zebra...some of the Grand Masters really aren't that bad, light gray at worst, and it would be easy to run a campaign where people working for them are pitted against ISWAT agents who make them look like boy scouts, but then you have Grand Masters like the Horsekiller and Bathori. Eeek!

Reich-5 is easy...they're NAZIS. Black hats. Nice and simple.

And, of course, there are things even worse than Reich-5. Things even the Cabal is afraid of. They don't even have a name for a color that black.

Mark

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by DryaUnda

I should have stated my question more clearly (and tactfully, I knew I should've been more tactful). As I've ranted before, Infinity doesn't appear socially consistent. Is it protectionist? Philanthropic? Imperialistic? Hedonistic?

Though to be honest about it, that could be one of the more realistic parts of the setting. Infinity as a cover name for a bunch of barely cooperating groups with diverging goals, each with shifting levels of outside control is a lot more believable than Infinity as a monolith so powerful it stands off the nation-states of Homeline. Think of the bits of Infinity as the same thing as branches of the UN/International Organizations system(s) and you no longer *expect* them to all pull in the same direction.

But at base, I don't think the setting could have been made a lot more consistent and still preserve those standard plots. Take the "defend history" plot involving the echos for example. In a time travel game you have a real motivation to defend history - if you don't you may cease to have existed. In the IW setting why do you even care? In fact since as long as history is still on track the echo is effectively useless to *either* side - nobody can exploit its resources, trade with it, or even let too many people visit it, lest it vanish into another quanta from changes wrought by your prodding its economy - Infinity's logical strategy is to force a change themselves. Purely randomly this will convert half the echos into useful worlds closer to homeline than they were before, and if you lose the other half, oh well, they weren't worth anything anyway when you couldn't use them.

Likewise the "protect the secret" plot depends on there being some reason not to tell other timelines where you come from, and there doesn't seem to be a good one. Particularly since the only way you are really going to make much out of interworld travel is trade, and it's damn hard to conduct trade on a worthwhile scale in secret (there's a *reason* black marketeers are individuals with a truck, or a string of pack animals, and not a container ship), makes this approximately "avoid benefiting from interworld travel". Truthfully I more than half suspect that the Paratime secret exists because Piper's seed idea for the first story was he had this cool idea about UFO origins - that bits logical connection to the plot of Police Operation is pretty thin - and since UFOs didn't announce anything there needed to be a secret.

Parenthetically I will say that if echos were going to appear at all it would've been nice to have one recorded incident where the shifting "echo" wasn't a duplicate of homeline's past. This automatically opens a new dangerous job for the PCs to be sent to do. Since you can no longer be certain a "parallel" isn't in fact an echo until it fails to shift, the first team that makes a major change to any newly discovered timeline is running a risk. Besides it can have fun implications with which to scare the players. The PCs are running an attempt at data collection on Caliph, and do something to attract suspicion, which gets a contact arrested. And the line shifts. Oh no. Being the sort PCs usually are, they engineer a jailbreak and the line shifts back. We're saved. Obviously our contact was an important figure in the history of the potentially projector capable timeline Caliph echos four hundred years in..its..past.... Uh oh.

[Jalinth]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Obviously our contact was an important figure in the history of the potentially projector capable timeline Caliph echos four hundred years in..its..past.... Uh oh.

I like that scenario idea. I like it a lot. Going to have to think some more on the subject. Thank you.

[David Johnston]

Originally Posted by DryaUnda

How am I supposed to suspend disbelief, then?

It's not really a matter of belief. It's not unbelievable that a bunch of free enterprisers are going to end up in conflict with a bunch of totalitarian conquerors set on taking their markets over, even if, for totalitarians, they are unusually nice guys. That Homeline isn't that much better than Centrum, as far as you may see may give you problems but they aren't ones of belief.

At the same time however, you might want to bear in mind that the last stage of Centrum takeovers pretty much has to involve mass executions, and the only thing that keeps them from all out invasion or annihilation of your home line is the technical limitations on their ability to project force that far.

But really it doesn't much matter that Centrum isn't unequivocally evil. As you pursue your trading venture or your mission for the Service, if they get a chance to kill or capture and brainwash you to serve them, they will.

[B9anders]

Originally Posted by DryaUnda

I should have stated my question more clearly (and tactfully, I knew I should've been more tactful). As I've ranted before, Infinity doesn't appear socially consistent. Is it protectionist? Philanthropic? Imperialistic? Hedonistic? Uncle Figgy* articulates my concern well:
(*Scroll down to near the bottom to read the whole thing.)

Uncle Figgy is reminded of the following exchange while talking to one game designer many years ago:

UF: Why can't wizards wield swords?
(after back and fourth questioning)
Designer [Now quite ticked at Uncle Figgy]: All of these decisions were made for the purposes of game balance. They weren't made to be realistic.

Now, in this case, I would have been willing to accept the game designer's explanations if they had made sense. They didn't. When writing a story, everything you write, whether it is unrealistic or not, at least has to make sense. Your readers are going to catch it if it doesn't; it hampers the "willing suspension of disbelief" that you need to maintain to capture your audience. The same is true of roleplaying.

"Realistic" doesn't have to mean "boring".

Looking at your rantings, it does make sense to me, tbh.

I don't know where Infinity gets off on "they don't have our sense of responsibility!" when it was a black-ops team from Homeline that lost Da Sekret to the Nazis. Also, why couldn't Infinity let modern close parallels -- just ever so slightly different enough to be more stable than echoes -- in on the action? Would Homeline Beta (the one without Dan Quayle) really do any worse of a job? Extra worlds would mean a lot less Cold War paranoia and a lot more I-Cops to recruit.

Just look at US nuclear policy. They are the ones who have dropped the bombs but they are rather picky about who else should be allowed to have them.

Because they're sane, as are most others who agree with me. :) As an aside, I find it odd for a culture of pragmatic materialists to be so technophobic (Centrum doesn't like rapid tech advancement). I highly suspect this to be a metagame decision on the part of the Lords of Historical Necessity.

It's a question of control. In centrum ideology is a much stronger factor. Look at the cahtolic church. New developments = new world orders. Certainly, if I were an evil overlord, I would not want to introduce changes at too rapid a pace lest the people get too accustomed to change.

Also, lacking social consistency is by no means an indicator of lack of realism. In fact, I would say social incosistency is a major feature of global politics. Altruism, trade exploitation, ideologies, etc. all mixed into one grand smelthing pot often with one nation (the US for example) an exponent for all of them.

[Pragmatic]

Originally Posted by B9anders

It's a question of control. In centrum ideology is a much stronger factor. Look at the cahtolic church. New developments = new world orders. Certainly, if I were an evil overlord, I would not want to introduce changes at too rapid a pace lest the people get too accustomed to change.

I've viewed it as a reaction to their (Centrum's) own history.

Centrum suffered through a world-shattering biological war (possibly with Nuclear and Chemical weapons? don't have the books in front of me) that left only Australia with an intact civilzation. The rest of the world, those parts that weren't depopulated, were reduced to barbarism--and the ravages of war did horrible things to the survivors.

Technology outstripped society's ability to assimilate it. Centrum believes in a steady evolutionary rate of technological advance. They're seriously opposed to inspired revolutionary leaps of understanding, because they produce societal chaos, and because they can result in ideas that society isn't ready to assimilate.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ludo

Not too hot with individual rights?

That's peace, no racism anymore, no sexism anymore, self comfort based on merit, all these on a global scale... Whereas on the other hand you've got a world where some women can be buried to neck and killed by head lapidation just for not marrying with a guy of the same religious community (voluntarily taking a nasty example).

There must be MANY people on Homeline actually demonstrating for peace and collaboration with Centrum...

You have to remember that this is a setting that was come up with by Americans. Centrum is an effort to come up with an adversarial power that is not evil with a capital ee, but a rival for resources that is clearly, in American eyes, less attractive than Homeline, while still having motives that are, in its own eyes, benevolent.

Part of "less attractive," for example, is that the whole society is a planned economy. Status comes entirely from promotion in a bureaucratic hierarchy within an organization. There is a deep cultural theme in the United States of hatred for bureaucracy. This, for example, is one of the big reasons that the Clinton proposal for national health care was massively unpopular: by having a single payer for health care, and a single medical service providing it, it told Americans that they would have to go to a bureaucratic organization and accept its standards for what was appropriate care, without the option of firing a doctor at will and walking out to look for another one. American HMOs rather work that way already, and are resented for it by a lot of people. But in Centrum you have a situation where the ONLY way to gain standing is to obey and serve. You can't walk out, start your own business, get other people to deal with you voluntarily because you offer a superior product or better service, and gain status by being good at it, or at least gain independence—and from an American point of view a life where you have no choice but to serve and obey is dehumanizing.

All of this, mind you, is at the level of cultural fantasy; I'm not claiming that that option is genuinely open to all Americans. In fact, if you look at Richard Florida's "The Rise of the Creative Class," you'll see an argument that the big division in current American culture and politics is between the economic class that has a form of this ability, the creative class, and the class that really does not, the service class.