Xanos
23-11-2009 06:04:17
Yeah, this post is long, it's grown over the course of the day from a paragraph to an essay. Sorry. 
Anyhow, by large I don't think it makes a massive lot of difference, though on the whole I think 2:1 works better for the kind of epic storylines we tend to like to do in GJWs and such (e.g. do we really want to see Antei invaded every single year? Or Clans having their cities razed and rebuilt that often? Or music chairs with each new Dark Lord of the Sith's reign being cut in half of what the old ones were? Seriously though, that obviously applies to more than just GMs, as while CONs and QUAs will always change faster than top jobs usually change in reality for such things, I always feel the old EH 1:1 ratio made the musical chair CON terms look fairly silly on the Clan storylines).
Like others have said, I also tend to find it fun for characters to not only age but also grow up faster. It's nice for people to be able to get to know each other, get married, make babies... whatever. Even in 2:1 a lot of that stuff is a bit hurried, but I feel we might deadlock ourselves more were we to slow it down--well, either deadlock, or people are going to be entering a level of musical chair relationships and promiscuity that even real life can't compete with.
I don't think there's any major threat of running into issues with the books or anything either really. Provided stories are written creatively and not just ripped off of the EU verbatim, things can always be done whenever we like. CNS fought the Vong a couple of months ago, even though the main Vong Empire was defeated 2 years ago. The story just had to be a bit unique rather than being lifted straight out of a book. From rival Sith groups, to alien races like the Killiks or Charon, to life threatening machine races like the Abominor, to ancient buried evils. We've done alien races with the Vong, we've explored buried evils in the past with Okemi, but there's still loads of other possibilities left to tap--even endless when we start to count our own creations like Crask and his fascist band of crusaders of the light.
Currently, the books themselves are in 43.5 ABY. Even if we stick to 2:1, we won't reach 43 ABY until April 2015. But by 2015 the books will probably have moved on and be another 10 or more years down the line and detailing the life of Ben Skywalker's children or whatever... so there isn't a lot to worry about with us ever ending up in alien territory where the galaxy might later get blown up before we realised. We'll always be playing catch up, so will always be able to pace ourselves sensibly.
Either way, in the current timeframe there's not a whole lot happen now anyway in the EU. There was the Vong War which killed quadzillions, but after that until they decide to write in another huge war (which means it won't affect us until at least 2015 or later) we've currently got a lot of creative freedom, even at 2:1.
The only things that might involve us (emphasis on the might, as the way things currently stand there's pretty much nothing we need worry about until Darth Krayt in 127 ABY--that could change, but again not until gone 2015, so there'll be years to plan ahead) are the Swarm War of 35-36 ABY (2011) where people around the galaxy went a bit crazy after drinking too much Killik nectar, but we can completely ignore the Swarm War if we wanted to--it wasn't exactly a huge thing, it was more a border conflict on the edge of the Unknown Regions really and a near-war with the Chiss. It was far more a "could have been... but was averted before it got that far" non-war. If anything, it's probably more RoS-scale than a full GJW, since the most it'd probably lead to would be hidden Killik nests growing up somewhere in the Clan systems and some short-lived civil war action.
(It could well be bigger than that, there could well be a mighty Dark Nest arise somewhere, say, led by an Elder who has become a Joiner and now threatens the DB as a whole... but that comes back to being creative again: we can do a story like that whenever we want to, since it wouldn't need to be tied directly into the main Swarm War, but could just involve a leftover nest that some DJM with a grudge later stumbled into and subsequently melded his/her hatred with the hive, leading to the entire swarm to wish the DB's destruction too. We could do all that in 2011... or we could do it right now... or we could leave it until 2021... or we could choose to never do it at all and focus on other things. So the Killiks basically offer the freedom to do a Starship Troopers bug invasion story whenever we wanted to.)
Then, the other main conflict is the Second Galactic Civil War against Darth Caedus in 40-41 ABY, but despite the grandiose name the actual war lasted about six months and was more a load of more local oriented secessionist anarchy, i.e. Planet A has always disliked Planet B, so used the war as an excuse to attack Planet B. So, again, we can pretty much ignore it if we wanted to. Obviously, we don't have to, and once we reach it (in 2013-2014) it could be fun to, say, use it as background in which to take advantage of the galactic disorder and conquer a few new systems or something, but it's still nowhere near the level of the Vong War in terms of being something that would need to affect any of the DB worlds. It just could if we wanted it to. But with only one Sith threatening the galaxy, it's not like we can have a whole lot to do with the main SkySolo story either way... we'd just be taking advantage of the second separatist movement.
(Which doesn't necessarily mean we need to do things by 2014, as the more recent books have left things a bit ambiguous whether all the worlds of the Confederation rejoined the Galactic Alliance or if some have been allowed to retain more independence. For DB purposes? We could, for example, just claim there were still some worlds that seceded and are no longer defended by the GA. It'd obviously probably be more fun to say we were this second secretive Sith movement taking advantage of the main chaos Caedus was causing elsewhere, but the official time scale doesn't need to restrict us if we don't want it to... we'd just need to be a bit more creative if we did it later on.)
The current book series in 43 ABY so far hasn't got a galactic war and doesn't look like it plans to. It seems more about the Star Wars equivalent of Cthulhu emerging from the Maw to devour all Force users and become Legion. Might that involve us? Again, it's a maybe, but also a maybe not. It's easy enough to just brush over the six month reemergence of the last of the Elder Gods than it was a six year alien invasion, so whether we involved Abeloth having any affect on any DB people would be entirely up to us.
(Unlike the Killiks or Confederation, Abeloth admittedly is one of the few things we would need to coordinate our timelines with, so she'd be 2015 or never. However, without her causing a war, I don't really know what we'd do with her anyway. Maybe Arcona, living close to the Maw, would all lose their memories and be driven mad... but... yeah... Unless something bigger happens over the course of Abeloth's release, she doesn't really offer much in the way of a GJW. At least, nothing we haven't already done with Okemi previously driving half the DB nuts. And as Luke Skywalker will probably be the one to defeat her, I don't really know what any of us could do anyway. Have a GJW that just miraculous ends when Abeloth is slain by the Jedi elsewhere? I think Abeloth is more just a case of "inspiration we could adapt for a story of our own" than something the DB would ever directly interact with. Just, in this case, we've already done basically the same story previously. So, in this case, they're copying us, not us copying them.)
All this said, if we go 1:1 we'll hit 43 ABY in April 2020. By then we can pretty much guarantee that the EU will have moved on and be well into the 50s, if not the 60s by then. While I think any faster than 2:1 does run the risk of us overshooting the EU, which could well lead us to miss out on some cool stuff if we only find out about it after the fact; the counterpoint with 1:1 is that 2020 seems... a long way away. In the end I think there's drawbacks no matter what we pick. 3:1 seems a bit fast; 1:1 seems a bit slow; 2:1 I guess averages things. Part of me does think "2015 is pretty soon for the Galactic Civil War", but then the other part of me remembers the Exodus was "only" 6 years ago, but obviously the Exodus was freaking ages ago, so I think 2015 is actually way longer away than it sometimes sounds on paper.
At 2:1, we'll be in 54 ABY come 2020; while that sounds a lot, I'd like to think it safe to say the EU will have advanced at least that far in the next 10 years--and that'd mean the EU only going at 1:1! I don't recall the EU ever going slower than real life, and even when a book series only covers a year or so, they usually at least move 2 or 3 years between series. Given the EU is in 43 ABY currently, the idea of Ben only being 26 in 2020 seems... really, really slow.
Admittedly, though they frog leaped from the end of the Vong War forward 10 years to the Second Galactic Civil War, they've slowed right down again after a lot of backlash of lost time exploring Ben's youth. So, the only real worry is perhaps if they keep releasing 9-book series over 3 years but only advancing 1 or 2 years each time. Whether they jump forward again or not is hard to say, but on the whole it seems to be the EU's general modus operandi and I can see them tiring of writing "Ben as a kid" books in the not so distant future... I generally feel that right now they're just trying to make up for what they didn't do in the 30s, but you can only have a 16 year old following his dad around so long.
The books have been falling over themselves recently to set up the New Galactic Empire as soon as they can with Emperor Jagged Fel, so chances are that will be dominating their urge to leap frog again and explore the rise of the Imperial Knights or something once they get done with the aftermath of Darth Caedus... which really is what the whole Cthulhu story is a by-product of, despite Caedus himself already being defeated. I can see them wanting to boost ahead after this to have a clean slate again, so I'll genuinely be surprised if come 2020 they've only moved on 10 years to reach 54 ABY.
Well, unless they get so terrified of going on without Luke that time practically freezes to milk Luke's last active years as much as possible.
Anyhow, by large I don't think it makes a massive lot of difference, though on the whole I think 2:1 works better for the kind of epic storylines we tend to like to do in GJWs and such (e.g. do we really want to see Antei invaded every single year? Or Clans having their cities razed and rebuilt that often? Or music chairs with each new Dark Lord of the Sith's reign being cut in half of what the old ones were?
Seriously though, that obviously applies to more than just GMs, as while CONs and QUAs will always change faster than top jobs usually change in reality for such things, I always feel the old EH 1:1 ratio made the musical chair CON terms look fairly silly on the Clan storylines).Like others have said, I also tend to find it fun for characters to not only age but also grow up faster. It's nice for people to be able to get to know each other, get married, make babies... whatever. Even in 2:1 a lot of that stuff is a bit hurried, but I feel we might deadlock ourselves more were we to slow it down--well, either deadlock, or people are going to be entering a level of musical chair relationships and promiscuity that even real life can't compete with.
I don't think there's any major threat of running into issues with the books or anything either really. Provided stories are written creatively and not just ripped off of the EU verbatim, things can always be done whenever we like. CNS fought the Vong a couple of months ago, even though the main Vong Empire was defeated 2 years ago. The story just had to be a bit unique rather than being lifted straight out of a book. From rival Sith groups, to alien races like the Killiks or Charon, to life threatening machine races like the Abominor, to ancient buried evils. We've done alien races with the Vong, we've explored buried evils in the past with Okemi, but there's still loads of other possibilities left to tap--even endless when we start to count our own creations like Crask and his fascist band of crusaders of the light.
Currently, the books themselves are in 43.5 ABY. Even if we stick to 2:1, we won't reach 43 ABY until April 2015. But by 2015 the books will probably have moved on and be another 10 or more years down the line and detailing the life of Ben Skywalker's children or whatever... so there isn't a lot to worry about with us ever ending up in alien territory where the galaxy might later get blown up before we realised. We'll always be playing catch up, so will always be able to pace ourselves sensibly.
Either way, in the current timeframe there's not a whole lot happen now anyway in the EU. There was the Vong War which killed quadzillions, but after that until they decide to write in another huge war (which means it won't affect us until at least 2015 or later) we've currently got a lot of creative freedom, even at 2:1.
The only things that might involve us (emphasis on the might, as the way things currently stand there's pretty much nothing we need worry about until Darth Krayt in 127 ABY--that could change, but again not until gone 2015, so there'll be years to plan ahead) are the Swarm War of 35-36 ABY (2011) where people around the galaxy went a bit crazy after drinking too much Killik nectar, but we can completely ignore the Swarm War if we wanted to--it wasn't exactly a huge thing, it was more a border conflict on the edge of the Unknown Regions really and a near-war with the Chiss. It was far more a "could have been... but was averted before it got that far" non-war. If anything, it's probably more RoS-scale than a full GJW, since the most it'd probably lead to would be hidden Killik nests growing up somewhere in the Clan systems and some short-lived civil war action.
(It could well be bigger than that, there could well be a mighty Dark Nest arise somewhere, say, led by an Elder who has become a Joiner and now threatens the DB as a whole... but that comes back to being creative again: we can do a story like that whenever we want to, since it wouldn't need to be tied directly into the main Swarm War, but could just involve a leftover nest that some DJM with a grudge later stumbled into and subsequently melded his/her hatred with the hive, leading to the entire swarm to wish the DB's destruction too. We could do all that in 2011... or we could do it right now... or we could leave it until 2021... or we could choose to never do it at all and focus on other things. So the Killiks basically offer the freedom to do a Starship Troopers bug invasion story whenever we wanted to.)
Then, the other main conflict is the Second Galactic Civil War against Darth Caedus in 40-41 ABY, but despite the grandiose name the actual war lasted about six months and was more a load of more local oriented secessionist anarchy, i.e. Planet A has always disliked Planet B, so used the war as an excuse to attack Planet B. So, again, we can pretty much ignore it if we wanted to. Obviously, we don't have to, and once we reach it (in 2013-2014) it could be fun to, say, use it as background in which to take advantage of the galactic disorder and conquer a few new systems or something, but it's still nowhere near the level of the Vong War in terms of being something that would need to affect any of the DB worlds. It just could if we wanted it to. But with only one Sith threatening the galaxy, it's not like we can have a whole lot to do with the main SkySolo story either way... we'd just be taking advantage of the second separatist movement.
(Which doesn't necessarily mean we need to do things by 2014, as the more recent books have left things a bit ambiguous whether all the worlds of the Confederation rejoined the Galactic Alliance or if some have been allowed to retain more independence. For DB purposes? We could, for example, just claim there were still some worlds that seceded and are no longer defended by the GA. It'd obviously probably be more fun to say we were this second secretive Sith movement taking advantage of the main chaos Caedus was causing elsewhere, but the official time scale doesn't need to restrict us if we don't want it to... we'd just need to be a bit more creative if we did it later on.)
The current book series in 43 ABY so far hasn't got a galactic war and doesn't look like it plans to. It seems more about the Star Wars equivalent of Cthulhu emerging from the Maw to devour all Force users and become Legion. Might that involve us? Again, it's a maybe, but also a maybe not. It's easy enough to just brush over the six month reemergence of the last of the Elder Gods than it was a six year alien invasion, so whether we involved Abeloth having any affect on any DB people would be entirely up to us.
(Unlike the Killiks or Confederation, Abeloth admittedly is one of the few things we would need to coordinate our timelines with, so she'd be 2015 or never. However, without her causing a war, I don't really know what we'd do with her anyway. Maybe Arcona, living close to the Maw, would all lose their memories and be driven mad... but... yeah... Unless something bigger happens over the course of Abeloth's release, she doesn't really offer much in the way of a GJW. At least, nothing we haven't already done with Okemi previously driving half the DB nuts. And as Luke Skywalker will probably be the one to defeat her, I don't really know what any of us could do anyway. Have a GJW that just miraculous ends when Abeloth is slain by the Jedi elsewhere? I think Abeloth is more just a case of "inspiration we could adapt for a story of our own" than something the DB would ever directly interact with. Just, in this case, we've already done basically the same story previously. So, in this case, they're copying us, not us copying them.
)All this said, if we go 1:1 we'll hit 43 ABY in April 2020. By then we can pretty much guarantee that the EU will have moved on and be well into the 50s, if not the 60s by then. While I think any faster than 2:1 does run the risk of us overshooting the EU, which could well lead us to miss out on some cool stuff if we only find out about it after the fact; the counterpoint with 1:1 is that 2020 seems... a long way away. In the end I think there's drawbacks no matter what we pick. 3:1 seems a bit fast; 1:1 seems a bit slow; 2:1 I guess averages things. Part of me does think "2015 is pretty soon for the Galactic Civil War", but then the other part of me remembers the Exodus was "only" 6 years ago, but obviously the Exodus was freaking ages ago, so I think 2015 is actually way longer away than it sometimes sounds on paper.
At 2:1, we'll be in 54 ABY come 2020; while that sounds a lot, I'd like to think it safe to say the EU will have advanced at least that far in the next 10 years--and that'd mean the EU only going at 1:1! I don't recall the EU ever going slower than real life, and even when a book series only covers a year or so, they usually at least move 2 or 3 years between series. Given the EU is in 43 ABY currently, the idea of Ben only being 26 in 2020 seems... really, really slow.
Admittedly, though they frog leaped from the end of the Vong War forward 10 years to the Second Galactic Civil War, they've slowed right down again after a lot of backlash of lost time exploring Ben's youth. So, the only real worry is perhaps if they keep releasing 9-book series over 3 years but only advancing 1 or 2 years each time. Whether they jump forward again or not is hard to say, but on the whole it seems to be the EU's general modus operandi and I can see them tiring of writing "Ben as a kid" books in the not so distant future... I generally feel that right now they're just trying to make up for what they didn't do in the 30s, but you can only have a 16 year old following his dad around so long.
The books have been falling over themselves recently to set up the New Galactic Empire as soon as they can with Emperor Jagged Fel, so chances are that will be dominating their urge to leap frog again and explore the rise of the Imperial Knights or something once they get done with the aftermath of Darth Caedus... which really is what the whole Cthulhu story is a by-product of, despite Caedus himself already being defeated. I can see them wanting to boost ahead after this to have a clean slate again, so I'll genuinely be surprised if come 2020 they've only moved on 10 years to reach 54 ABY.
Well, unless they get so terrified of going on without Luke that time practically freezes to milk Luke's last active years as much as possible.