On 6/20/2020 5:09 PM, Kelly St. Clair wrote:
> On 6/20/2020 3:49 PM, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:
>
>>     Keen insight here (including the Roddenberry tag).
>>
>>
>> I tried to find Rodenberry's Axiom, but Google and DuckDuckGo give me
>> blank stares.
>
>  From memory, it's essentially "people today don't constantly remind
> their co-workers how automobiles work, so they wouldn't do that in the
> future."  It's a justification and caution against stuffing clumsy "As
> You Know, Bob" exposition into a story.
>
> But as we see here (and with one of Roddenberry's own inventions, the
> transporter - which he created to serve the needs of the story, getting
> the crew into the action without having to pay for expensive footage of
> shuttles launching, landing, etc every time the crew left and returned
> to the ship), leaving something completely /un/defined, and/or pulling
> new capabilities for it out of your ass to solve some problem and then
> never mentioning or using them again, even when they could and logically
> should fix a later problem, is also Bad Storytelling (or Setting/Game
> Design).
>

(adding on a bit)

You don't have to (and probably shouldn't) spend five minutes/paragraphs
every show/book explaining to the audience how it works, but the
author/game master/showrunner SHOULD know and have worked it all out, so
that when someone (a player, another writer, etc) asks, you can give
confident and non-stupid answers which, ideally, won't end up breaking
other things when taken to their logical conclusions.

--
---------------
Kelly St. Clair
xxxxxx@efn.org