|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 Recent Posts
The cover for the Tomb of Dracula that never was is also a thing of beauty.
Comics Alliance has a series of comics that never were--things like "The Brave and the Bold: Batman and Jay-Z in The 99 Problems!" The most terrifying of the lot, though, is...Jack Kirby's "My Little Pony." Prepare your mind for a world where "friendship" is "magic!!!"
I imagine Pharasma knows something the daemons don't. :3Excellent thought. Now I just imagined Pharasma holding a chess board and saying "check mate" in a voice befitting her in tone. And when the daemons overturn the board, leaving her holding one rook, she shakes her head sadly and, in the same tone, says, "That won't help, you know."
Dear lord that's an awesome idea. Next time anyone tries to pull that I'm going to have the npc's do the same thing.Yes. He pointed out to me that without houserules, there is nothing to stop him from continuing to play his character while dead.I got a question. Are there any actual rules saying your character can't take any actions when it's dead? One of my players pointed this out to me.Is this a serious question? "Us Yellowbeards are never more dangerous than when we're dead."
There are two questions here, which may not have been previously stated well. First, what would the characters know vs. what the players have been told? AFAICT none of the items you've listed are things that could be considered background knowledge for a character. OTOH, the majority of the items the OP listed are things that a character native to the game world would be expected to know. The second question is likewise not unreasonable: What sort of campaign is this going to be? Presumably, we're all playing to have fun, and something that's really not fun for a lot of people is to have their general expectations be wildly different from actuality. Thinking you're going to be playing Call of Cthulhu when the GM is actually running Toon! could be an amusing once-off (as could the reverse, in the right hands...), but it's tough to make a campaign out of something like that. IMHO, though, that level of expectation violation is a minor annoyance compared to the big one: what is the role of the PCs? The expectation is that the PCs are going to be the center of their own story. Events may push them around, but at some point they can look forward to their actions being significant, even if all they're doing is trying to survive in a hostile world. If they won't be, that's definitely something to tell the players up front. It's possible to have fun playing in a campaign where the PCs are peripheral to the main action (the late Mike Ford wrote a lot of very entertaining stories in which the main characters are peripheral to the major plot), but that's something the players should know about in advance.
So (as our liason with the local LEO) Grigor's going to put out a BOLO on all three?
You can find pictures of some HERE, although I should warn you that they're all scientists and other technical folks.
WotC was cranking out books like trees were going out of style. There was no way half of that stuff could have been properly playtested or edited, as evidenced by how poorly a lot of the material works together, and all of the exploitable loopholes in the metric assload of rules books put out. WotC was obviously putting money far ahead of quality for quite a bit of the 3.5 era. This is all hindsight, but the biggest problem that I see in the second-hand 3.5 stuff that I've picked up is, as you said, how poorly a lot of it works together. It's like the people who were working on psionics were stovepiped from the people working on the Complete X lines (except for Complete Psionic), and none of them were talking to the Bo9S people. There are books that are brilliant--I love Lords of Madness, frex--and there are some nuggets in the Complete X books that show real creativity and thought, but there didn't seem to be anyone who was taking responsibility for the cohesiveness of the entire D&D rules set.
WotC has always been, with a very few exceptions, horrible at producing good adventures. If it weren't for Paizo's handling of Dungeon, and a lot of decent 3pp stuff, 3x would have been a very adventure poor era indeed. Which is kind of surprising, considering how many competent Paizo/3PP adventure writers have a stint at WotC on their resumes. So on a complete tangent: besides RHoD, what are the good WotC adventures?
OK, missed Eberron. I was playing a homebrew system or raising kids at the time, and missed out on almost all of 2e. Nothing else, IME, that TSR did from 1978 to 1985 came close to matching the sales power of the 1e core. Granted that this is one gaming group of 20-40 people (albeit in a college town, so there was a fair lot of turnover over that time), but at least 3/4 of the people in my gaming group had a copy of the three core 1e books, and I can count the number of copies of any other TSR game owned on the fingers of one hand. (Lots of Champions! and Villains & Vigilantes, though.) I grant that TSR was trying very hard to duplicate that 1e rapid expansion, but none of the other rules sets seemed to come close. I would welcome some actual sales data from the time, though, as my experience may not have been typical.
Ummm... the reason for all this happening is that WotC decided that making adventures was somehow a Bad Idea. Adventures didn't sell, because what they wanted was to sell every book to ALL players, not just the DM. Thus, cutting out the adventure making must be a good idea, and the OGL is an expression of this. What they did not see is that someone putting out a system without showing faith enough to do adventures for their system are basically saying "we want to make our money by putting out new rule sets as fast as we can get away with it". For a while, it worked. Fourth edition tried to put out more adventures, which was a good thing, except they instead thought that people want generic adventures and settings are unprofitable, except as book settings. Guess what? Settings are places where you PUT adventures, and ignoring any part of this will hurt you. It's fascinating that a modern company does so much wrong that TSR in their time understood perfectly. I'm not sure Gygax-era TSR understood that at all, because they were able to support themselves almost entirely by selling 1e rules to people new to gaming. The 2e folks got the idea and went overboard with it, though--how many settings was TSR trying to support back then? Greyhawk, Eberron, Spelljammer, Planescape, Dark Sun.... The folks at Paizo have the right idea--one setting, with lots of different places in it, so they can do lots of different kinds of adventures without having to commit to support, e.g., an entire all-Gothic horror campaign world. Instead, they have Ustalav--one country among many, and they don't have to keep coming out with all-Ustalav adventures, background, etc.
Doing near-future SF well is a pain, because you don't know what's going to be invented in the next few years that'll completely wipe out your entire premise. Granted, this was written, but Charles Stross was talking about the problems he had writing "Halting State," a near-future police procedural. The book starts with a police report of a bank heist in an MMO. A couple of months before the book was released (so it's long since been written, edited, etc.), he sees a story about IBM getting a chunk of space in Second Life as a quid pro quo for doing some programming support for SL. The (virtual) real estate in question was on an island somewhere. That's right: IBM has a secret island headquarters in a virtual world.
You also can't take Augment Summoning as your initial feat; you have to take Spell Focus (Conjuration) first.
Could I get a cite for that? Also, how does that affect things like wheat? Thank you much...interesting reading. I was trying to work through the amount of corn used for ethanol production in the US and getting nowhere; my google-fu was weak.
WRT traits, the DM for nother nautical campaign I'm playing in here on the boards added one he called Able Seaman. It gave +1 on either Acrobatics, Climb, Profession (Sailor), Survival, or Swim checks; and made the chosen skill a class skill. I'm not sure if he came up with that on his own, or pulled it from one of the Freeport books; he talked about it here. Does that sound reasonable?
I had a friend end up spending a couple of days in durance vile for something similar, and around the same time frame; sneaking around a house for a Killer game, and the owner called police. He didn't squirt anyone; they got the drop on him. He went on to oversee a particularly difficult Killer variant game. It simulated John Le Carre-style espionage, and thus was supposed to be invisible to anyone not in the game--no big shootouts or sneaking around with weapons; a lot of the action revolved around making dead drops or collecting information from other drops. He tagged two people, made them the heads of the opposing spy services, and told them to recruit two other people each, who would be their lieutenants. No one below lieutenant level was supposed to know the identities of the service heads, and I'm not sure the service heads knew who each other was. You can see where this is heading, right? One of the lieutenants on Side #1 recruits the head of Side #2, right out of the gate. It didn't end well for Side #1.
The boards just ate my first post. Sure, skirmisher sounds good--there are some tricks there that fit well with shipboard life. So here's Ursion Crispin. Background: Ursion is the youngest scion of a once-wealthy Sargavan merchant family. The family was brought to destitution by the tax to the Free Captains; because of omens surrounding his birth he was raised and trained as a ranger and sailor with the intent that he would eventually command their (now nonexistent) trading fleet, but he publicly broke with his parents and siblings three years ago. He's been out on his own ever since, working wherever he could find a berth. His preference for shipboard position is lookout (particularly in bad weather), although he's becoming a fair navigator, and has distinguished himself in several boarding actions. His last berth was on a vessel of uncertain provenance that needed some major repairs, which is how he comes to be in Port Peril, hoarding his dwindling supply of coin while waiting for the repairs to be complete. The rumor of another berth drew him to the Formidably Maid; the recruiter wasn't around, so Ursion bought a grog to nurse while he waited. Thus it was that his next berth found him.... Deep Background:
Sargava, three years ago:
The city of Eleder stifled under a blanket of oppressive heat. Even two hours past sunset, the evening's cool sea breeze barely touched the beach before dying away in the tropical humidity. Baron Utilinus signed and sealed the last of the documents in front of him, handing them to one of the omnipresent servants for the next stage in their journey through the Sargavan bureaucracy. There came a gentle knock at the door. "Come!" the Baron ordered, and the door opened to reveal yet another servant with a couple he recognized immediately. "Count and Counte--er, Master and Mistress Crispin, Excellency. And their son." His task done, the servant bowed and left the room, closing the door behind him. The Baron had never seen the young Ursion before, but his ancestry was clearly stamped in his features--Chelaxian black hair and pale skin, with only a slight tan and what was probably windburn coloring his face. The plain sailor's clothing seemed tailored for him, looking far more appropriate than his parents' faded and oft-mended formal garb. He looks like both his parents. It remains to be seen if he inherited any of his father's subtlety or his mother's drive, though. The Baron smiled in greeting. "A pleasure, as always. And Ursion--also a pleasure. We've never met, though I've heard much of you. And I daresay you've heard much of me. By the questioning look on your face, I'd wager you don't know why you've been brought here. I'll let the Count and Countess explain." The bewildered look on Ursion's face told the Baron his surmise was right--Morvius and Pontia had never told the boy they were nobles. Not that I blame them...without estates and holdings, the title's an empty one. The count spoke hesitantly. "My son, you've been brought up to be a sea captain, unlike any of your older siblings. You were born with Besmara's Blessing, or so the priests told us, and it seemed natural that you'd command one of our trading ships, and later our fleet." He laughed bitterly. "Our fleet. Ha! By the time you're trained, we won't have so much as a rowboat--the Free Captains have seen to that, bleeding us dry. We have another part for you to play, though. It's a wild gamble, a complete toss of the dice, and even if it fails there's a good chance you'll be able to at least poke a stick in the eye of those devil-bought bastards of House Thrune." Countess Pontia continued, her voice far more forceful than her husband's. "Ursion, you must leave us and go to sea on your own. Your task is to accept what Besmara's Blessing truly means--you must become a pirate and win a name for yourself preying on the same sort of vessels you once hoped to command. Preferably those flying Chelaxian flags, of course. Then, and only then, will you be able to reach for a higher prize. "My son, you must become a Free Captain yourself. Then you can restore our fortunes--all our fortunes, and make Sargava great again. Your father and I have given you the tools you'll need, but it's your choice and yours alone. Will you accept this?" While his parents spoke, the young Ursion grew more and more incredulous, eyes wide in something like horror. As his mother finished, he stood mute, looking back and forth at the others in the room. Finally he found his voice. "Mother...father...Count and Countess...." His tone grew sarcastic at the last. "You want me to, to give up all I have and run off? You think I can actually become a Free Captain? You're mad, all of you. And I won't have any part of your idiotic plan!" He fled the room, slamming the door behind him. In the silence that followed, the Baron breathed deeply, tapping his chin with one finger. "Well, that went better than I would have expected. Do you think he'll do it?" Morvius and Pontia looked at each other, then back at the Baron, both smiling. "Of course he will." Tears streamed down Ursion's cheeks as he frantically packed his few belongings. There's a ship in port...there's always at least one. They'll take a skilled hand with no questions asked. What were they thinking? Me, a Free Captain? But far down in the back of his mind, the thought echoed, with a slightly different inflection:
I would rather see a series about space exploration than the peak oil apocalypse myself. With the news about private companies looking to mine asteroids why not tap into Heinlein's The past through Tomorrow collection? Depending on the motivations and capabilities of the asteroid miners, a better Heinlein example might be _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_; specifically, the "throw rocks at them" part.
I submitted another ranger (going for TWF kukri), this one straight, to GM Wulfson's S&S game, but there are over thirty applicants with another week yet to go before his deadline. If you think two rangers in the group is still reasonable, let me know and I'll post him here. ETA: He's a Sargavan human of Chelaxian descent, who fled home after his parents told him about their plans for him.
Ursion Crispin, Sargavan (colonial) Human Ranger. Crunch (limited at present):
S 12 D 16 C 14 I 12 W 13 C 13
Feats Weapon Focus (kukri), Weapon Finesse Traits Besmara's Blessing, Storm-Lashed (from Inner Sea World Guide, if that's OK) Skills Acrobatics, Climb, Knowledge (Geography), Perception, Profession (Sailor), Stealth, Survival, Swim Favored Enemy: Humans The rest is TBD. Fluff:
Ursion is the youngest scion of a once-wealthy Sargavan merchant family. The family was brought to destitution by the tax to the Free Captains; they raised him as a ranger and sailor with the intent that he would captain one of their trading vessels, but he publicly broke with his parents and siblings three years ago. He's been out on his own ever since, working wherever he could find a berth. His preference for shipboard position is lookout (particularly in bad weather), although he's becoming a fair navigator, and has distinguished himself in several boarding actions. His last berth was on a vessel of uncertain provenance that needed some major repairs, which is how he comes to be in Port Peril, hoarding his dwindling supply of coin while waiting for the repairs to be complete. The rumor of another berth drew him to the Formidably Maid; the recruiter wasn't around, so Ursion bought a grog to nurse while he waited. Then his berth found him....
I had been posting the shiznit out of this, but I'll post it one more time for Levon. Thanks, that's a great piece of music and a great performance. Watching it, I was reminded of something Neko Case said about Levon Helm--that hitting hard and singing smooth is really tough to do, and he was one of the few singing drummers who could do it. I mean, you can see his mike shake in some of the shots from the impacts on the drums, but his voice was rock steady.
I would have little respect for myself if I told someone else that s/he should take a risk that would benefit me, while I was insulated from the downside. It's that whole "tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders" thing.
Then I have a book recommendation for you: Normal Accidents-Living with High-Risk Technologies, by Charles Perrow. He's a sociologist, and has a lot of good stuff to say about unanticipated behavior in complex systems and how it affects the potential for accidents. The initial focus is on Three Mile Island, and he's a bit more pessimistic about such things than I am, but after a few conduct of operations horror stories maybe I'm not so sure.
It is not necessary to make the same mistakes again, Give me some examples of environmental concerns, and keep in mind that it's not just the US' experience we're talking about. There are industries across the US in all kinds of different climates; there are industries in Brazil, in Europe from Mediterranean climates to near-Arctic; in South Africa; in India and China and Japan and the Middle East. There's a huge amount of knowledge out there already, so we're not plunking down igloos in Kansas without knowing something about the weather. Politics? Culture? What is inherently political or cultural about scrubbers on smokestacks? About processing wastewater before you dump it, or using processes that don't require hexavalent chromium or carbon tetrachloride? And, if you don't mind, what are some of the other differences you mentioned--politics, culture, and environment seem to pretty-much sum things up. And yes, I expect them to get it right--if they want to sell to the US.
When Great Britain, the US, and Western Europe industrialized, no one had done it before, and there was no knowledge base of how to do it correctly. It is not necessary to make the same mistakes again, when the knowledge of how to avoid those mistakes exists now. You seem to be assuming that no one in the industrializing civilization is capable of learning from someone else's history. the best solution would be to support domestic industry with strong pollution controls in developing countries. Everyone benefits (except Comrade Anklebiter's roving parasites, who can go jump).What do you mean by 'support'? I mean that in order to prevent pollution from occurring in the first place (and preventive controls are preferred over mitigative ones, all other things being equal), at the very least First World countries should use state force to prohibit or heavily tax importation of goods from countries with lax pollution standards. Corporations that don't comply with modern pollution standards should not be allowed to do business. That's what I mean. Oh, and some carrots: give companies that do it right tax breaks in First World countries, and nations that enforce strong pollution standards get reduced tariffs. It's not a very libertarian approach, but pollution is a problem that doesn't lend itself to tort law solutions.
It has something to do with the way first world countries actually have pollution standards.We've been talking about the environmental impact of barring immigration. I don't understand your confusion on why it'd be better for the environment to heavily restrict immigration to First World countries. In the meantime, though, everyone around them has to deal with the developing countries' pollution. Stipulated: the best solution would be to support domestic industry with strong pollution controls in developing countries. Everyone benefits (except Comrade Anklebiter's roving parasites, who can go jump). There are very few examples of that particular situation, and innumerable examples of corporations electing to move industry from places with strong pollution controls to places with lax pollution controls. It's entirely appropriate behavior for a corporation with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize short-term profit, and the only way to ameliorate that is by regulation. And developing countries tend to be desperate for capital and lacking in leverage, so they don't want to do anything to chase off that industry; e.g., by imposing environmental regulations. (And then people in the First World countries argue that we can't afford strong environmental regulations, and we're back to the race to the bottom again.) Serious question, btw: your last line, above, seems to be an example of what I thought was called the ontogenetic fallacy (but turns out not to be). Basically, it's the idea that because something happened one way in the past (Great Britain and other First World countries industrialized with lots of soot and general health unpleasantness) it will always happen again the same way (all countries have to pass through a period of high pollution on their way to modern technology). Why do you say that?
All right, that makes some sense; it's blocking from a niche rather than an area. However, 1) you're still essentially saying that a bunch of people can't have nice things while (by virtue of an accident of birth) you can;You're saying the same thing. By enabling people to migrate, you are making it harder for the source region to develop economically. Consequently, you are telling people in the source region who are unable to migrate that they can't have nice things while you (by virtue of accident of birth) can. Point taken. But (wrt your point below) that particular objection is independent of the social infrastructure in the country to which they're going; it only deals with the conditions they're coming from. And by that argument, migration is never a good idea, and should never happen, because it always drains human resources from the source country. 2) labor must be prohibited from being fungible, while capital and resources are not so constrained. If money can move and people can't, you end up with a flight to the bottom-style wage competition as international companies let people go in developed countries and hire workers where the cost of living is low and they don't have to be paid as much. To compete, workers in the developed countries have to accept lower wages; in the long run, this will wreck the developed countries' middle classes (particularly in combination with increases in the cost of education in excess of inflation). Since a thriving middle class is very nearly a prerequisite for stable long-term economic growth, this is short-sighted; the people making the decisions are insulated from the adverse outcomes by their personal wealth, though. OTOH, if you let people move, they can go where the standard of living is higher and get paid more, removing or at least ameliorating the motive for wage reduction. If resources can move and people can't, you get a situation that I apparently didn't think through, so I withdraw the argument (except to note that resource extraction is in general economically destructive to the area from which the resources are extracted, unless they are very very careful, like Bolivia is trying to be with their lithium). Essentially, if people can't move, they're stuck with the mess after the miners have gone with the vast majority of the profits. Taking your point that the social support infrastructure in this country has issues in spots, to put it mildly, what is the magnitude of the problem? How many people are we talking about, and how does that compare with the number of people born in this country who are also a strain on the system?
All right, that makes some sense; it's blocking from a niche rather than an area. However, 1) you're still essentially saying that a bunch of people can't have nice things while (by virtue of an accident of birth) you can; and 2) labor must be prohibited from being fungible, while capital and resources are not so constrained. I also managed to completely misunderstand that you were restricting your definition of immigration to economic migration (AIUI, one person goes to another country to work, either legally or illegally; sends money home to the rest of the family). I'm sensitive to criticism of immigration; all four of my wife's grandparents were born outside the US and came here in the early 20th century, and people were objecting to immigration then. When Poland and Slovenia had no opportunities and the US was crying for cheap labor for domestic resource extraction, was it wrong for them to come here?
World Non-Sequitur Society: We may not make sense, but we do like pizza!
Don't you mean Hazard Category 2 facility :-)? I've managed to avoid getting out to Idaho for anything, although I've had a bunch of training at Los Alamos, Sandia, and the Nevada Test Site. I'm at Argonne, and was a safety basis analyst for their nuclear facilities for three years (it just seemed longer than that). I jumped ship a few years ago and am now the safety coordinator/quality assurance person/environmental compliance guru for the Nuclear Engineering Division. Eh, keeps me off the streets. Oh, and pie is better than cake, but also much easier to screw up and a poorer substrate for frosting delivery.
Particularly since (as you allude to) the current model for e-books is software instead of paper books--you buy a (revocable) license to read an e-book, not a copy of the e-book itself.
You pretty much have to expect in any implementation of technology that the folks who employ it will be "cheapskate twits". Because after anything has been around for awhile that's exactly how it will be used. Interesting story, although the background may be a bit dry: After Three Mile Island, the US civilian nuclear power industry realized it had A Problem (and not just the PR one, either). Industry safety people got together with some ex-Navy nuke types and founded INPO, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. They standardized things like control design and implemented an operator training and certification program, and conducted independent assessments of plant safety protocols. (Yes, yes, I realize there's some potential for regulatory capture here. Bear with me.) Anyway, they had considerable success in rooting out issues, identifying problem areas, and generally promoting a robust safety culture in the industry. This is all very good. Then they figured, about ten or fifteen years ago, that the industry had a good grasp of the basic elements of safety, and they could move on to examining and correcting higher-order structural issues. (I heard that. Stop snickering back there, Comrade!) Again, they had some success in refining cultural elements to improve safety. Then came Fukushima Daiichi. Right after it happened, INPO embarked on a major assessment of the current state of safety in the US industry. They found a bunch of fundamental issues of the sort they thought had been taken care of. The example I remember is the plant somewhere in the central US that had (as nuke plants should) backup diesel generators to run the cooling pumps if they ever had to shut down the reactor. For perfectly understandable safety reasons, they only kept enough diesel fuel on site to run the generators for a day. But that was OK, because they had a contract with a local supplier to keep them going. Trouble was, the local supplier had gone out of business in around 2006, and no one at the reactor had updated the contract. I'm generally pro-nuke (given my job, I sort of have to be), and even I find that scary.
One point in response. Plutonium is a NECESSARY component of deep space exploration. With out it long distance probes can not generate power effectively/efficiently. America is currently IMPORTING plutonium FROM other countries so that it can fuel its deep space probes due exactly to an actual LACK of plutonium within its boarders, since that countries nuclear facilities no longer produce it.I don't see this as a major crisis issue. Given that we launch a deep space probe on the average once every five years or so? Thorium can also be used for RTG's as well. Power density is much better with Pu-238, and for deep space applications keeping the mass low is critical. OTOH, you're right--it doesn't take a lot of Pu-238 to supply the current planned probe fleet.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
