Good TV

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@sockmonkey
Yeah, they're only doing 13 episodes a season. Which sucks in a way because I WANT MORE, but I'm also sure that it's how the show's been able to keep up the quality that it's achieved. So, I'll live.

And watch whatever episodes of The Good Place are up on Netflix/Hulu on a loop.

[Sockmonkey]

@Three-Eyed-Crow Yeah, I knew they had short seasons. I just hadn't been paying attention to the episode count. Plus, I'm greedy and I want MOAR JANET.

Sadness.

[Aria]

....I kind of logged in here today just to tell all of you that I would play the fuck out of an Altered Carbon MU*. I love this show. I love this setting. So, so, so much. +1 to all previous mentions of its inherent goodness.

[Auspice]

(Eclipse Phase is pretty much made for Altered Carbon type settings specifically. Very specifically.)

[Lotherio]

New show on tonight. Ima check it out, Olympic or something.

Looks like lots of falling on ice so far

[Aria]

@auspice said in Good TV:

(Eclipse Phase is pretty much made for Altered Carbon type settings specifically. Very specifically.)

What's Eclipse Phase?

[ThatGuyThere]

@aria
A transhumanist sci fi RPG that was free on the games website for a while, but I think the ended when the new edition came out. The setting and stuff were neat but I never played it so can't comment on the systems except to say the seems on the complex side of things from a read through.

[Auspice]

@thatguythere said in Good TV:

@aria
A transhumanist sci fi RPG that was free on the games website for a while, but I think the ended when the new edition came out. The setting and stuff were neat but I never played it so can't comment on the systems except to say the seems on the complex side of things from a read through.

What he said. The quick rules are free on DriveThruRPG. I haven't looked through them, but from what I was told (before the show came out / when I began reading the books), the game system was basically made for Altered Carbon / that type of setting.

[Lithium]

It's like Altered Carbon, in spaaaaaace!

[WildBaboons]

I've only looked at it briefly but isn't Cybersphere basically Altered Carbon as well?

[The Sands]

@thatguythere said in Good TV:

@aria
A transhumanist sci fi RPG that was free on the games website for a while, but I think the ended when the new edition came out. The setting and stuff were neat but I never played it so can't comment on the systems except to say the seems on the complex side of things from a read through.

I'm not sure how high a complexity I would give it. At its core it is pretty simple. You have a stat, such as Kinetic Weapons (which in this context means guns that shoot bullets). You roll a percentile die roll and you want to roll under your skill to succeed. The difference between your roll and your skill is your Margin of Success or your Margin of Failure and there are additional effects that can kick in because a Margin is either 30 points or 60 points (think of it as normal results, results with a mild adjustment, and results with a major adjustment)

Like most games these days the designers decided to throw in some wrinkles. If your skill is being opposed by another person's skill (for instance, when you shoot at someone they get half of their Fray skill to oppose you shooting at them) they roll their skill as well. If one person fails and the other succeeds it is really easy to figure out the results but when both people succeed the person who rolled higher succeeds (not the person with a higher MoS but literally the person with the higher die roll). This seems counter intuitive since if you roll low and succeed you get a better result but it is also easier for your opponent to prevent the result since it is easier to roll higher. In practice it seems to work out fairly well.

A second wrinkle exists in that characters have a few points that regenerate every so often that they can use to modify their rolls by doing things like reversing the two dice (so your roll of 61 becomes 16).

Combat actions can be modified by doing things like aiming, dodging, firing a single shot, firing autofire, etc. but it doesn't strike me as much worse than most games that include modern firearms.

A little complexity is added because your character is essentially separated into two components; the Ego (which really is your character) and your Morph (or body, which can be viewed as a piece of equipment since this is a transhumanist game). If you move from one Morph to another the different bodies will have different modifiers which means your Skills may adjust. Also some types of Morphs have different abilities (eg: artificial robot bodies don't need to breath or feel pain, biological bodies can use psychic abilities).

From there, yeah, you can dive down the rabbit hole into what skills a character needs to create blueprints to use with a nanofabricator or what is involved with hacking into someone's cyberbrain, but really those things are no more complicated than the rules for a Changeling PC to build Tokens in your average WoD game.

Sure, it isn't the simplest system I've seen but it is far from the most complex. In all honesty I think the bigger issue a non-initiated group might have is that the setting is just so freaking huge. You've got the inner planets which are highly capitalistic and which are probably relatively easy for new people to understand, then you've got the outer systems where they are living in a 'post-scarcity economy' and so money doesn't mean anything and everything is based on your reputation. Earth is a desolate wasteland and is suppose to be off limits to all humanity (though some adventures might have the characters deal with the biomechanical horrors that cover it or occasionally crop up in other locations) and the Pandora gates lead to planets in completely different solar systems. It is really easy for a GM to provide no guidance to as group and then when you sit down you find that one person is playing a Lunar Oligarch, a second is playing an anti-transhumanist from the Jovian Junta (think sort of space fundamentalists who live on Jupiter's moons), a third is an AI program who grew up in a virtual environment and the last is a University Professor from Titan who specializes in Old Earth relics, none of which are appropriate for the adventure that the GM had which was recovering a derelict Scum barge that is out around Neptune's orbit.

[Arkandel]

Say what you will. The first season of Star Trek: Discovery kicked some serious ass.

[ZombieGenesis]

Ugh. I'm probably going to break down sooner rather than later and watch Discovery. The first episode was just so...bleh to me. Stop "re-imagining" things. I hate it. It also did not help Discovery that, IMO, The Orville was so good and felt just like the Star Trek that I was looking for (maybe with just a TOUCH too much toilet humor).

[SG]

@arkandel It had its ups and downs, the second half of the season was much more fun than the first, the last episode felt very tacked on, though.

[Arkandel]

@zombiegenesis If it helps, I was pretty meh about episode 1 and only lukewarm about episode 2.

It's just that they used those as building blocks, and what they built was fucking amazing.

[Lithium]

I still dislike the change to klingons, but if you can get past that, Discovery was actually very well done imho. Enjoyed it.

[Auspice]

@arkandel said in Good TV:

Say what you will. The first season of Star Trek: Discovery kicked some serious ass.

I'm finally catching up on the 2nd half of season 1 and I keep having some serious holy shit moments.

As a writer, especially as one who has been going to school for this, who has had to write a TV episode (under a raging asshole of a teacher who put us through the goddamn wringer)... These writers deserve props.

Not only is each episode crafted beautifully as an arc, the whole season is a wonderful arc from act one, two, three. Each character is well-written. They have threads from earlier episodes that aren't just dropped, but woven through in ways that when they come up again, you have those ah-ha! moments.

I haven't been this impressed by television writing in a really long time.

[surreality]

@lithium said in Good TV:

I still dislike the change to klingons, but if you can get past that, Discovery was actually very well done imho. Enjoyed it.

I did -- out of context -- love all the concept design for them. Like, that was a pretty, pretty, beautifully conceived everything.

But it bothered me in the sense that... that was a lot of frou frou, which is often a contradiction for a highly martial society. There are exceptions, but I don't know enough about the original concept/world-building for the Klingons originally (or in their current incarnation) to know if it fits.

As in, it's the kind of stylistic choice that seems to pick them up out of the 'barbarians with an honor code' sort of feel, which is how the old version used to seem to me, to something more akin to samurai composing battle poetry in their heads and so on. Which is neat, sure, but it is a big change and more importantly, it's not necessarily one I'm convinced they intended.

Why: a lot of it is artsy for artsy ornamentation sake (potentially with some symbolic/religious/spiritual overtones). Yeah, it's a big break from the more industrialist approach we've seen before, which is fine, and I wasn't expecting that, but what we're seeing breaks my brain in some respect because it would mean the armies of craftsmen in the Klingon empire would have to outnumber the soldiers by a factor of like, ten to one at least without raising a lot of other questions that get my brain stuck in boggle-loops on the regular.

I love the ever living hell out of the visual design. Love love love. OMFG love love love. Could not love more. Love like I loved the design for the original Stargate when it first hit theaters back in the 90s kinds of love.

Just, from what I've seen of it all so far? What I know of the 'old version' (and my interpretations of it), the design (no matter how gorgeous I think it is), and the few eps I've seen so far... it doesn't all fit together in my head in a cohesive way, even with the 'maybe they're going for a more... ' approach thing in mind.

Maybe that just a 'yet' and I need to watch more of it? But while I don't hate it, it is a bit of a ????? that I've been having trouble getting my brain around properly and it's getting in the way of enjoying it (while being a reason to enjoy it because omfg shiny as fuck -- gahhhhhhh all the mindscramble!).

[SG]

I just found Spooks on Dailymotion. How that site is still going is beyond me, but it's been years since it's been on netflix. Great stuff. So long, long weekend!!

[Lithium]

Began watching Electric Dreams, surprising amount of Star Power in the series, the SFX budget is good and nicely used, set construction is also good and they make best use of each one in an episode.

The acting is strong and it is engaging. Very nicely done Amazon, very nicely done indeed.