Posts made by Lithium

I don't see slaves as something even remotely necessary in a space lords and ladies game. Why have slaves, when you can pay someone less than it costs you to house and feed and clothe them? It just doesn't make sense especially if a key element is that there is a lot of humanity to farm. Slavery just seems pointless let alone that it will lead to revolution, or attempted revolution.

It happened to the Romans numerous times and the social mores of it are just repugnant.

I wouldn't play on a game that allows it as an institution because it just invites all sorts of the worst (to me) kind of drama and 'rp'.

@Miss-Demeanor I also wish to work for this company!

ShadowRunning is not a full time gig. Work comes, it goes. Sometimes you do all the work, something goes sideways, and you don't get paid at all. Sometimes you're flush.

The 'goal' for most shadowrunners is to make enough money to retire outside of the shadows. Most don't ever get to do that, they either always want more shiny, can't give up the adrenaline, or simply are not successful enough to make the money in the first place.

The team isn't in a vacuum, there's a /lot/ of running teams, or people who think they are runners, all competing for work. So your connections network is what determines how much work you're going to get, that you're actually willing to do.

There's a lot of people who refuse to put on the black hat, see ShadowRunners as some sort of super hero, and that's fine, I guess, but it doesn't pay the bills imho.

Rousey needs a better boxing coach if she wants to get better with her hands in my opinion. There wasn't much improvement from Bethe to Holly in her standup I felt, even if she was concussed from that kick in the first round she needs reflexive responses more than what she's got at the moment.

I like Tate, I think she's a hell of an Athlete. I give her kudo's for beating Holm, she earned it. I don't know if she'll ever be able to beat Ronda though, and we might well have that win-triangle till people retire at least.

@Thenomain I wasn't trying to be dismissive, I was trying to avoid another potential conflict. I don't find Fallout 4 to be uninteresting. The storyline with the Synths is very interesting to me, Valentine's side quests, discovering that lore, digging into the past of the game is what interests me. The mods I use, are weather and environmental mods, along with the mod to remove level limits on gear so everything is in use by the bad guys from the beginning which is more exciting to me. I delve heavily into trying to get /every/ settlement as high in happiness as I can, I explore everything I run across because I never know if I'll find another holotape to listen to or notes to read. Even going into some raider dens and reading about their trying to get 'The Sight' just is more immersive to me and I find the whole game interesting.

You apparently do not find those same things interesting, so I am at a loss as to what to suggest that would make it more interesting for you.

I find the better settlers mod to be interesting, the mods for the updated or different companion appearances, and once their are Vertibirds in the air just watching the world do it's thing is incredible to me. I like to try and race to the fight to see if I can help, or at least see if anything interesting dropped before the Vertibird gets shot out of the sky or all the enemy is killed.

I take Aquagirl at level 2 so I can explore the water without drowning, without radiation, and without being jumped by baddies. I look for the giant monsters, and I experiment with different tactics.

I use the VATS mod that (somewhat) causes VATS to stop everything from moving (it doesn't work perfectly but better than the way it was originally) so I don't have to try and treat it like a first person shooter to terribly much. I try not to get shot by using cover, cuz cover does work. There's also a mod that removes the spam throwing of grenades by the enemy cuz that shit is cray and annoying, being spammed with molotov cocktails is annoying.

That's what I do, and the game is plenty interesting and fun to me.

To each their own then.

Interesting is subjective.

@BigDaddyAmin Uhh... every game turns into a TS factory.

TRANSFORMERS turned into a TS Factory... I still don't get that one but it did.

@BigDaddyAmin Amarr and Minmatarr are closest to symmetrical, but the Amarr still aren't and the minmatar look like they're made of rust and duct tape. Anyways this is the wrong topic for this, so back at space lords and ladies.

If it's a politics game, everyone apping Joe the Ship Captain just puts themselves at the mercy of the npc's or the PC's who are running the government, the farmers, and the docks. The beauty of a 4 way system is that there's no way for a single faction to control everything. The farmers have to grow food to sell and support themselves, the space docks rely on trade to keep money flowing in and out, the captains need cargo/passengers, and the government needs taxes.

Then, as with every space game, you can eventually have the aliens attack and all four have to unite to throw off the alien oppression (Or they fail, all hail our alien overlords) and you have a fifth faction. And since it's space lords and ladies, the aliens are of course space elves or something else beautiful.

@Ganymede Oh. Possibly. Even probably. I don't console so have no idea about mods on one of those.

@BigDaddyAmin Slightly off topic, my biggest, /biggest/ gripe with EVE, the lack of symmetrical ship design. It's like... whyyyyyy?!?!?!

@Ganymede Actually, yes to all of those.

EDIT: And the modders don't even have the tools to /really/ mod the game yet.

I've found that each time I play through I go do a different thing and it helps. Like this last time I played I went through and did all of the minutemen to getting the special home base unlocked before I ever went after my kid. Not very motherly of me I know but.. You can also just run through the main game, and then explore everything else afterwards because it doesn't end. I spent a lot of time just exploring the glowing sea as well.

Also, like most things Bethesda, mod's make the game much prettier, and much more enjoyable. Kind of a shame that the community is so much better at certain things than the main company but, that's where it is... for me anyways.

@Pyrephox And then on top of that, you have the ship captains themselves, so there is a third class that also dominates shipping because of smugglers and then you have the government who is taxing everyone and controls the city itself.

This could be a lot of fun.

@Thenomain

May I ask how it is a problem? I am honestly (for real) curious as to how it is one in your eyes because that seems to be a flaw at character design/creation made by the player rather than the system itself.

Any character can be made to be more than who they are on a job. They can have interests and skills outside of shooting/stabbing/fisticuffs/spells/drones/decking or whatever if they are a whole person no?

I remember in the very first edition (and 2nd and I think maybe others) there is a whole encounter designed around going to the Stuffer Shack which is then 'robbed' by gangers while the runners are in the place.

There's a lot of stories that can be told in ShadowRun other than: Do X for Y.

@faraday I agree completely. The best fun to be had in ShadowRun, as ShadowRunners is when you can come up with a team, or at least a group of people who can play at the same time as you so you can end up /as/ something similar to a team, at least familiar enough with each other's playstyle and capabilities that you can make a plan accordingly.

As a random solitary Runner, being thrown into runs with people I didn't know or trust? I don't think if I was being totally realistic I'd do that, but we did for the sake of story. Finding a /team/ you can at least partially count on is paramount.

That'd be a good tool to have, a piece of code that a person could put in their archetype, focus, and times available so as to help organize the players to find teams.

Teams are easier to run for as well. On ChampionsMUSH way way back in the late 90's, you couldn't even get approved without having a staffer 'sponsor' you which in general meant the staffer was willing to take you onto a team. It wasn't the best way to run things, but it also wasn't the worst way to run things either.

@Thenomain said:

What does an adventuring party do when they have nothing to adventure? What defines a shadowrunner when they're not on a run?

This isn't a problem in my eyes, there is always the possibility of rounding out your character with knowledge skills and other skills that are more than 'Is this useful in a gun fight?'. That is also where RP helps. ShadowRunners spend a majority of their time not on runs. Most of the time they are trying to survive the mean streets where they don't (for the most part) have any legal identity and are relegated to the underside of society.

Maybe one shadowrunner likes to paint, write, or play a particular sport. Another might enjoy boozing and whoring. A different one might spend time with his old ganger pals to make sure that they're not dead, or to help them out. One might have family to take care of. Every Runner has a /reason/ for running the shadows and those can drive a lot of what the Runner is doing while not on a run.

There's also downtime work, repairing gear and vehicles, making contacts, buying your Fixer a drink or watching for Backlash from previous runs. ShadowRun since it is such a huge setting has a lot of different tones that can be used, and a lot of that is up to the players and the particular GM.

One of my /favorite/ SR games was when the GM said, nobody can take more than C resources, everyone is a ganger in the same gang, or an ex-ganger in that gang trying to claw their way out of the Barrens. Was a blast. Another game everyone was part of a Doc Wagon team for platinum member recovery.

There are a lot of games to be had that aren't, go do bad things for money, and the setting is vibrant enough to allow for all of this in my opinion.

@Gingerlily I hate how On Demand doesn't hold stuff, or misses episodes for no apparent reason at all so I've taken to DVR'ing everything so I don't have to deal with on demand anymore. I can also fast forward past commercials then.

@faraday With ShadowRun the best settings I have seen are when it is hands off. Build the world as best you can to provide empty space and openings for people to fill with their own ideas. Allow gangs to be player ran. Allow players in the different criminal and legal organizations. Allow players anywhere, and let players also play ShadowRunners.

Each ShadowRunning team will have very different types of 'jobs' they want to do, some will be white hats, some black, some somewhere in between.

That's my take on it, open up the can of worms and let them all out and the game will settle into whatever it will be.

Eclipse Phase was a neat environment and setting, but, the rules for it were clunky as all hell. Back when I first tried to start coding I jumped in /way/ over my head and tried to code an Eclipse Phase chargen... that was impossible for me at the time.

The ideas behind it are very cool, but, it also is a game that needs personal narrative driving things forwards so the scale as huge as it is, needs to be smaller in order to make sense.

The other problem is the environments, sure you could ego cast yourself with forks or whatever but what kind of setting do you use? A station? A hab cluster with it's own rules? Space travel in the system is slow as heck to do it physically, and then there's the pandora gates, so it gets somewhat tricky to try and have a cohesive setting and theme that makese sense to a wide variety of concepts.

It's a lot easier to do like, all resistance fighters, all explorer's, all trouble shooters or whatever which makes sense for tabletop but falls apart at larger numbers.

As far as settings go, I love the RIFT's setting, but the system... damn you Siembieda... damn you for the Palladium system and all it's clunkyness.

I know there is a way to ignore whole groups, like Taste's Less Gamey or whatever, but is there a way to ignore just a topic/thread within that group? Like the Basketball one. I don't follow basketball, I don't want to read it but having to mark it as read every time there's a new post is... a little annoying.

Just wondering if it is possible to do, other than ignoring whole major groups.