Best posts made by Packrat

@golgoth Absolutely! I mean that generally only Brother Battle or the more violent sort of bishop are likely to view maintaining a military force as the primary destination for their benefice's income.

Legal stuff is complicated. Personally I am not a lawyer but I am an 'expert' (apparently?) in legislation concerning export control. ITAR, EAR, Wassenaar compliance, etc.

I just had a meeting with one of the vice presidents in my company of employment where he expressed the belief that 'Ohh, we do not need that kind of support, we know all of that, it is built into our thought process and we all understand it'.

What the shit. I have been doing this for a decade and I do not know everything. I briefed a room full of his first line reports on the subject for four hours then they followed up by between them booking over twenty hours of my time for follow up consultation, questions and advise in the light of the apparently startling revelations I had given them about how their business areas were impacted in ways they had not foreseen.

Added: Also the gutting of the State Department in the US makes my life a nightmare, because apparently the US government has decided that their laws apply to everyone, everywhere in the world but the current administration has crippled the people who actually enforce this, grant licences or answer questions. It has reached the point where the place I work is quite literally willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to avoid employing engineers in the United States and instead replicate their work elsewhere.

I have been playing Cyberpunk on my oldish (3 years old) but high spec desktop and whilst I have definitely run into bugs? A lot fewer bugs than many other 'Triple A' games.

Performance has been decent and the game looks gorgeous whilst having largely well written and well acted plots in an amazingly rich and interesting world. Some of the very RPG mechanics stuff like levelled equipment and enemies suck and run counter to the immersion but overall I am having a great time.

Also I admit I do not see where anyone is coming from who is talking about lack of positive representation for LGBT individuals? Outside of the rightful indignation over some of the initial marketing. One of the best characters who is integral to the plot is lesbian and there is a side character who I only recently found out is a trans woman. She has a whole set of side missions where you hang out with her and she is pretty awesome.

@auspice I think I would go with my brother's awesome looking dog:

Not sure what he would be, he looks very wise but is actually a lazy idiot who runs around ineffectually but with great enthusiasm when he thinks there may be rabbits, followed by not knowing what to do if he catches one.

@kanye-qwest That one! Fierce puppy with ferocious growls.

Has anyone else been playing Tyranny? Shorter then a regular sprawling CRPG but I loved the way it actually lead to me roleplaying and it seems extremely re playable.

Plus the setting is neat as hell.

I definitely want to chime in and say that I agree with the people who prefer skills to matter over stats though, the default equal weight to both in WoD (and a fair few other systems) really is nonsensical.

Take the example of the doctor with Intelligence 3, Medicine 3 for a pool of 6. Should they really be barely better than a really smart person (Intelligence 4) who has qualified on a first aid course (Medicine 1) and thus has a pool of 5? Probably not!

It also makes all sorts of concepts just not work. Hell, in real life I probably have WoD Dexterity 1 (Dyspraxia) yet when I was in the military I was an excellent shot. Did I have Firearms 5? Hell no, but I was a better shot than the commando qualified captain who must have by definition had a dex+firearms pool of 5 or 6 minimum.

I actually really like the attribute+skill weight in the system used on Arx but it really could benefit from the system being an awful lot more transparent. That might have changed since I played there but it certainly used to be that people who had experimented and worked out the odds (and/or cooked up spreadsheets) were significantly advantaged mechanically if they wanted to be.

That said I found with Arx that all characters have amazing base attributes but also start with weirdly anemic skills in comparison which then rise rapidly in play. You cannot be a even a merely very capable person who is a serious expert at things, you have to start as a wildly naturally talented person who is 'pretty good but unexceptional' at one or two things.

I just finished Iron Gold, the new Red Rising book by Pierce Brown.

Conclusion? It is pretty great, I would say better than Morning Star though I am unsure if it is better than Golden Son. It has multiple viewpoint characters and so rather than getting a Darrow-centric view of the setting you get a nice slice through different parts of it, also the glorious revolution to overthrow the wicked dictatorship and break the chains?

Well it broke a lot of other things and mostly succeeded through co opting the existing members of the ruling class, then only won in some places before settling into an endless, grueling war, leading to more compromises for the war effort. It is wonderful especially seen through the eyes of characters who are this time actually adults.

Also the fucked up solar system resulting would be a pretty great RPG or MUSH setting. Kind of a gritty space opera cyberpunk almost with everything from space-mafia vikings on hoverbikes with cybernetic eyes to Space Knights fighting aerial duels with cool sword/whip things. Also refugee camps, half smashed cities on a terraformed luna, etc.

@ixokai said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

A lot of people ignorantly think that you have to defend copyright or you lose it. I don't actually believe any real lawyers are telling any authors that they must say no, though. Its just a sort of urban legend that floats around and people claim to be true.

'People' in this context being Nymeria, who is on some kind of weird years long ego trip fueled by the fact that GRRM noticed her and thus apparently crowned her the eternal high princess of all Song of Ice and Fire related fan works. She must smite all pretenders to her title, or indeed any who fail to bend the knee.

I honestly do not mind socializing with most of my coworkers but there really is a limit. A few months ago I was at a conference and some bastard scheduled stuff every single evening until midnight, every day.

I just... No, after 10 hours of conference and workshops I need to go and relax with some alone time. Occasionally I do very much enjoy a night out with people drinking beers and chatting about stuff but no more than once or twice a week. Definitely not every day until midnight when we are putting in long days in an unfamiliar place and I want to be properly awake.

So the big trick economy wise to ensure that nobody ever has enough and always wants more? Do not just say 'You are an X level noble, you get Y income!'.

Instead put together a list of Things A Rich Person Might Want, limit the number to how much detail you want to go into. Then default people to having these things at 'Moderately Crappy'. Let them spend portions of their income to raise them, but not enough to have them all above average.

So say you are an Andoran Lady.

You have an income of (random number) 1000 Crowns a year.

You might have to think about:

Household - Spending on your servants, retainers, clothes, etc. Would effect social and political stuff and how fancy of a dress or horse you can just be assumed to have.
Guards - How many armed retainers you have, from some literal household guards, to a retinue of cavalry to a small personal army.
Alms & Welfare - How much you give back to the common people. Charitable donations, good works, sponsoring festivals, etc.
Infrastructure - How much you invest in stuff like bridges, town walls, roads, waystations, etc.

Then have all of those default to like a 2 on a 1-5 scale with 3 being 'average/acceptable' and have it cost 250 Crowns a year to raise each one by a point. Also let this theoretical noble squeeze out more money if they ratchet up taxes and/or take out loans. (or if they bring in another PC who has high Stewardship or something. Best to make the actual extra income somewhat random though and ensure the steward is in a position to seriously consider embezzling).

Make sure raising each of these things either gives beneficial shinies or ups some abstract popularity meter that has descriptions for each level saying how awesome as a ruler the PC is and loved by their populace they are, but only at the higher and very expensive levels.

I can guarantee that if you run something like this you will end up with characters who are rich but are still scrabbling desperately for every penny, trying to extort each other or going into debt.

My 'pain in the ass to find' thing is shoes, I am a UK size 13 in an I fitting for width so both are essentially outside of the range that are actually carried in shops. If I want something that I can comfortably walk in with my gigantic hobbit feet then I am limited to ordering from online.

So then the fun of inevitably trying on and sending back a half dozen pairs of shoes which will of course be delivered whilst I am at work then need to be retrieved from the post office along with being a pain to return.

One of the annoying peeves I always had with the code on Arx was that +task/work was not automatic if you end the week with unused task supports, you could actually miss out on not insignificant income/resources through forgetting or not realizing you could spam a command a couple of times on a Sunday.

@sockmonkey To be fair with mine at a mere size 13 UK (14 US I think?) That still apparently puts my feet in the largest one percent or so of feet for the male population. Fortunately it is not uncommon for most ranges of shoes to actually exist sized for my feet in recent years it is just that very few shops stock them.

Anything larger and it really does start limiting you to specialist shoes or importing from the USA.

I guess there is also the context that, as of Empire Strikes Back, Leia and Han have years worth of 'off screen' interactions, they are absolutely not strangers to each other.

So I at least like to think this was all within mutually understood boundaries to some extent? Which is probably optimistic.

So, to follow on from Altered Carbon being turned into a TV show?

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/21/17035618/amazon-culture-series-iain-m-banks-television-show

Apparently Amazon is going to try turning Consider Phlebas into a show. I can only imagine the brain melting degree of budget that would be required to pull it off but am intrigued as to the result.

@Reason Some kind of abstracted lifestyle code can work really well actually.

Basically write a paragraph for each 'level' defining what it means in practice and for RP purposes, then also perhaps set out areas and styles people can live in the city with different lifestyle spending.

Then? You can further reduce admin and busy work by allowing people with certain lifestyle levels to automatically be assumed to have stuff and equipment of X and Y costs provided they are not permanently giving it to other characters. So somebody is spending the equivalent of a million dollars a year on lifestyle? Let them just pose having a sports car or use one in high speed shennanigans. If they want a panic room full of regular non fancy guns to bust open when techno ninjas attack their party? No need for them to have gone through whatever system is in use for equipment to secure fifteen sub machine guns.

But the person spending a thousand cyber dollars a year on lifestyle and living in a cardboard box probably has to individually buy sub machine guns, or fancy outfits suitable to attend the party which is going to be crashed by techno ninjas.

Regarding the 'buy or contract' question, it depends on your finances. If you can afford to just outright buy a phone then take a SIM only contract then that is generally cheaper but you do need the money up front, it does however give a lot of flexibility especially if you snag a good contract, you can potentially stick with it forever.

As an example I am now 6+ years into a two year contract and never upgraded my phone because the company stopped offering the same infinite data, infinite tethering plan at some point, I just buy a new phone every few years then move the SIM card into it. I have in the past just used my phone for my home internet and broken 200 gig a month through it.

I still find it crazy that prior to World War 1 the main source of income for the US federal government was tariffs, along with how important that was to the establishment of US industrial supremacy in the early/mid 20th century. But I am huge nerd when it comes to international trade and economics.

My kittens begged and I gave them each a sliver of cheese.

They puked all over my carpet. Do not let kittens eat cheese however cute they are.