Best posts made by Packrat

Wes Platt of Otherspace infamy actually did this, only without the whole 'Charity' part, I am unsure how much money he actually got from the whole affair but the game was live for I think a couple of years. Needless to say he did not actually pay staff, they just got some of the pay to win beanies for 'free' in return for hundreds of hours of their time.

So as a new cat owner, I found a few of the videos here super helpful and definitely appreciate this guy's amazingly smooth and calming voice.

Helpful Vancouver Vet

@Duntada said:

@Ghost
I love over reaching and getting smacked down for it. Mad grabs for power where you either end up at the end as king, or a corpse are the best kinds of storylines. It's been a while since I had one of those though... back in the 90's and early 2000's though I'd seen some games get BRUTAL. I ended up iced just for being in the same room as someone's enemy before.

The best one I ever saw when it comes to brutality was one person who died on an older Fading Suns game because they had tea with their friend in the library. Unfortunately for them, their mortal enemy was also in the library, blocked the exits with goons, then forced them into a one sided duel to the death as they pleaded and begged. The thing is that 1) Their friend knew it was a trap 2) Was actually their friend and 3) Was forced into it, yet all of the players involved were cool with things OOC.

@insomnia Belatedly, I do indeed have Windows 10, reinstalling drivers seems to be a semi regular requirement if I want to still be able to talk on Discord or similar. Always annoying though.

One thing that I always run into with FS is that it suffers from the 'linear character generation, geometric progression' problem where having a stat of say, 5 in character generation, will cost 5 points while a stat at 1 will cost 1 point. In play raising a stat from 0 to 1 might cost 1xp while raising it from 4 to 5 might cost 5xp, leading to very strong (year+ of progression on many games) punishments for making a well rounded character instead of aiming to squeeze the 'best' possible degree of min maxing past whomever staff is.

It seems that building in a more balanced advancement system from the start might work better than trying to hope staff on whichever game implement something, especially as it seems common for FS to be implemented by people without any real knowledge of how the numbers work or willingness to tweak them.

Well I am going to have another go at streaming, this time with a microphone that works!

Twitch Link

I have been doing some thinking whilst commuting and somehow came up with the following rough draft for a setting/idea:

So in the distant past some extraordinarily wealthy individuals set off into distance space to colonize, expending all of their vast wealth in doing so and very much establishing this colony with the intention of setting themselves up as Space Nobles. They did this, and had the resources to set themselves up with an extremely well planned, high technology and rapidly developing base, only for all contact with Earth to be cut off without warning. They were deliberately not connected to the wormhole network used for FTL travel but were still alarmed by this and cautiously expand back toward the core.

At this point they find out that aliens have successfully conquered the human race and start a war with them, a war they are winning and have been for centuries, 'liberating' occupied human populations or isolated and technologically regressed worlds then welcoming them into new lives of being serfs for their genetically augmented and super tech possessing new overlords. The aliens have their own wormhole network but destroy it as they lose territory (Unless daring heroes thwart this perhaps!) meaning that the advance is limited to the speed of light, with new wormholes being brought forward to consolidate gains.

The game is set in a region on the edge of a cluster, with stars perhaps half a lightyear from each other (go for say 3x time in game, fighting across space to new systems is a thing albeit slow) where an advance force of especially ambitious/covetous nobles pushed far ahead, only to fight a bitter battle in interstellar space where their fleet was scattered and their wormhole 'back home' destroyed. They won and seized the sector capital, they are advancing and setting up a local wormhole network, they can still talk to everyone else via Ansible or whatever, but they have no way back and no way for massive reinforcements to arrive for say... 20 years.

There would however be a constant stream of scattered ships arriving from interstellar space, often unexpectedly, to allow new PCs to turn up.

Everyone would be trying to 1) Fight a war, 2) Set up themselves and their families to get as much as possible and 3) Try to ensure that when contact with the Empire is reestablished they are not executed for being Space Traitors but rather get to become the new Space Viceroy. Space Nobles are super capable, products of generations of genetic enhancement, and have really good technology, but cannot make new Space Noble grade ships locally (though starships can probably manufacture new smaller, expendable on adventures grade ships, Space Armour, Space Swords, etc). The aliens are dangerous but on the back foot, the 'Liberated' humans definitely better off under Space Nobles rather than Evil Aliens but likely remembering Space Democracy as a thing.

I do like the idea of the Aliens being Space Elves or something, that opens a lot more options for interaction than if they are bug monsters or robots or similar.

Originally I was thinking that all Space Nobles would have their own starship, albeit varying in size and capabilities, making 'ship owners' a 'class' works though. Reading the above I did think that you could have a divide between Conquistador type Space Nobles, and Space Navy Officers (who would be nobles themselves of course). The former would have more economic clout, likely mandates to administer worlds, ships which make much better Space Palaces and also manufacturies or able to land as a colony, etc.

Space Navy types would have more outright murderous warships (Though certainly not unique access to them), possibly more unity of purpose, etc, but would be cut off from their supplies and with no choice but to work with/for the more privately motivated Space Nobles, even outside of the fact that they have major personal incentives to do so.

The kittens conduct their comprehensive review of the packaging material for their new water fountain.

Update: Well they definitely love the water fountain, they are drinking a ton more water than they used to or just spend time staring at it.

It is probably a terrible idea but I am tempted to actually make this thing, can anyone recommend a good MU* hosting site which is usable for idiots who have not set up a game in a decade?

I will probably end up using Wikidot for the website given that is far easier than any of the alternatives.

This weekend I took part in a zombie event thing that involved running around a huge derelict factory in mostly complete darkness with BB guns and very few torches, teams competitively completing objectives whilst battling actors dressed as zombies.

There was also the 'invincible' zombie with the chainsaw, at one point we fled him into darkness only for six of us to end up rammed into a doorless toilet cubicle and failing to hide from a man wielding a chainsaw. Good times!

But one girl thought it was a good idea to wear golden flipflops to the event instead of ankle boots.

Amber was a character on Star Crusade who...

Well actually she was not given unfair advantages over the other County level nobles and was in many ways arguably the weakest. Certainly she was not particularly favoured or disfavoured by staff, non of whom knew who she was from prior games and none of whom were particularly friends after she did turn up.

Remember that nobody had more than a fractional overview of what was happening on that game, people fixated on their issues or opposition without realising their rivals were generally being funked over in eight different ways themselves but dealing (or not) with it without advertising everything.

Some people have alleged she was kind of a bitch but it was apparently a given for people to complain that everyone who was not them or their ally was unfairly favoured and/or evil on that game. I only RPed with her like four or five times but she seemed okay.

She was markedly less prone to histrionics than most players though and was a political rival of Apollonius' character.

I think a staff member did play one of her vassal barons but he was playing a decadent fop who was not exactly a key asset.

This is probably very much a case of 1st world problems.

But no, if you phone me on a Tuesday afternoon I cannot make time for a job interview on Thursday the same week. I have an existing job and most of why you are potentially interested in hiring me is because of this and its fairly high profile, intensive nature!

It was three years ago and an awful lot happened on that game which I disagreed with, I mean I did quit staff and have no intention of repeating much of what happened on Star Crusade, so I am just not going to go into a step by step rebuttal of that though I do not feel your account is entirely accurate.

On a more positive note (or negative?) I am definitely not going to make a Fading Suns game, whilst it is a great setting Fading Suns lead to a ton of impositions which I am not a fan of and frankly I want things to be more sci-fi and less medieval. I have the broad brushes of an original theme already sorted out, the framework for the economy and social system, and will be setting up a server/trying to remember if I can code in the last week of April (since necessary bits for my computer build got delayed and so I am stuck without a real machine).

For a start it is one hell of a lot easier to put together economics/military stuff when you do not need to take into account medieval slaves in salt mines compared to space robot stock exchanges and knife wielding conscripts vs anti grav laser gunships.

People who piss on toilet seats then do not have the courtesy to wipe them dry with toilet paper.

Why would you do this? Why would you walk out of a toilet cubicle at work leaving piss all over the seat? Somebody is going to have to deal with that and it will be altogether more disgusting for them.

@silentsophia said:

I still can't believe the first period thing. EGADS.

Sofia was pretty much the naval gal. Sure, she had a thing for Sans, but she had a job and things to do. Plus, Admiral Fluffnstuff was a very popular cat.

Sophia and Sans did have matching robot hands, it was fate.

Edit: Actually I just checked, they were not matching hands! San's was super strong but Sofia's had water/chemical resistance. Also I never realized that Sofia had a phobia of spiders.

Wait, how can people fail to change cat litter for weeks? After like a week at most it is substantially turned into cat piss soaked sawdust that cats will get on their paws before cuddling with you and stinking.

Change that stuff every week at most! 5 days is better and I am a clinically depressed lazy person.

I distinctly remember Custodius' Hazat on Vargo had a vassal who controlled basically the whole Hazat whole navy, he used to bitch endlessly about how his peace efforts were unsuccessful.

Not knowing that she was using 'his' (her) navy to pirate raid coastlines 24/7 regardless of whom Custodius had decided to be at war or at peace with.

@Ganymede I have absolutely broken up with somebody before because they texted me at 3:30 am for some bullshit reason and woke me up before getting pissy that I told them I wanted to sleep. I had to be up at 6:30am for work, that was Not Cool absent a genuine serious issue.

This does sound pretty awesome, I remember playing a character from a Zoroastrian mythology world on an Amber game years ago and it was a wealth of cool stuff that people are not normally very familiar with.

@Cobaltasaurus I tried to have a nice lie in today, as a Sunday where I had no commitments.

I was woken up at 6:30am by a cat vomiting onto my feet, presumably because when I did some baking last night she went berserk to access then lick at the mixing bowl in order to devour that buttery, sugary goodness. Thanks kitten.