Best posts made by Packrat

@surreality To be fair that image does have the tuxedo kitten looking far more derpy than she normally does, here she is two weeks ago, on day one, looking all dignified and protective!

@surreality That is very much the idea, here are some examples of baronies I have put together whilst working on the system:

Added: Bolded 'income types' are the two sorts of strategic income that sort of benefice gets at half cost, each benefice also has a speciality, which is basically something that it does about twice as well as might be expected otherwise. If this is a type of strategic resource then it means that the benefice holder can exchange their own resources for this type at double the normal ratio. Of course people can trade their resources between each other which is almost always more efficient, Manpower cannot be just traded to another person outside of slavery though.

More Added: This is very much not limited to nobles or bishops, here are some guild benefices for comparison:

Because I am spamming this thread, here is what I woke up to this morning:

Apparently I make a good bed.

@arkandel Agreed there, I remember running a tournament on Arx with a multiple bracket knock out jousting contest then a grand melee with over a dozen participants and it took less time than I have seen completly inconsquential stuff take in WoD, for some reason. It is not even down to code, the jousting was just people making rolls using a random system I threw together in advance.

Aww, at least he had a long and it sounds satisfying life.

Also here is a kitten in a box:

@krmbm You say that whilst on book 3, by the time you hit book 9 I suspect you will either have gone mad or put it up to like x3 speed.

Artemis is 18 weeks old today. Here she is squeaking at me to play with her.

@arkandel said in Favorite Minigames:

It's not really a mini-game per se, but I really quite the 'ladder' of gear upgrades on Arx when I played there.

I have to admit that the gear levels/upgrades system on Arx is one of the things that I really, seriously, do not like about it and definitely a mental barrier to my playing on the game. The advantages of 'high tier' equipment over default stuff are amazingly acute and to a degree I find difficult to match plausibility wise with what (at least when I played there) was a very low magic world.

A regular decently made sword vs a super fancy sword had no comparison, the super fancy sword person (at least a year ago) was potentially able to do ten times as much damage against an armoured opponent. It made it impossible to have say a Bronn like attitude of 'a sword is a sword' because the person who has a precious special sword can fairly easily slaughter you. Even if the focus is not PvP, that tells.

Especially tied with some characters having access to infinitely more money than others.

Though with such a system implimented it did strike me as odd that armour could be worn by anyone instead of it being custom fitted being a Big Deal, that would both make sense and be a good way to stop people handing off their now second best armour to a friend after upgrading, thus preserving the money sink aspect.

Today, Artemis manages to nudge a tiny gap open in the kickboard of my fitted kitchen. She then flowed through the resulting tiny gap before getting completely stuck, I wondered where she was then found myself hearing despairing mews from behind the backs of cupboards.

Once I realized where she had gotten to I removed paneling to let her out but of course her sister then had to investigate the exciting new territory, her hugely fluffy long haired sister. By the time I had both of them lured out I found myself with a pair of extremely dusty and excited 8 month old kittens romping around.

Gah.

Edit: She did it again today, it turns out it was not the kickboard, she was climbing atop the fridge then falling down behind it. I had to unscrew a ventilation grill to let her out after I heard piteous cries then saw her nose through it. I have covered the top with cardboard but will need to work out a less airflow blocking solution.

I would definitely chime to to the confirm the mentions above of people living in different countries, which is going to lead to very different views on what is 'left' or 'right'.

I am pretty sure that even the most authoritarian mainstream political views in the USA do not include a monarchy, hereditary nobles or having a 'House of Lords' instead of a senate. Though a state (Christian) religion might be more mainstream.

But even the right wing here in the UK are overwhelmingly in favour of a fully tax funded national health system, centralized police, nationally funded primary and secondary education, etc.

Still most 'Centrists' from a US perspective tend to come across to the average person in the UK as pretty extreme right wing with an often quite frankly disturbing and quasi religious faith in 'the free market' with 'capitalism' and 'socialism/communism' repeated like mantras for 'good things' and 'bad things' respectively.

@jinshei I survive! Despite the presence of voracious predators in my home. Witness the terror unleashed by floofy Hera as she hunts her preferred prey.

Fearsome Kitten

Personally I would l would love to make a new Fading Suns game and have gotten fairly far with it in the past, to the point where I had most of a grid in place.

But in practice? I absolutely will burn out long before finishing something like that and would definitely not have the time and energy to run a game. From experience, the longest I can keep personal momentum going on something like that is about a month and a half.

Also I cannot code and trying to learn how again turns out to be much more difficult than when I was in my teens.

One thing that I do feel is valuable in a Lords and Ladies set up is a large population of NPC nobles and society. Then you can have people with social stats or plots influence things, or social pressures be applied, etc, without having to rely on player characters entirely.

Another consideration, for me at least? Player characters almost always have 'above average' stats and skills for good reason but if player characters then make up the entire structure of an inherited noble caste? That starts to create a world in which those of noble birth are inherently superior even if that was not the intention.

I am to be honest a big fan of making that kind of thing based on 'level' of nobility also, if you are a knight/dame? Be really good at stuff! There might well be thousands of NPC gentry and you are one of the people who stand out. Somebody is playing a duke or duchess? Have them given points to be statted like a vaguely kind of competent person because they are going to get plenty of spotlight and agency from their position and power. They do not also need to be a master duellist or peerless tactician or unmatched courtier, actually if they are merely decent at stuff then they have much more reason to want to recruit, retain the loyalty of and have to delegate power to other player characters.

So I should probably say who I am, I have been away from MUSHing for a fairly long time but I jumped into playing Cristoph. Fun so far though I am spending probably far too much money on random items of coded clothing.

@Ganymede said in Course Corrections:

@surreality said in Course Corrections:

I don't think it's necessary to, say, uncreate bats just so people won't make gunpowder from guano (though if someone wants to do that, that's their call and I support their right and choice to make it), or perhaps more accurately, I do not feel it should not be necessary to go that far in order to be able to say: we really don't want to go in that direction with this game/do not want to drastically change the game world in the ways that idea would inevitably change it.

My objection to taking such a stance is how horridly insipid it is relative to the development of modern firearms, which took almost 1,000 years. Plus, gunpowder existed, but was seldom used during the late medieval/renaissance period of European history, from which much of fantasy seems to be lifted from. (For example, full suits of plate armor did not exist until after cannons were used in the Battle of Crecy, 1346.)

Pretty much this, gunpowder developed a lot over time for that matter, not just how it was used. Your basic 'early' gunpowder was quite expensive to make and would tend to differentiate into it's component ingredients if left to sit around, which meant it started off not hugely powerful then rapidly degraded over time. Siege and even handheld weapons did use the stuff but it was relatively rare and for personal weapons less effective than a crossbow.

Handheld weapons started as novelties then evolved to being used because they were much cheaper than crossbows to make and very low on maintenance, if inaccurate and very slow to reload. Typically used as multi barreled weapons for siege defense or perhaps wall weapons for militia (again, for siege defense, where reload times do not matter nearly so much.).

14th century, wet grinding allowed production of gunpowder that was more of a paste and did not differentiate, this made it cheaper mostly because it could be stored for longer periods of time (also more infrastructure and better developed production methods). Cheaper powder and very simple ammunition meant that gunpowder was starting to get very cost effective, this is not down to the 'it takes less time to train somebody to use a gun' factor, it was the cost of the weapons and ammunition. Basically a handgonne might cost 1/3 as much as a crossbow due to lacking moving parts and you did not have to worry about replacing bits nearly as often, plus powder and lead shot was easier to make than quarrels, but the weapons were basically inferior to a good crossbow in action.

15th century, 'corned' powder, rolled into grains, which improved the lifespan of powder even more and when done properly, basically doubled the power of gunpowder due to allowing more air in the mix to allow rapid combustion. At this point, by the mid 15th century, you start getting handheld firearms that outperform crossbows in penetration, plus both longbows & crossbows in range and accuracy. Still slow firing and not hugely reliable but they had a genuine battlefield role. They were certainly not the objectively superior weapon though and a hundred years later in the mid 16th century, crossbows or longbows were very much competitive weapons used by professional troops of well funded militaries.

Mid or late 15th century is also what a lot of people think of when they think of fantasy, full plate armour, etc. It was also very much an age with field artillery and firearms, the armies of Burgundy for example, had one handgunner for every eight man 'lance', along with a knight or man at arms, a light cavalryman, three archers, a crossbowman and a pikeman. Keep in mind that this was over two hundred years after gunpowder's introduction to mainland Europe, with two centuries of development, eager development. It was not a case of kings and knights retarding development, kings in particular loved cannons, they were expensive (and thus only kings tended to have a siege train) but allowed the breaking down of castles relatively quickly, thus giving them far more power relative to rebelling lords.

Of course James II of Scotland loved cannons too much and died when one exploded on him.

So history ramblings aside, I can both see why people would 'fear' gunpowder in their games and also why it is silly to do so. Looked at 'realistically', introducing firearms into a medieval fantasy is not going to make Robin Hood expys or knights in shining armour with swords irrelevant, but in practice? Somebody is going to want to develop six shooters or expect their musket to act like a Garand, ignoring that those advancements took centuries of incremental advancement in metallurgy, powder manufacture, the development of springs, blast furnaces, etc.

Custodius running plots is generally where things get bad, he runs decent plots, but they are all ultimately about favoring his character and furthering their agenda and if you confront him about it he professes complete ignorant no matter how ridiculous. I think the worst I ran into was on Vargo.

His main character sent the character of his RL wife on a quest! He then tried to run said adventure as his alt and was adamant that this was not at all biased, he spent weeks whining and wheedling and complaining when I shot him down and said that no, he was not allowed to do that.

I have been playing Kingdom Come - Deliverance.

It definitely has janky edges but is overall rather fun as well as being absolutely gorgeous.

Currently riding around on a horse I spent far too much money on in half stolen, half cheap plate armour and beating Hungarian mercenaries to death with a mace whilst keeping a longsword for cutting up bandits or stabbing people with visor lacking helmets in the face with.

EDIT: If you run into the 'Faint Hearted Knight' along the road and he challenges you to a duel, demand he stake his sword on the contest. His sword is probably the best longsword I have found in the game so far and has a base value of somewhere north of 2,500 silver, also he is terrible and easy to beat up.

@Bad-at-Lurking Right, being a channeler is the Real Ultimate Power but the setting also makes it seriously distrusted and potentially dangerous in most areas. Most places seem to have male dominated societies - but ones that are fucking terrified of Aes Sedai coming in like wrecking balls and being something that they just do not have an answer against and must defer to. They do not like it though.

@auspice Good news, it now works! The stupid news, it could have worked on day 1, I actually had all of the required ports on my graphics card but they were covered with protective rubber caps that looked like they were not supposed to come off. Now I have a bunch of DVI-D to HMDI converters, extensions and splitter cables.

Edit: So to add, holy shit, VR is crazy. The quality of the graphics is kind of not wonderful, it is lower resolution than a 1080p screen, but utterly butter smooth and amazingly immersive. I dipped into 'VR Chat' and it was as I suspected full of anime character avatars but just being in a 'room' with people, talking to them, walking around, etc, whilst actually in my spare bedroom? Pretty mind blowing.

@Lithium said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

@Packrat The oath forbids them from using channeling against anyone except to save their own life or some nonsense like that.

Not quite, it forbids them from using it as a weapon except against Darkfriends or Shadowspawn, or in the last extreme defense of her life. Numerous Aes Sedai in the books reason to themselves that wrapping somebody in air and restraining them does not count as 'a weapon'.