Well I am currently streaming early game Aurora 4x, so... No graphics solar system survey and colonisation extravaganza so detailed that you have to design not just engines, or missiles, but engines for your missiles.
Right now I am converting my shipyard to make a colony ship so that I can ship people to Mars.
Whilst I monologue. Which is harder than it looks!
The Good Place really is excellent, the writing is so good and they obviously did have a (crazy) plan in place right from the start. I love it.
Honestly one of the big problems I had with Arx when I played there was that a lot of the things which could lead to complexity and to player fed plot felt deliberately smoothed out and whitewashed for lack of a better term.
Noble houses as immutable and eternal entities with no transfer other merging of lands through marriage and centuries old existences, weirdly hierarchical and 'clean' chains of feudal obligation, a safely ignored church that proceeded to politically shoot itself in the head under NPC direction.
Then hordes of evil approach and everyone gets an irrefutable divine vision just to make sure. It made IC focusing on anything else rediculous and also made RP relating to it pretty dull. Especially with everything happening off screen.
I have been watching Altered Carbon continuously since I finished work today, holy shit this is good, I last read the books over a decade ago so it has just the right balance of memorable whilst I am unable to remember more than the broadest outlines of the plot.
A lot really does depend on:
Also
Assuming both of those are in place then swashbuckling takes place. To use the example of @deadculture above I have certainly had characters swashbuckle on Fading Suns games even though the system is not really set up to support it. At least, rappelling off cliffs onto a sloop full of Space Moors then fighting them with a saber in one hand and a pistol in the other sounds pretty swashbuckling to me.
I work for an engineering focused aerospace company and it is a huge issue here, only 15% of the entire workforce are women and they are skewed heavily toward administration type roles that by and large are not paid that well compared to engineers. That then reflects into senior management, though to be fair they are making significant efforts to recruit and promote women, take on women as apprentices, etc.
It was nicely refreshing today that one of the presentations I attended was being given by a 27 year old woman who was a team leader running part of a cutting edge research project. I mean yes, she is probably free of prejudice in employment here, the company is really good about that kind of thing and absolutely stamps down immediately on discrimination. But the pressure she must have faced to go through the whole years long education path to become a materials engineer in such a gigantically male dominated field must have been huge.
Altered Carbon binge completed. Yep, not the same as the book but definitely worth watching albeit with gratuitous nudity in profusion.
One thing that I see a lot of on games but have never really seen working too well is conflating IC positions of leadership and authority with expectations of OOC administration or quasi staffing. Things like the High Priest also being some kind of 'helper' or designated OOC authority on stuff related to their religion, etc.
I can see why this happens given that the player of the High Priest presumably knows a bunch about the organisation they ICly lead and is likely to be somebody many enjoy or at least can stand interacting with. Inevitably though you end up with people writing the fluff for their faction in hagiographic terms along with people feeling out of character pressured not to disagree with the 'faction head'. Even if it is relatively subtle and not abusive very few people define the IC reality of their organisation to have deep issues or flaws especially related to the leadership of their character. This has obvious effects even without players often relying upon faction heads for plot and similar goodness.
Additionally the level of pressure expectation leads to faction head types burning out rather quickly unless they are surrounded and supported by a clique. Not comic book specific, but pretty relevant where feature characters and activity levels are a concern.
I took advantage of the recent sale to buy Banner Saga 2 and 3, having enjoyed the original but then failed to follow up on it.
I guess I am going to be engaging in tactical RPG saga action for a while.
@mietze I remember having the reverse, my father is 6'4" and I always assumed I would grow to be the same kind of height.
Then I stopped at 6', in retrospect I am kind of glad given this means I fit in beds and stuff, but it was disappointing as a teenager!
So I am quite serious regarding this, do you want to see Fading Suns 2017 happen? Do you have ideas as to how it should happen?
Then message me. The more minds collaborating the better this is going to be and the more likely it will be 2017 rather than 2018. Even if you are not going to want to help staff the place I do want to avoid the issues previous FS games have had and ensure there are comprehensive systems in place prior to launch, this is not something which is going to work very well if I come up with stuff in a vacuum. Regardless of the improbable number of hours I have spent considering the issues with prior Fading Suns games whilst commuting.
Talking about vampires, I actually picked up the 14 year old original Vampire the Masquered Bloodlines recently and installed the 'fan patch' that fixes stuff and improves the graphics.
It is actually really damn good? A few sections get iffy especially if playing as a social character (looking at you, sewers full of monsters and only rats for blood) but I am now super hyped for the new one coming out next year even if it has been delayed.
I have discovered the joy of really good quality kitchenware, I do not even cook more than once every few days but the nice stuff just feels right to hold and looks great.
This week I have spent the equivalent of about $250 on saucepans.
I think I have a problem and need help.
@oldfrightful I assume dog staffers leads to this:
To be fair my kittens are filling a very important role in return for my feeding them, homing them and giving them medical care.
They are fluffy and super adorable. Like, when I wake up in the morning I typically have the black and white kitten curled up next to me, she wakes up and trills then nuzzles me as I pet her. Then as I sit up and try to get my contact lenses in the fluffy black kitten bounces in, trills and jumps up to purr aggressively for cuddle time.
On the other hand I just found out that their dad weighs 8kg (17.5 lbs?). These are not going to grow to be small cats!
@thatguythere I figure that depends on if there is possible 'synergy' between skills or if the system rewards different skills in different circumstances that can change at any given moment.
I mean to use a combat example, in a lot of game systems it does not really matter much what melee weapon you are using, a knife, a sword, a club, etc. Maybe they have slightly different stats, or one is clearly superior to another, etc. A lot of games then inexplicably have separate skills for them.
In that instance yes, there is no reason to take Sword 6/Polearm 6 guy over Sword 8 guy.
But what if poleaxes are awesome vs people in heavy armour and in open spaces on foot, but you cannot use them on horseback or easily indoors, plus they are a pain to carry. Swords are easy to carry and great vs people without good armour plus take up less space. You are going to storm Baroness Von Evil's castle to rescue the sexy prince who was kidnapped and is being forced into marriage.
In a lot of systems you obviously take Sword 8 guy, because Sword 8 guy is better at fighting. If different skills actually let you do different stuff though? Sword 6/Polearm 6 person might well shine over Sword 8 guy when you fight Baroness Von Evil's demonic knights in the courtyard then be less effective after you hack your way inside and battle up the stairs of the Evil Iron Citadel against tentacle demons.
Today, kittens are unhappy about going to the vet:
They are now micro-chipped and vaccinated though and I let them feast on real meat when they returned, which apparently means they forgot to hate me.
Sadly our coder broke, or his computer broke at least, with no signs of recovery. Things never really recovered momentum so this is kind of in a limbo state with me occasionally poking at documentation rather than being properly worked on.
The kittens have worked out that my setting up a towel means that they are going to get their anti ear mite drops, which they hate.
However investigating dangled shoe laces is much more important than hiding under a table and ear drops are followed with ham.
