Posts made by Packrat

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.

@auspice On the plus side, from everything I hear actually working in the video game industry is absolutely horrible. It is an aspirational job, lots of people want to work for Bioware as an example. As a result? Those companies then take horrific advantage of people because they know they can get away with relatively poor wages combined with horrific working conditions and unreasonably long hours.

You can probably find a job a much better job with greater job security and conditions that uses the same skills in another industry.

@auspice There is that factor here, if you buy a house? It is brick, the roof is slate, you can generally expect that in a century it will be structurally sound and might even still have the original roof. Of course with the cost of land and subsequently housing here it makes sense to build permanent and solid constructions. US houses are far, far cheaper for several reasons but seem to fairly rapidly become rickety as they age.

@auspice The worst part? Unless you are actively rich you cannot get anywhere here in the UK with really big rooms unless you get particularly lucky, even if you have the budget for a larger home. If you buy a bigger house then that generally means just more fairly cramped bedrooms that are about large enough for a double bed.

Twenty foot across rooms are generally limited to high end luxury housing or huge prestige Victorian homes that tend to run in the three quarter of a million dollar range. You cannot buy something the size of a 3 or 4 bedroom family home that has two bedrooms and more space instead.

@auspice That kind of bullshit is why I have never felt the urge to go and work in the USA even when opportunities have come up. I do not care if the cost of living is lower or if I could get higher wages, or lower taxes.

I get thirty days of paid leave a year and up to six months of fully paid sick time, along with private health care to go on top of the National Health Service to ensure I do not need to wait if I need physiotherapy or something. If I lose my job for anything other than legally provable malfeasance? I have to be given months of notice and a substantial payout that would ensure I have plenty of grace period to find new employment and move.

Admittedly I am management but I doubt I would get all or even most of those perks if I was in the states, certainly not after factoring in the cost of private health insurance which would still be nothing like as comprehensive and stress free as what I get right now.

But I do look with unutterable envy at the kind of house I could afford in most of the USA. My 650 sq ft apartment here is worth a quarter of a million dollars.

Some years ago I worked for a company that was growing exponentially, we kept hitting 10% growth and 15% profit every year and business was booming. Every year nobody in the entire company apart from the executives and salespeople would get a cost of living increase in wages but we would be thrown a paltry bonus. Also Human Resources would give the same spiel about how we could not get raises this year because we might not do as well next year, also no, it was taking far too much effort to introduce any kind of wage transparency.

Also for some reason men who managed projects would be 'Project Managers' whilst women could only be 'Project Coordinators' who were paid a lot less, this apparently had no bearing on the size or quantity of projects managed.

Then one year they made 1/4 of the company redundant and the Finance Director drove into work the next day in a new Porsche Spyder, a million dollar supercar. Obviously there was no money for any pay rises six years running and they were legitimately sad about not being able to provide such.

So I finally bit the bullet and paid into the new kickstarter, meaning that I now have roughly the first 3/5 of the manuscript to read.

I have not really gotten into the rules portions of this yet but the setting information and general writeups of Dragon Blooded society? This is really, really good stuff and I am seriously intrigued by it. They have actually bitten the bullet on the implications of a matriarchal society for example, along with the whole thing being surprisingly inclusive yet stodgy and strict in other areas.

Transgendered? Marrying a same sex partner? Both fine! Not having kids? Wanting a divorce? Nope. You need to stick with your spouse and summon demons or grow children using magical plants fed by blood or something. Though you get a few decades to jump into having heirs given that your lifespan is a few hundred years.

@roz I have two monitors so I am okay display wise, I can just shove an instance of the stream off to my right to see chat. The issue does seem to be getting proper audio so that people can hear me talk and thus stick around instead of leaving due to it being incoherent distant mumbling.

@insomnia I will give it a go, thanks for the suggestions!

One thing that endlessly frustrated me about Wheel of Time was that the main character established his Male Channeler School, probably the second most powerful group/organisation after the White Tower.

Then he just ignored them and left them alone for months at a time to do whatever the fuck. Despite the fact that he could teleport. Despite the fact that dozens of them were able to teleport themselves and thus could have established communications between his wildly disparate holdings and nominal allies. Just popping in to do a double check and supervision pass every few days for an hour could have made the whole series infinitely less head impact against wall inducing.

Another factor that I have run into a lot is that, certainly in a text only medium, is is amazingly easy to attribute the worst possible motivations to people when you interact with them online. I certainly am not perfect at practising what I preach there but my own experience is that if I clamp down on my initial gut reaction to personally file somebody as a Super Jerk for disagreeing with me or questioning what I am sure was an objectively right decision?

Fuck it, they probably had some kind of point or are operating under different assumptions and priorities to me, so if I continue to treat them as a cool person then it will likely be a self fulfilling prophesy.

Obviously that goes out of the window if they start vomiting forth sexist or racist vitriol.

I tried adjusting things, but think I might just need a better microphone. It is weird, I tried testing things out by listening to my own stream and my voice was quite clear but apparently I sound as if I am in a water tank or something to everyone else.

@insomnia I am using Xsplit, which apparently does have weird issues with audio pickup. I will try other options before making another attempt because it is obviously not working.

So I am having another go at streaming, this time with Deep Sky Derelicts, which I have play a good few hours of before but not with the latest content. Think Space Darkest Dungeon but still in early access.

I also have tried to tweak the audio but no idea if it worked!

Twitch Link

I played on it very briefly but cannot remember my character and never played them for very long. I mostly remember that the person who summoned the angel character I made then immediately tried to bang him and was creepy enough about it that I quit after two weeks or so.

Ahah, it is on Youtube, the first two minutes or so of this video.

Youtube Video

Just, damn, that absolutely works to set the scene.

So I watched a Twitch stream VOD for the Battletech campaign that included the intro sequence.

Holy shit, instant sale.

@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.

Arise thread, from the grave!

So post release, Exalted 3rd Edition languished and the books that were supposed to immediately follow it never materialised. Some time ago however the two head developers were sacked (thankfully, I have seen pretty convincing evidence one of them was sexually abusive toward fans). The new development leads seem to be both better people and rather better at actually releasing things.

Some time ago there was a 'gear book' Arms of the Chosen that featured a whole array of incredibly cool magical things from a bow that help you be magical Genghis Khan (with magical mongol armies on special occasions) , to a magical brush/spear that lets you declare things as scholarly facts whilst murdering people. Also a suit of armour that lets you turn into a dragon but also gives you the Principle of 'I am the storm, raining destruction on my enemies', its intensity building the more you use your armour to turn into a dragon.

There is also a kickstarter just begun for the Terrestrial Exalted, the inherited by bloodline, weaker but much more numerous Exalted who run most of the largest and most powerful societies in the setting. Apparently this time they have the manuscript actually written and are releasing it during the kickstarter campaign with things looking good so far.