Posts made by Packrat

@aria This strikes particularly home for me.

My grandfather just died (on Christmas Day), age 94, he was from Lithuania. He was also an Oberfeldwebel in the Luftwaffe in World War 2. I mean in his instance this was not entirely voluntary, he was in his late teens when the Russians invaded Lithuania in 1939 then fought the Soviets as a partisan until the Germans took control in 1941, then he ended up being conscripted into the German military after volunteering to keep fighting the USSR.

Him then commanding work parties of Soviet prisoners of war to scavenged downed power lines after he was trained as an electrical engineer was pretty voluntary though. After I joined the army and he started drinking with me the one time he opened up with a lot of things he had not spoken about before. My grandmother (and mother, and uncle) all got shocked and assumed out loud he would have been shot if he had not done this. Nope, he confirmed that using Russian prisoners for slave labour got him promoted and extra pay and he also fucking hated them.

Also when the war was ending he destroyed his identity documentation, switched to civilian dress, then fled west and surrendered to American troops whilst claiming he had been a forced labourer rather than a senior NCO in the German military. It worked.

I spent every weekend with my maternal grandparents prior to starting school, they were like a second set of parents to me and he was one of the hardest working, gentlest and kindest people I have ever known.

He was also built like a brick shithouse, blonde and blue eyed. Apparently he actually met Hitler, shook his hand and was partially promoted because he was picked out as an example of a model member of the 'master race' from outside of Germany. Bleh. He was crying when he described how his family and him cheered as the jews from their village were rounded up and shipped off though. It was not something he was ever proud of in retrospect, just stuck in a fucked up situation for everyone involved but he did end up going along with it.

@miss-demeanor That really does look amazing, sadly no UK delivery. Dammit.

So I have been trying Elite: Dangerous, using a Vive. It is ridiculously immersive but also not ideal for keyboard and mouse.

'Press the Home Key!' I blindly fumble finger random buttons, put my spaceship into 'silent running' mode without realizing, it overheats, thrusters break, I spin uncontrollably into an asteroid and explode.

@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.

New peeve, which is I think a textbook definition of first world problems.

I just spent about (translates) $1,400 on various computer upgrading and Vive buying so that I can get room scale VR set up and working at maximum efficiency, I have a room set up for it, now I am stuck waiting on Amazon to deliver the various random connectors that I found mid process that I need to complete the setup.

No electronics stores nearby were selling DVI-D dual link splitter cables!

@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:

Personally I feel that there is really no benefit in conflating IC authority with OOC authority at all.

If you make the ICly senior person for X group/organisation/area associated with providing RP, helping people, etc then it 1) Means that they have additional burden which will likely reduce their impetus to continue doing stuff. 2) Make people feel obligated, OOC, to them. They are the provider of RP, they are the avenue of communication to staff, etc. That is likely to stifle rebellions, unrest, etc. Even in a situation like say Arx where each 'tier' (complaints about there being a rigid tier system aside) is only about 40% stronger than the one below. 3) Make them feel obligated to other characters and players. They should probably not kill Unruly Duke X because that would suck for their player, etc.

Edit:

The probably flawed approach I am working with for the new Fading Suns games is, simply, to charge people for stuff in character generation. Being a Knight is 10 points, a baron 30, being a Count is 50 points. Actually controlling a barony looks to be 100-160 points whilst the example counties I have made so far were up to about 250 points. The thing is that you have to pay for this and (for example) a 50 year old character gets 445 points whilst a 20 year old gets 300. Being a generic well rounded NPC knight with the skills to do your job but nothing exceptional costs about 150 points.

The idea is that the full cost is for a 'secure' fief whilst a border benefice or one where there exist serious rival claimants might be half price. Still, landed nobles are likely to trend toward being not terribly competent youngsters or middle aged people who are competent rather than heroes. Basically if you are a secure landed noble, bishop or wealthy guilder, then you are going to be a quest giver rather than the person who engages in epic adventures and who needs other PCs to work for them to achieve things.

@Pyrephox Ooh, the excommunication thing made perfect sense, it was the not-pope throwing somebody off a bridge that was the 'shot in the head'. Before that I know my character was frankly pretty much in agreement with the church. I mean believing the word of demonstratively asshole elves that the human sacrifice was necessary or useful to anyone other than elf assholes always struck him as pretty deeply suspect.

Give the example that @bored gave about Star Crusade earlier in the thread this is something I have been thinking about a lot for any new Fading Suns game, also keep in mind stuff that I observed on Arx.

To start with I am looking at having a much flatter structure for feudal/whatever power holders. On Arx a baron gets pretty much the same ways to interact with the economy/systems as a duke but with smaller numbers, all dukes report to a head of house whilst having marquis level nobles reporting to them, etc. This is both not very interesting and pretty weird if trying to emulate any kind of actual feudal hierarchy and its snakepit messiness. Playing a duke I ran into a fair bit of griping from say, counts about how poor and unimportant they were, let alone barons. Anyone not a landed noble was basically not on the scale at all outside of the head of church guy, who was an NPC who then politically shot the faction in the head before being replaced. It was all very dependent upon having a head of 'faction' (High Lord tier) who was active and you got along with and people were almost inevitably super in lockstep with said person as a result.

So my plan is basically two 'tiers' of IC power holder. You can have a 'minor benefice', which means you spend points in character generation to get a small income of abstracted strategic resources (Cash, Manpower, Industry, Influence, Technology, etc). At this point you are very much not a 'power player' but could be a landed knight, a rich priest, a guilder with investments, or perhaps somebody with offworld assets who has diverted significant resources to their benefit whilst they do stuff 'here'.

Or you have control of a full on 'Benefice', which could be controlling a barony or county, being a bishop, controlling a major business, being a mayor, etc. These are all pretty much on the same tier with the richest perhaps 2.5 times the income of the poorest and the things bought using character generation points. There are also ICly a lot of people at this level, a few hundred, meaning that the vast majority will be NPCs presumed to exist and able to be persuaded to actually help or hinder using Influence.

A count is only really different from a baron in that they have a benefice giving (most of the time) more income and also a half dozen baronies loosely affiliated with them, these baron tier people nominally owe them a certain degree of military service but in turn a count has a higher military obligation to their liege. Not all barons report to a count rather than a duke, hell, not all feudal benefices are owned by a baron, you can be a knight and have one if your title is rich but not titled, a landless count, or an abbot with feudal obligations for your monasteries' land grant.

So, effectively, no 'hard' factions. The bishop of Ramlah, the Count of Ramlah, the various guild leaders of Ramlah and the landed nobility of the county? They are not at all assumed to be working together. If the Count turns out to be useless then one of the barons or baronesses can step up easily enough, or perhaps the Bishop gets things done, or perhaps everyone raids each other, goes into debt and ends up owned by the Reeve Director.

All Hawkwoods? Definitely not assumed to be working together. Any positions above 'I have a benefice that is particularly rich' would come down to ducal positions, being a general or admiral, treasurer, etc. The intent is very much for these to be appointed or voted on, temporary and volatile.

Top level leadership being mostly NPC at least to start with, in the form of two (Well, three counting offworld) ducal titles and the archbishop but the most relevant duke being largely incapable. Plus a city council running the capital/main play area, which would likely be PC dominated.

So essentially not putting some people at the top out of character generation because they applied for an empty slot and trying to avoid any character becoming a 'bottleneck' unless they can be easily ICly replaced. If some knight manages to wangle a position of 'Lord High Admiral' then fails to keep their peers happy about it? Then they can and will be replaced.

Thanks everyone, it was not entirely unexpected given he was 94 and has been rapidly going downhill with asbestosis for nine months now but still horrible. Mostly to be honest because of the effect on my mother, especially given we were all about to go visit to give him his Christmas presents.

Still, he got to 94 and up until the last year was still completely there mentally whilst being in good enough physical shape to do his own gardening and house work. He got to see his first great grandchild as well so he had a good run.

Well it is the morning of Christmas Day and my grandfather just died.

Fuck.

@aria Thankfully it never got that far, despite her hotness I pulled out after most of the conversation from her side in the second date was about how eastern European immigrants were evil. The woman in question was an immigrant herself (from Nigeria), also my grandfather is Lithuanian. It was awkward.

I am guessing that the guy equivalent is going on a date then finding that the woman you are with talks about nothing but how she wants babies and how she keeps getting fired from her various attempts at having a job, with bonus racism.

She did have some pretty good cooking tips though?

So I could not sleep and thus watched Bright on Netflix. It was not a great film but definitely kept my attention for a few hours and I loved the worldbuilding.

Hell, it was basically a buddy cop movie set in the Shadowrun universe, also there was a brief shot of a centaur riot cop and also a dragon over the LA sky line with no further explanation.

I have been playing a lot of They Are Billions, a really neat RTS where you have to build up your base then survive in a world overrun by zombies.

The thing is that the map starts choked with zombies and at intervals you are attacked by hordes, each twice the size of the one before. Just prior to the end time? You get attacked by every surviving zombie on the map as well as literally thousands of them for all directions. A really, really hard game even on default difficulty, but tremendously satisfying.

This is actually being worked on, albeit slowly, I have built the core of the grid and character generation is being coded.

Edit: Also things like jumpwebs, planet write ups, etc, rereading of various Fading Suns supplements gave me some hooks to tie into the 3rd Republic and I can also confirm that Vuldrok will be involved for that space viking flavour.

Also been working on it today, enjoy a massively high resolution version of the Nestorian map:

@saosmash This implies that some level of 'learning' takes place. Given my commute on Tuesday in about half an inch of snow I am fairly certain that nobody does any such thing.

Maybe if you give xp to people who lose their shit at suitable moments? Xp incentives are a powerful drug.

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

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.