Posts made by Packrat

I have to admit that I am rather torn on Arx style heavily coded combat. It does make combat happen one hell of a lot faster, which is huge. No more waiting 8 minutes for somebody to +roll Stat+Hit Things and bogging everything down.

But it also seems to make any kind of plot involving violence turn into a big ball of coded combat with no variables or real differences between characters outside of 'Jane has bigger numbers than Bill'. You do not get people moving to block attackers in a doorway, or people engaging their sword wielding foe with a crossbow whilst on the other side of a trench, or somebody throwing the guy wearing tons of armour out of a window, etc.

It leads to far faster and probably on average 'better' results but sort of smooths everything out and avoids the possibility of truly memorable violence times that can come from good systems in interesting circumstances with players who are rolling promptly. I still years later remember the wild flailing of one fight on a Fading Suns game where people did not consider the implications of using guns in a warehouse stacked with metal barrels full of pure ethanol.

You definitely need some solution to the code problem though, year before last I was working on a Fading Suns game and got to the point where I had a server, I had most of the grid on it, I had setting information along with maps and stuff that I had gotten looking pretty nice.

But I was bad enough at coding that I could not get things like character sheets to work even though I had full access to the Star Crusade code and the blessing of the person who had made it to port stuff over. Something broke in it and I was too inept to get even basic commands like dice rollers and similar to function. It just sapped all impetus and things stalled out.

It was a shame - I had gone pretty all out with a unique take on the setting, researching Nestorian Christianity so that I could put historical references in stuff, etc. Not to mention having the 'opposing faction' being a resurgent '3rd Republic' arisen from an isolated colony who had been forced to rebuild from scratch and followed a heterodox version of the main faith whilst being pro psychic technophiles with a representative democracy. (They were thus actually ruled by a shadow government of mind controlling psychics. Ooops).

Also their technology was actually worse than the higher end stuff of the Known Worlds due to lacking the remnant infrastructure, relics etc of the old Republic's core worlds. They just had a LOT of tech and could readily produce more.

Personally I am male and also slightly bisexual? Or Hetero-curious? That is not quite the right term for it given curious implies that I have never given things a go. I have tried going on dates with and had sex with other guys but it does not do nearly as much for me as being with women does and I do not find very many men sexually attractive.

When I MU* I tend to come up with a character then literally flip a coin to see what sex they are going to be before they tend toward being bisexual either way. That said my characters tend not to be enormously sexual and a good portion of my concepts tend to be people in their 40s or 50s with NPC spouses.

I might change up the coin flipping thing though given that I have definitely become more trans aware over the past few years - I have also been just plain writing more than MU*ing and given that is mostly in far future and somewhat transhuman sci-fi settings I started making about one in ten characters non binary. I was half expecting some pushback there but it seemed to work just fine and those were actually some of the characters people seemed to be most invested in.

I was about to chime in and note that personally I find Stellaris far more intuitive than say, Civilisation 6.

But then I looked and realize I have 321 hours in Stellaris but only about 50 hours between Civilisations 5 and 6 combined.

The confusion on my part was that the wiki was just so vague about the setting I had absolutely no idea where the game might be based. Some kind of actual nether realm? (but if so, what is it actually like?) A place on actual Earth with a lot of mystical connections? The actual city of Derby with its quarter million population trans-located into a pocket dimension?

If the information was anywhere on the wiki it did not reveal itself to a 5 minute search. Also the actual city of Derby is about the least mystical and magical place I know of which made it additionally amusing to me. Derby is really aggressively dull and honestly seems to have less going on there than most cities a third of the size though the countryside around it is lovely.

The wiki at least does not really explain where the game is set though? Admittedly I am extra discombobulated because I literally lived in Derbyshire until the start of this year so by reading this I mentally assume it is based in a sprawling post industrial town near the lake district.

I guess there is also the context that, as of Empire Strikes Back, Leia and Han have years worth of 'off screen' interactions, they are absolutely not strangers to each other.

So I at least like to think this was all within mutually understood boundaries to some extent? Which is probably optimistic.

That kind of thing can be extra fun with international teams.

I live and work in the UK, my boss and every other member of my team are in the USA. Generally? This works out really nicely, I basically get to rule my own domain for all of Europe and while I am supported really well by my manager and colleagues they do not try to micromanage at all and generally try to schedule things so that I am not stuck working too late.

On Monday though? My boss did not realize it was a national holiday here. Where are you? Why are you not dialing into this meeting? I was half way to getting drunk in a beer garden.

So in the absence of actually MUSHing, or having energy for it, this is the kind of thing I have been writing:

After The Collapse Quest

I did try running a strategic scale quasi feudal space admiral thing on the same forum previously, that I prematurely bailed on because I lost motivation and it was becoming a pain to write. That one hit 245 pages and was much more popular but does end mid plot:

You Are: A sector admiral of a strained imperium

Really not the same kind of thing as MU*ing at all but it goes some way to scratching the RP itch whilst also being more forgiving of me being eaten by work for a week at a time. Also it lets me try out my own settings and explore them which I find a lot of fun.

On the other hand I have been writing literal novels worth of terrible sci-fi web fiction in a choose your own adventure format and feel somehow guilty for this.

I found keyboard and mouse fine for Elite: Dangerous, right up until I attempted to use the galaxy map in VR to plot jumps.

Fuck that noise, it was impossible and nightmarish and awfully designed for no reason.

The spire was lost, along with 800 year old stained glass windows, but apparently the main structure was saved.

Which... Is better than it could have been? Though still awful, whilst there might be a multitude of millennia old cathedrals in Europe so few of them still have original windows and glass work let alone those as iconic as Notre Dame.

When I was a six foot tall, whipcord lean, blue eyed and apparently cute seventeen year old, I signed up to a temp agency for summer work. I was given a job at an apartment store who then assigned me to the women's lingerie section where I spent several months being low key molested by middle aged women who required my opinion on bra fittings.

In retrospect I think that probably helped quite a lot of people buy more expensive and decadent bras.

@Grayson I still fondly remember Astrid and my character walking randomly into that bar on Metro and scaring the hell out of everyone through their obviously murderous presence before having an amiable conversation with one of the locals about how to find and murder vampires.

Edit: For context, two scarred up, high Rage Get of Fenris lupus Garou in human form wander into a Kuei-jin bar. Enough people in the crowd had the powers to tell what they were that there was some significant freak out about if they had been 'found' or if some kind of murder fest was about to begin.

So one guy actually came over and chatted with them before feeding them information about vampires he particularly disliked and wanted removed.

I really enjoyed Captain Marvel, it was not perfect but I thoroughly enjoyed it and the mood in the audience was great.

Also, as an added bonus, I can now blacklist Youtubers who put up misogynistic rants about how bad it is. It seems to be a really sensitive detector there even if some of the 'discoveries' are disappointing.

Yeah, I mean yes, Crusader Kings 2 is awesome and I have sunk hundreds of hours into it.

But I have also probably sunk hundreds into the DLC given that I buy them all at full price when they release? I should probably compare it more to a 4-5 game series at this point rather than one title.

@Aria My brother got married last year and had a pretty good way to avoid it costing a fortune.

He got married in a field.

A field owned by a friend of my sister in law's family, the seating for the ceremony? Made by him and his friends out of scrap wood the day before in an isle of trees at the edge of the field. They did rent a tent along with paying people to run a hog roast and an icecream stand but the whole thing cost a couple of thousand (pounds sterling) whilst being an amazing day.

Especially memorable was every bridesmaid either leading or carrying a happy dog.

I am travelling with work right now and instead of putting my kittens into a cattery I am paying somebody to come and look after them in my house. It worked out about the same expense wise (well, I guess more because they are still eating their regular food on top) but hopefully avoids traumatising them too much.

The thing I love though? She is sending me an update email after each visit, this is the longest I have ever left them alone and it is so reassuring to know they are okay and getting less shy, even if they are apparently still hiding behind furniture once they realise the door opening is not me coming home.

Well I am now actually in Mesa at the Hilton and, somehow succeeded in matching to the timezone pretty well. I manage to stay awake until almost 11pm last night (local time) before sleeping like a log and getting breakfast.

Now free to explore with no commitments until Monday evening, I will certainly go and check out the art district!

@Doozer See, I am flying there from the UK on Saturday and was assured that I should stock up on sunscreen in advance. False advertising!

I am in the process of moving into a new home, it was supposed to be unfurnished but apparently the landlady just sort of walked out of the front door and left everything but her clothing, bedding and TV? Like there are mugs in cupboards and towels still here. Needless to say this makes things profoundly awkward and there are now two houses worth of furniture crammed into the place while we try to contact the owner to ask her WTF.

Obviously my main concern was my cats though who, after a five hour journey in a pet carrier, were horrified and immediately glued themselves to the back of a cabinet where they could hide until they scary removal men stopped scarily moving furniture.

The plan was to keep them confined in one room for a day or two but the fluffy black thing escaped and started exploring, also lounging on stuff:

Now they are running up and down the stairs like lunatics but I cannot get a proper picture of that due to excessive scampering. They were in an apartment before so stars are new and exciting for them both.

The cats continue to explore, atop wardrobes:

Enjoying stairs:

Looking cute in front of windows: