Anyway, I'm doing a project with him over the summer, writing a brand-new RPG. Snagging $800 flat for my participation there, though I feel like I coulda kicked it up to 1k if I'd been less scared
Dunno if that helps, though, since frankly in a lot of cases I'd work just for the love of the game.
You could try admitting that. Bossman's a good guy. He might screw you a little (he's still in business) but DSP overall is very above-the-table, honorable, and interested in creating long-term relationships.
Okay, that explains some confusing things; the emails I got didn't mention DSP, just had a sign-off with a name and "Catalyst Consulting." Google tells me the guy is associated with both, but it's CC that I can't find a proper web presence for.
uh, that's hard. :( my mom is under 60 and she's starting to get pretty sick. Kidney issues and stuff. My dad is a few years away from 70... and both are in Germany, and I'm studying in Canada, so it would be really inconvenient to go and help out. But so is popping out a child and raising it, and I love 'em so I hope I'd have what it takes to make going back and helping them work. I respect what you're doing for him, even if I probably don't have the faintest idea of how difficult it really is.
I'm typing up a question for SciFi.SE, though I'm not sure it's acceptable there. It's title, "Story/book identification - Star Wars Choose Your Own Adventure" appears to be tripping up some red flags, and I get a "The question you're asking appears to be subjective and is likely to be closed." Any idea of the etiquette for such things?..
hehe, the chat is quickly becoming a larger chunk of my time spent on the computer today. got stuff to do, so I'll bugger off for now. As always nice chatting with you all, and I appreciate that just about whenever someone's here. :)
@BESW You need to have Commoner as your first character level in order to take the Chicken Infested flaw, which supplies the raw materials for your grenadier.
The bit where being good at sex helps you cleave people in half with your greatsword, or the one where your infinite skeletal chicken grenades are also front-line healers?
Fate Core isn't a fully formed "game," it's an engine.
It lacks setting, it has hardly anything definite in terms of tone, and it provides no concrete leverage for theme or conceit.
I can safely say that the work I'd be doing would involve using the Fate Core engine to create specific mechanics and features which would speak to all of those elements.
Just look at the Dresden Files RPG, Spirit of the Century, and Diaspora to see how previous versions of the Fate engine have been put to use creating vastly different games.
Because it's OGL and CC-BY, Fate Core is an ideal tool for people who want to publish a new concept or breathe new life into an old one, without starting at brass tacks.
Unseasonably wet right now, but aside from rainy/dry/typhoon, we're pretty consistent year-round: high humidity, temperatures in the mid 70s at night and the mid to high 80s in the day.
Generally the late year is rainy and the early year is dry, with summer being extra windy and autumn being most likely to produce typhoons.
Right now it's just past 8pm, 79 degrees, with a bit of wind and cloud. Earlier today there was a light sprinkle.
@Murch I enjoy it all year 'round. It's got its share of problems like everywhere else, but it's home and if I'm to have problems I'd rather have them in a tropical paradise.
@BESW Heh. Winter here is cold and dark, with snow and ice, spring is allergy season, and summer is humid. I like autumn best, but after spending half a year abroad, there is no place like home.
I'd say it was a very interesting experience, I enjoyed the work, but I am fairly certain that I'd require a lot of incentives to live there in the long run, even though I am a citizen. :)
I was working for a technology company with a strong international background, so people were pretty open-minded at work, but I was shocked at times about the state of a bunch of things there. Public services in general seem to be very expensive and inefficient, social inequality glaringly obvious, politics extremely stuck.
But you would probably know that, Guam belongs to the US, doesn't it?
We're a bit different because there's a very different set of cultures and traditions underlying a lot of it, but we're also quite American in some senses.
People from the mainland usually take a month or two to notice that the differences run deeper than palm trees and Japanese tourists.
@BESW Heh. Aren't we all just a little different from one another? It took me about a month to get used to people asking me "How do you do?" and not wanting an answer to that.
The issue, I think, is that Guam is superficially similar enough to the mainland that it's easy to think it isn't different.
Then when they realise it is, they feel silly, or tricked.
And the culture shock is that much harder to deal with.
These islands have history and traditions that run very deep, are felt very strongly, and are very conflicted. I know a lot of people take years to stop underestimating how much tension and complication can be packed into such a tiny little area.
Especially since some of the most important things come with a tacit understanding that they can't be talked about--not even that they shouldn't be vocalised, but that they can't be.
There is no accurate English translation for the fundamental philosophies of the local culture; they're translated with words like "shame" and "reciprocity" and "unselfishness," but those don't even begin to describe the drives underpinning the culture.
So even if you find someone willing to try talking about it, there's a gulf which is hard to bridge without losing the subtlety.
@BESW That reminds me, I spent a year in the US during High School, when I left for the USA I expected stuff to be different, so I had hardly any cultural shock at all. However, when returning to Germany and expecting everything to be just like I am used to, I had a major cultural shock, because a lot of things just felt weird.
The local people, the Chamorros, were an independent culture until their islands were colonised by the Spanish (with representation by the Dutch and Germans, among others), then handed over to the US, then invaded by Japan during WWII and subsequently reclaimed by the US.
Most of the Japanese influence is thus from WWII and later.
@Murch Ah, yes. That must have been strange.
@Murch Similarities to Japanese culture in terms of social interaction are probably because most smallish island cultures develop those values: placing the community over the self is a crucial part of most societies in places where you can't easily walk away and ignore people you offend.
@BESW Yes, you're right of course, but to an extent, it is very similar. The town had about 4000 inhabitants, a lot of the families had been living there for generations.
The RPG community is drastically insulated and resistant to new ideas, except for the occasional new blood via military guys stationed there from the mainland.
(Correction: one of the D&D groups I know of is playing AD&D.)
I got really lucky when I was a university student and found a group that played all kind of different games, so since then I probably tried out two dozen different systems.
@Murch I heard about RPGs in high school here, but I didn't find anyone I was comfortable playing with until college in South Carolina, where a friend arranged for me to GM a D&D group as my first experience.
I started in 3.5 and didn't branch out from it for years; I knew about White Wolf and Spycraft but I didn't really pay a lot of attention to them.
I was pretty insulated. I didn't know what other games were available, and I had little interest in finding out.
I tried Mage with a friend in college, but the ST was famous for railroading and the group broke up after one session.
Another friend was running a Star Wars d20 campaign, but I had no interest in the deep devotion to canon that they were bringing to it so I stayed away.
I wanted to run an SG-1 (Spycraft d20 engine) game, but that's not far enough away from D&D 3.5 to even really count.
Only a couple years ago, with a much smaller group here on Guam, did I start taking the opportunity to investigate other games, haphazardly: Dogs in the Vineyard, Everyone is John, My Life With Master, Dawn of Worlds...
3.5's rough edges galled, and we moved to 4e for about two years. It was a lot of fun, but the big thing it did for me was show that it wasn't 3.5 that was my major problem: it was D&D.
@BESW We felt that D&D will keep tearing you into discussions of tactics and strategy, and didn't really allow for story driven development. It always quickly turned into trying to "win the game".
3.5 insists that it can handle any kind of game: pulp combat, gritty survival, political thriller, espionage and assassination, court intrigue. But it can't.
It develops increasingly intricate subsystems to try accommodating playstyles that its fundamental engine is not designed to accommodate, and that doesn't work.
4e, on the other hand, is a tactical combat simulator and makes no attempt to pretend otherwise.
It's possibly the best tactical combat simulator available in the RPG world today.
And when we embraced that, it was a lot of fun. But still, the most fun we had was between the rules, in the situations where there are no solid mechanics so we didn't use any.
@Murch They are definitely spiritual siblings.
Now with Fate, we have rules for the fun bits in a system that lets the rules fade away when we don't need them, and brings them forward when mechanics would make things more interesting.
A couple of years back I started a blog on infographics - mostly debunking of terrible or manipulative infographics, in the style of Junk Charts
At some point I turned that into a short lecture about how easy it is to lie with charts, and then I ended up turning that into a longer one I can actually pitch and get paid for.
I need to expand my repertoire, though, if I want to really have a sideline on the lecture circuit.
They're for people interested in applying the teachings of Bahá'u'lláh to community development, with no sense that one must be a Bahá'í to do so.
Naturally in the process one learns a lot about the Bahá'í Faith and many people do become Bahá'ís because of their involvement in the core activities, but that's not the point of the thing.
A tangential thought on that - Lord_Gareth has an amazing opportunity that many roleplayers would kill for, and I hope he manages to resolve his issues with Paizo so he could enjoy it properly, because I really think it's dampening the excitement he should and could be feeling.
I had to work very hard to keep a straight face when our FLGS owner told me about the guy who bought the 4e core books when they first came out, and then threw them in a dumpster.
@ProfessorCaprion Aw.
Summary is that each fractal has its own card, and modifying elements on a card is done by shift-clicking.
How to label aspects was tricky: high concept, trouble, etc.
So he just put in a bit of code that says "If there's a colon in the aspect line, everything prior to the colon is bolded."
So you can write "High Concept: Fashionable Prince of Nothing" if you like.
The genius bit is that it allows for total customisation, if a particular Fate game has its own unique aspect types.
lol, the evolution of the opportunity attack vs large creature question is interesting.
Joshua added a third step to the diagram I created that changed the question's intent, then responded. Then the OP came back and clarified that he meant my solution, then Jonathan added back the other diagram (which is totally fine), I'm just amused
Hey @BESW I found another song that is similar to Hellfire. It doesn't have the orchestra background music but the sound is similar. youtube.com/watch?v=4LEk-sTwBv8
@BESW Oh wow that pretty much frames why I like D&D. I'm not that good at building and presenting dynamic and internally consistent and logical worlds.
@Murch It is? That's news to me. DW and Fate (well, Apocalypse World and Fate) are basically diametrically opposite approaches to doing the same kind of thing.
Fate is a bit closer to the indie games that preceded AW, I think. Ever heard of "setting stakes?"
"Setting stakes" is basically just: when you want to roll for something (important, because we roll for important things), define what the consequences are, for both success and failure.
Many, many games do something like this now. It's basically a way to avoid game-blocking failures or boring successes.
