My group's main campaign is a version of the atomic-robo RPG in an +magic modern-day setting, but we're using the Umdaar setting for the interior of an Atlantean colony ship that we just rescued.
I'm the primary GM, but sometimes other people in the group run some sessions, and tonight is one of those times. My usual PC is inappropriate for the current story (Jessie didn't come with on our trip to the colony ship), so I made Aquila.
@BESW yeah, that's part of the reason I'm interested in it to some extent
@BESW although, the setting-dependency might not ring well with me -- I'm not a huge steampunk fan, although it's much more tolerable to me than say, supers
And it starts right out by saying "Your physics is not our physics."
> The worlds of the Wild Blue float in a sky of breathable gases circling a small, cold star. Scholars believe that the star is made from pure Essence—the strange energy that sorcerers channel for their magic. This “solar system” is much smaller than you might think—it takes about six weeks to cross from one side to the other on a standard sky ship. Most of the worlds of the Empire are so closely positioned that it takes only a day or two to travel from one to another.
> The heavier gases form a dense layer of fog below the “sky” of the Wild Blue. This fog is corrosive —people need to wear gas-masks to breathe and most airship hulls will start to corrode after a single exposure. Pirates and other criminals sometimes use the lower depths to evade Imperial patrols and launch raids from hiding. Unfortunately, the depths are home to sky squid and other monstrous things....
I'm annoyed by a too-short USB cable (although longer ones are on order, they'll take a few days to arrive, and it's on the critical path for a school project), and rather frustrated at an issue with the Jessie backport for Wine on one of my boxes that's breaking it rather completely
Anything but a PDF that has some kind of text flow following rows, unless a cell has more than one word in it, in which case it jumps to some other row, or there columns are too far apart, in which case it takes all the other rows first and then the next column, or takes in page numbers and headers, etc.
@Miniman There kind of is. No question is going to be able to apply to every system, but there's enough generically applicable questions to certain kind of systems (one gm multiple players) that the tag still has a bit of a use.
Unless you're saying that the tag serves no purpose at all?
@Miniman That's true, GMless systems wouldn't have an issue like this. It's a problem that could potentially happen in any One-GM Many-Players system though (OGMMP?), so the tag makes sense, I'd say.
Also, why would someone keep playing in a game like?
@WrongOnTheInternet A whole forest of reasons, all of which we see regularly. "We're friends", "I can't find any other groups", "I don't want to be rude", you name it.
The GM decided that his GMPC was going to heroically sacrifice himself to save us all from the terrifying villain he'd created, in order to show that the villain was Serious Business.
At least three of the players came up with ways to defeat the villain, or at least fight it to a standstill long enough to escape. One of these solutions took literally the time it takes to say "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." But the GM insisted that before we could do any of that, his GMPC had pulled the pins on a dozen grenades, run the length of the roof, and taken a swan dive onto the villain on the street below.
Then we came up with two plausible ways to keep the GMPC from dying in the resulting explosion, but both were vetoed with "It happens too fast to react." One of the PCs was a time-manipulation mage.
Thus, the GM's character nobly and pointlessly sacrificed himself to stop a threat that any one of us could've snapped our fingers to make weep uncontrollably.
I want to write a new GM's guide, and one of the top three items on the list of things that will be included in that guide is the importance of Player Agency.
This was a GM who was famous for coming up with really awesome stories, and running games where the PCs were basically finger puppets for telling his stories.
His players generally felt that loss of agency was a worthy price for admission to a front-row seat to his stories.
One player came to me with a stat build for Elon Musk and his telepresence androids called Musketeers, and said, "I was going to play this guy, but I think he's an antagonist. Here."
@BESW Ah. That's probably for the best. Now I can't help but imagine a massive space battle where the entire "battlefield" is littered with blackholes that need to be avoided, though.
Given how close we were to the Sun, I don't think someone as conscious of the fragility of humanity's future as Elon Musk would've been throwing around permanent black holes.
apparently however he learned the hard way that you're not supposed to connect your ship's command centre, with all of its combat systems, to the internet.
Thankfully, proprietary closed-source software is often much worse than open-source software, because at least open-source software has had thousands of people notice and fix bugs.
Closed-source software is like... Oracle recently said the people using their software weren't allowed to report bugs in Oracle's software because doing so was reverse engineering their software, which their license agreement said they weren't allowed to do.
> Oracle's chief security officer is tired of customers performing their own security tests on Oracle software, and she's not going to take it anymore. That was the message of a post she made to her corporate blog on August 10—a post that has since been taken down.
@doppelgreener yah. the major FOSS projects, on a whole, are very good about proper security triage -- something that many commercial development companies fail to grasp.
@doppelgreener Why. It's as if the CSO doesn't think any vulnerabilities will be exposed this way, which is dumb, or they don't want vulnerabilities exposed this way, which is dumber.
The bugs are there whether you hear about them or not, and one of the chief security mantras is: it is not a matter of "if" but "when". Things will be found! Let the people who are finding them tell you!
@WrongOnTheInternet Or Oracle has some weird stuff going on internally where the CSO gets in trouble when a security bug is found, as opposed to some kind of healthy perspective like "bugs are inevitable, we can't fix all of them, it's great when they get reported". And the CSO lashed out externally to the people causing her trouble.
@doppelgreener I'm finding it hard to understand how a company could be a software giant with that kind of culture, unless it somehow became the culture after they were already wildly successful.
@BESW I like how older stuff tended to have two titles. It also confused me in older cartoons: they'd say "TO BE CONTINUED in TITLE ONE, or, TITLE TWO." So, what, there's going to be two different episodes continuing this one..?
And does the "or" mean they're both going to continue it but down alternate storylines? Those two titles sure do sound like two different stories. But the last episode was to be continued by two different episodes as well! I only saw one of those and you're already announcing another duo of episodes. How is any of this manageable!?
"Subtitle," "alternate title," and "explanatory title" are all used.
I think that what you're describing is best called an "explanatory title."
A good example is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
It's not an alternate full title that you might find the work listed under, like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is an alternate title for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
It could be a subtitle, but subtitles are just as commonly (or more!) used with a different form. eg, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest or Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
"Explanatory title" seems to be the best term for specifically describing the phenomenon where a work has a perfectly good independent title (unlike Star Wars, which is insufficient in itself) and then a bit gets tacked on to give you a bit of detail re: what it's about.
However, everybody uses those terms quite interchangeably which, among other things, makes it really hard to track down the history of the use.
(Shakespeare did something like it with Twelfth Night, or What You Will. And it seems to have been uncommon but not so rare as to be remarked upon at the time.)
@Polyducks Potential Paranoia scenario. Friend computer says "you are going to deliver milk to the three hundred citizens in western ward 4." "OK" say the troubleshooters. "They need one milk carton each," says Friend Computer. "OK," say the troubleshooters. "Here is the milk," says Friend Computer, handing them one milk carton.
Fifteen minutes later, the troubleshooters are standing at the Western Ward Information Map, which clearly labels the lack of a ward between wards 3 and 5.
It makes me so very sad to see that people only discuss Paranoia in my sleep
@BESW Friend Computer, we have delivered milk to everyone in sector WWF in record time! In fact, we did so well, that we even have milk to spare.
It is too bad for the troubleshooters that milk is white.
@doppelgreener Sectors are three letter codes, silly. The Alpha Complex is a big place.
@Polyducks Have you ever seen the table to roll on for Bureaucrats? It's the last page before the char sheet, so I read it by accident (official reason, right here). I really want to fill out paperwork at least once in a game of Paranoia. seriously.
