TRPG General Chat

nitsua60

00:00

@doppelgreener Did I ever tell you: when my oldest was 3 or 4 I overheard him in the tub singing "do you know the muffin man...." When I went in to sing along I learned it was actually "do you know the admiral, the admiral, the admiral? Do you know the admiral? His name is Bill Adama."

doppelgreener

@nitsua60 hahaha!

that's a great way to sing it

kviiri

@eimyr At our University campus there's an unofficial but popular Moomin Monday event every week. They screen a couple of Moomin episodes for curious audiences to enjoy.

Peter Cooper Jr.

@nitsua60 Yes, I've been volunteering as a referee for the last few years. I'll be at WPI (among other places), and while my volunteer role hasn't been officially assigned yet, it's likely I'll be a ref again.

nitsua60

@PeterCooperJr. Excellent--thanks for your time, then. I need to get into VIMS. For many years I was the only mentor associated with my school's team, so I felt no guilt about not also volunteering. Recently, though, a few others have come on board and I've been able to step back a little, so I really should help out....

Peter Cooper Jr.

@nitsua60 I'm a bit of an odd case in that I don't actually have a team, I just remembered how fun it was from high school (I was on 190, WPI/Mass Academy), and started volunteering at events a few years back (as just a few weekends a year is a commitment I can make). And I'm geeky enough at liking rules systems that I like refereeing, and I understand it can be hard to get people for that role sometimes.

nitsua60

00:15

@PeterCooperJr. 228, here. We're certainly contemporaries =)

(I was a founding member.)

How old's your oldest, again?

Peter Cooper Jr.

@nitsua60 Don't feel guilty about not volunteering at events; there are plenty to ways to contribute to forming kids' minds. :) Though if you want to, it's certainly a lot of fun.

@nitsua60 9.

nitsua60

@PeterCooperJr. FTC or FLL in your area?

Peter Cooper Jr.

@nitsua60 We're crazy enough to be doing homeschooling, though I've thought about starting up an FLL team at the homeschool co-op. But that's more of a time commitment than I can see doing at this time.

nitsua60

Okay, a picture of the 2.5D model the kids and I made is over in the Tomb of Annihilation room. (cc @Shalvenay @ACuriousMind @kviiri @SPavel)

Shalvenay

00:58

@nitsua60 not bad for a craft project

nitsua60

Thanks!

BESW

> Litterbug. You get +2 on your next attack if you throw down a personal item, like a cloak or helmet or weapon, to show how serious you are.

nitsua60

> Handy with a Scalpel. You get +1 on your next roll to Persuade if you use Precision rather than Social. You have an incisive wit, after all.

BESW

> Bumbling luck. When you succeed at cost, you also get a fate point which can only be spent to declare coincidental details that your character couldn't possibly have influenced.

doppelgreener

@BESW Tintin's main stunt

BESW

01:10

Hee, yes.

> Interviewer. Once per session, declare a professional skill that you once interviewed someone about. You can use Rapport as if it were that skill for the rest of the session.

Epicyon was the largest canid ever, measuring 1.5 metres long & weighing over 136kg. (Credit: Mauricio Anton)

Tweeted by Extinct_AnimaIs on January 2, 2018 at 5:45 PM

trogdor

@BESW wow that is crazy

Shalvenay

@BESW sheesh, that's a big canid

(I think the world's largest dogs get close though)

doppelgreener

> Haunted. Anytime anyone else is succeeding at cost, they may choose as the cost that this character is now near them, not yet in sight, and will soon begin to interfere.

BESW

01:27

@Shalvenay The heaviest domesticated breeds I know of top out around 100kg.

Shalvenay

@BESW yeah, I suspect that they do match Epicyon on length, though

(although dogs tend to be measured in terms of height not length)

BESW

BTW, @Shalvenay, here's a worldbuilding extrapolation for you: a world with plentiful helium, otherwise as close to ours as reasonable.

(Goal: casual safe zeppelin use.)

doppelgreener

Shalvenay

@BESW I'd think there'd be a lot of alpha emitters deep down inside, leading to large quantities of trapped helium in among NG formations that needs to be separated out (probably by condensing the NG and pulling the helium off the top)

hence, helium-a-go-go

nice and trapped where it can't float away

(otherwise, helium has this annoying habit of not being hung onto very well by little rockballs)

BESW

So there'd be more radioactive material in the crust?

Shalvenay

01:34

yeah

probably could be accomplished relatively easily by changing the relative isotopic distribution of transuranics

trogdor

@doppelgreener lol

nitsua60

Helium

Helium (from Greek: ἥλιος, translit. Helios, lit. 'Sun') is a chemical element with symbol He and atomic number 2. It is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, inert, monatomic gas, the first in the noble gas group in the periodic table. Its boiling point is the lowest among all the elements. After hydrogen, helium is the second lightest and second most abundant element in the observable universe, being present at about 24% of the total elemental mass, which is more than 12 times the mass of all the heavier elements combined. Its abundance is similar to this figure in the Sun and in Jupiter...

Peter Cooper Jr.

If helium was a significant "fuel", I'd kind of expect that it'd be as easy to "mine" as the gasoline/oil/coal/etc. that we use for other energy sources. Though that's without really looking at any numbers.

nitsua60

hmm... that was supposed to fast-link to the paragraph about how radioactive crust-material produces earth's helium.

Oh, it did. It just doesn't onebox the linked section, I guess.

BESW

@nitsua60 Yeah, chat ignores # when oneboxing.

nitsua60

01:37

@BESW Too bad. Would have made me look a little less of a patronizing jerk =)

BESW

@nitsua60 Yeah, so I'm trying to figure out how else a world would be different, if it met the requirements for casual safe zeppelin travel.

What would the world be like if we had that much more uranium and thorium in the upper crust?

doppelgreener

> Ancient language. You can read and speak an old, dead language of a collapsed civilisation, but can be compelled when you do so to say or mumble what accidentally turns out to be a magical incantation.

Peter Cooper Jr.

I don't think it's a lack of helium that prevents casual safe zeppelin travel

trogdor

@doppelgreener I think I have the second half of this stunt sometimes

I wish I had the first half

BESW

@PeterCooperJr. If helium had been more plentiful, the Hindenburg might not have exploded, and the modern need for speed in travel associated with jet planes might have been mitigated by alternate lighter-than-air options.

The Hindenburg disaster came at a crucial point in the popular consciousness of what personal travel was about.

A modern day where zeppelins are common air vehicles would also likely be a modern day where commerce and economics are slower and more human-maintained than our contemporary faster-than-the-brain computer-maintained economy.

Shalvenay

01:50

@BESW more geologically active. the trick isn't to crank up the quantity, it's to alter the isotopic distribution so that the decay chains produce more alphas and fewer betas on their way to lead

BESW

Specifically, it was the US restrictions on helium which prevented the Zeppelin company from using the safer gas. If the gas had been more plentiful, they wouldn't have had their trade deal with the US interrupted by war.

(See also: British lighter-than-air projects were scrapped because of similar hydrogen-based disasters.)

trogdor

mm sounds similar to the rubber restrictions during WWII

BESW

Yeah, WWII tanked zeppelins on multiple fronts, in large part because the necessary materials stopped being traded internationally--but also because they found airfoil designs were more effective at bombing runs.

But first I'd want to build from basic principles to find out how much the world would be fundamentally different, before I started tinkering with specific historical events.

trogdor

i'm not entirely sure that a difference in that one event would make zeppilins more common anyway

also hats are gone :"(

BESW

02:09

[sad]

If we'd had one more day I would've done Detective Toshimi Konakawa.

nitsua60

Crap! I forgot to update the photo album. I only took pictures of about half of them =\

trogdor

welp, time to change the avatar then XD

BESW

21 detectives!

trogdor

we had a nice run

Shalvenay