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Old 09-18-2017, 11:36 PM   #11
David Johnston2
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Default Re: IW quarantining

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Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec View Post
Wouldn't a world traveler (jumper or conveyor) have to be quarantined for the rest of his/her life? Otherwise, how could you be sure that he/she was not a carrier of a virus with the mortality and morbidity of smallpox or ebola and the contagious incubation period of HIV?
HIV indirectly had worse mortality and morbidity than smallpox. It was just less contagious and gave us plenty of time to work on treatments. While in theory a world with an undetectable disease that is horrifically world-destroying on Homeline while innocuous elsewhere is possible, so's getting smacked into oblivion by a gigantic asteroid. For that matter so's running into something nearly as devastating from any traveler coming back from South America, Africa or Asia. Doesn't mean we'll get crazy with the countermeasures.
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Old 09-19-2017, 12:04 AM   #12
Johnny1A.2
 
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Default Re: IW quarantining

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HIV indirectly had worse mortality and morbidity than smallpox. It was just less contagious and gave us plenty of time to work on treatments. While in theory a world with an undetectable disease that is horrifically world-destroying on Homeline while innocuous elsewhere is possible, so's getting smacked into oblivion by a gigantic asteroid. For that matter so's running into something nearly as devastating from any traveler coming back from South America, Africa or Asia. Doesn't mean we'll get crazy with the countermeasures.
That said, limited quarantine periods make sense, and they don't have to slow the game down much.

GM: "The PCs have 40 days of quarantine to get through, how do they spend it?"

"Can we study skills?"

"Sure, as long as it's something available in the Infinity libraries and staff.

You could brush past the quarantine in a few minutes of game time, and even use it to give players a chance to heal wounds, catch up ST and HT, work on skills, etc.
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Old 09-19-2017, 12:35 AM   #13
fchase8
 
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Default Re: IW quarantining

Robots and drones would be the first to explore a world, taking back samples of microscopic life. They would detect for radio signals, and if the world is advanced enough for that, listen in on them - otherwise, a drone could take aerial photos of human (or other) settlement. There would be a lot of off-game pre-exploration of any world.


Playing an initial exploration of a world could use any standard quarantine to lessen the advantage I-Scouts would have on that world. They couldn't just pop back to Homeline to get the perfect gadget for the situation, or call in I-Cop support whenever. If there's some big thing happening, they either have to abandon the world and wait the standard quarantine, or act then & there with what they have.
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Old 09-19-2017, 01:43 AM   #14
Flyndaran
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Default Re: IW quarantining

Also they'd likely have an uninhabited quarantine world as a stop gap. Nicely set up where first entrants to a new world live for a month or two.
Maybe they could find a world where plagues or even viruses aren't possible.
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Last edited by Flyndaran; 09-19-2017 at 02:04 AM.
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Old 09-19-2017, 07:16 AM   #15
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Default Re: IW quarantining

I figure that the lack of population-destroying virgin field epidemics is largely due to the presence of individual world-jumpers, who have existed since antiquity. Most worlds have been cross-contaminated at some point in the past, leaving only more recent mutations and the occasional outlier that had never been visited before as sources of concern. The biggest problem is that before the development of technology (or similar levels of magic, etc.), jumpers were likely confined to a single continent, which is why the Columbian Exchange was still so devastating.

This is "the dog that didn't bark" in my Time Traveller setting: there haven't been any "Plague of Duskir" incidents on the outworlds, despite fairly lax quarantine standards. If anyone were to think about it and do the simulations for infectious diseases, they would probably realize that there is a channel for inter-world contact besides the jump drive.
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Old 09-19-2017, 10:52 AM   #16
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Default Re: IW quarantining

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I figure that the lack of population-destroying virgin field epidemics is largely due to the presence of individual world-jumpers, who have existed since antiquity. Most worlds have been cross-contaminated at some point in the past, leaving only more recent mutations and the occasional outlier that had never been visited before as sources of concern. The biggest problem is that before the development of technology (or similar levels of magic, etc.), jumpers were likely confined to a single continent, which is why the Columbian Exchange was still so devastating.

This is "the dog that didn't bark" in my Time Traveller setting: there haven't been any "Plague of Duskir" incidents on the outworlds, despite fairly lax quarantine standards. If anyone were to think about it and do the simulations for infectious diseases, they would probably realize that there is a channel for inter-world contact besides the jump drive.
That was my solution as well. Short-lived, small, hard to detect nexus portals that briefly flicked open between "adjacent" timelines. They open to the same location, roughly in each world, meaning diseases were still bound to roughly the same land mass. (And thus the post-Colombian plagues were still lethal on most worlds). Also, the occasional dimensional road can provide exposure to off world diseases on a fairly regular basis.

There are also "paranoses", diseases carried by parachronozoids. One NPC wrote his doctoral thesis on the transmission patterns of gargoyle-pox.
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Old 09-19-2017, 11:56 AM   #17
David Johnston2
 
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Default Re: IW quarantining

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Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2 View Post
That said, limited quarantine periods make sense, and they don't have to slow the game down much.

GM: "The PCs have 40 days of quarantine to get through, how do they spend it?"
A quarantine period is likely for scouts returning from a new world. For worlds that have been opened up for trade I think they'd only bother if someone actually coming back with symptoms of illness. Otherwise a quick blood test just in case and once the results come back you're done.
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Old 09-19-2017, 04:45 PM   #18
johndallman
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Default Re: IW quarantining

In Infinite Cabal, the characters were worried about this, once they'd got their TL up a bit and understood for sure how infectious disease worked. They learned from Infinity that most bacteria and viruses seemed to die on a transition.

Later they learned that this was Infinity disinformation, and there's much less diversity of diseases between worlds than you might reasonably expect. My Infinity spreads disinformation about this because they really don't understand this lack of diversity and it cuts down on people asking awkward questions.
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Old 09-19-2017, 07:09 PM   #19
malloyd
 
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Default Re: IW quarantining

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Later they learned that this was Infinity disinformation, and there's much less diversity of diseases between worlds than you might reasonably expect.
In fact, there is still more than a little controversy about how much you *could* reasonably expect. Genetic sequencing has not clarified the ancestry or divergence timing of many disease organisms as much as we first expected to, so it's still possible to get into debates about whether some pathogen or other has infected humans for 500 years or 50,000. The age of a considerable number of them has been pushed back to at least the Neolithic, so it's perhaps not too startling if anywhere diverging during recorded history shares most of the same diseases. Sure a couple of additional or absent ones wouldn't be too shocking, but broad similarity may not be all that strange in a "realistic" sort of set of alternate histories.

Mind you for Infinite Worlds, the really scary stuff is probably what happens when travelers catch something on worlds where physics and biology don't even work according to the same natural laws. The failure of visitors from Homeline to drop dead instantly on entering those worlds is a bit of a logic problem in the setting as a whole. Something allows travelers to survive when going somewhere human life depends on Elan Vital. So what happens to a disease the drains Elan Vital when you bring it back to Homeline?
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Old 09-19-2017, 07:18 PM   #20
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Quarantine Enforcement Division
The scariest branch of ISWAT, responsible for stopping the multitude of contagious nasties/communicable curses/supernatural plagues/rampant pseudo - physics from Wrecking havoc on Homeline. Fully licensed to kill and extremely well equiped agents have full operational freedom.
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