Additional Craft Secret Perks?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

Fantasy-Tech addresses this. Buy your copy today!

Yeah, I mentioned it before, but Fantasy Tech is just chock-full of stuff that can be pilfered for Craft Secrets.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I ate a big can of worms on that.

If you mean the slings and arrows of gamer logic, I'll note that I find it very helpful to reply to "But X would imply Y, and then everybody could figure it out!" arguments from players with something like, "People in the setting – including your PCs – think in a different paradigm and don't see these connections. Discovering the new paradigm is an Amazing invention . . . roll against the the lowest of Philosophy, Psychology, or Teaching at -22. After that, you can teach others at the usual 3d months per class." Gamers who live in today's rapidly changing near-Singularity society have a blind spot where such things are concerned. That is, they don't realize that most implications are missed by generations of thinkers who can plainly see them, until a suitable Zeitgeist emerges and removes their blindness. Great-man thinking is amusing and all, and plays well to gamers' power fantasies for their PCs, but it's probably bunk.

[The Benj]

Originally Posted by Kromm

If you mean the slings and arrows of gamer logic, I'll note that I find it very helpful to reply to "But X would imply Y, and then everybody could figure it out!" arguments from players with something like, "People in the setting – including your PCs – think in a different paradigm and don't see these connections. Discovering the new paradigm is an Amazing invention . . . roll against the the lowest of Philosophy, Psychology, or Teaching at -22. After that, you can teach others at the usual 3d months per class." Gamers who live in today's rapidly changing near-Singularity society have a blind spot where such things are concerned. That is, they don't realize that most implications are missed by generations of thinkers who can plainly see them, until a suitable Zeitgeist emerges and removes their blindness. Great-man thinking is amusing and all, and plays well to gamers' power fantasies for their PCs, but it's probably bunk.

I feel like -22 may be a bit harsh, but otherwise, yeah, spot on.

[PK]

Originally Posted by The Benj

I feel like -22 may be a bit harsh, but otherwise, yeah, spot on.

That's just the usual penalty for something the GM considers an Amazing invention.

[benz72]

Originally Posted by Kromm

If you mean the slings and arrows of gamer logic, I'll note that I find it very helpful to reply to "But X would imply Y, and then everybody could figure it out!" arguments from players with something like, "People in the setting – including your PCs – think in a different paradigm and don't see these connections. Discovering the new paradigm is an Amazing invention . . . roll against the the lowest of Philosophy, Psychology, or Teaching at -22. After that, you can teach others at the usual 3d months per class." Gamers who live in today's rapidly changing near-Singularity society have a blind spot where such things are concerned. That is, they don't realize that most implications are missed by generations of thinkers who can plainly see them, until a suitable Zeitgeist emerges and removes their blindness. Great-man thinking is amusing and all, and plays well to gamers' power fantasies for their PCs, but it's probably bunk.

Should we take this to imply that major advancements like this that do occur are made by people who have all of Philosophy, Psychology, and Teaching at amazing levels or that they are the ones who rolled critical successes? a la 'if you try often enough, you will eventually guess right'.


EDIT: Sorry for the brain-whooft. I meant Fleming's dirty dishes, not Pasteur.

I can see Pasteur and his dirty dishes being a fluke kind of success, but interpreting paradigm shifting results from the LHC experiments seems like something of a different matter to me.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by benz72

I can see Pasteur and his dirty dishes being a fluke kind of success, but interpreting paradigm shifting results from the LHC experiments seems like something of a different matter to me.

Doing experiments, you either get results that are compatible with existing theory, or ones that aren't, which is more interesting.

For hard stuff like particle physics, the ideas about what might actually be going on very rarely come from the people doing the experiments. They'll come a year or ten later from theorists who have been using the equivalent of the Hyper-specialisation perk and lots of extra time modifiers to get a chance to make a roll. And most of them come up with wrong ideas anyway.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Kromm

If you mean the slings and arrows of gamer logic, I'll note that I find it very helpful to reply to "But X would imply Y, and then everybody could figure it out!" arguments from players with something like, "People in the setting – including your PCs – think in a different paradigm and don't see these connections. Discovering the new paradigm is an Amazing invention . . . roll against the the lowest of Philosophy, Psychology, or Teaching at -22. After that, you can teach others at the usual 3d months per class." Gamers who live in today's rapidly changing near-Singularity society have a blind spot where such things are concerned. That is, they don't realize that most implications are missed by generations of thinkers who can plainly see them, until a suitable Zeitgeist emerges and removes their blindness. Great-man thinking is amusing and all, and plays well to gamers' power fantasies for their PCs, but it's probably bunk.

Imposing penalties and high costs for inventing with low-tech equipment would also be fun. When your only tools are some needles, some thread, a length of cord, and a pair of scissors, and enough cloth for a suit costs a month's wages, designing a new type of clothing is hard and expensive.

[Kromm]

To be very clear: My post was not talking about specific discoveries, inventions, and secrets. I was addressing the "meta-issue" of looking at others' discoveries, inventions, and secrets in such a way that one can undertake to understand and reproduce them. Things like "reductionism," "the scientific method," and "reverse engineering" aren't timeless . . . they were invented and developed, and people without them were fundamentally ill-equipped to reproduce results from analysis, observation, etc. Those who wish to create a world of the mind in which Craft Secrets are routinely grasped and disseminated by observers have their work cut out for them. I'd say that the necessary thinking needs to be reinvented at each TL, too.

My point is really only that players who say things like "Oh, I saw gunpowder made, so now I should be able to do it!" are thinking like modern gamers with meta-game knowledge. In a TL3 world, say, "making gunpowder" may well be a Craft Secret that always flops for those who lack it, sometimes disastrously, and that can't easily be understood because the essential analytical methods and concepts of experimental controls don't exist to allow it. If they want to change that, then they should first develop TL4 scientific thinking as a philosophy (or something like that). That's because they're trying to change the setting TL from 3 (gunpowder is a rare secret) to 4 (gunpowder is well-known and mass-produced) in an important respect.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by The Benj

I feel like -22 may be a bit harsh, but otherwise, yeah, spot on.

Maybe a bit harsh, yes.

But if you double the bonus from Versatile, and allow several Complementary Skill rolls (with each roll taking a lot of extra time), and disallow retries (or at the most allow one try per thing per decade per character), then -22 might in fact be simulatively apt.

I mean, going by my Ärth setting, I don't want the player characters to invent tonnes of anachronistic crap. On the other hand, if the players create geniuses, then entitles their characters to be geniuses, and so they sould have a chance - a non-zero chance - of doing something amazing. I'm perfectly okay with that.

[The Benj]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Maybe a bit harsh, yes.

But if you double the bonus from Versatile, and allow several Complementary Skill rolls (with each roll taking a lot of extra time), and disallow retries (or at the most allow one try per thing per decade per character), then -22 might in fact be simulatively apt.

Why would I double the bonus from Versatile?

I mean, going by my Ärth setting, I don't want the player characters to invent tonnes of anachronistic crap. On the other hand, if the players create geniuses, then entitles their characters to be geniuses, and so they sould have a chance - a non-zero chance - of doing something amazing. I'm perfectly okay with that.

If you're running a game where you don't want people changing the world by being amazing inventors who revolutionise the way people look at things, then you reject character concepts that go along those lines. I think it's really as simple as that.