12-01-2020, 08:46 AM | #21 | |||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Late TL8 skills (almost) everyone has
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I think the universal 'sports' skill kids learned at all the schools I went to was throwing (and kicking) small balls - impromptu cricket, tag, etc. with tennis balls was universal. Quote:
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." Last edited by Rupert; 12-01-2020 at 02:01 PM. |
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12-01-2020, 09:09 AM | #22 |
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Kentucky, USA
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Re: Late TL8 skills (almost) everyone has
Driving is experiencing the same transition a lot of skills have and will go through. You still need the skill, it just becomes the near exclusive domain of a professional, be they a taxi, bus or train driver or AI.
Cooking had the same transition, going from a mandatory survival skill to something most of the population doesn't need thanks to packaged goods, equipment bonuses and expert instructions letting you succeed 99% of the time going off default. I believe this is also an "apocalypse how" scenario, where everything except games and hobby skills gets exported to unseen professionals/AI and then you lose access to them.
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GURPS Fanzine The Path of Cunning is worth a read. |
12-01-2020, 09:19 AM | #23 | ||
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Late TL8 skills (almost) everyone has
Here's a great example of why "universality" is hard to find.
Where I grew up, guns were subject to so many regulations that shooting was extremely uncommon. Moreover, I was in the city, so those who jumped through the hoops to do it got side-eye for being either scary gun nuts or wannabe mountain-men who didn't belong in the city. My uncle, founder of a shooting club and winner of many shooting prizes, was seen as a weirdo by the family – we didn't talk about it. Teaching children to shoot was a strict no-go; older schools had shooting ranges that dated to WWII, and all of these had been repurposed as storage areas. My sum-total experience with guns was seeing a vault that apparently held some firearms under strict lock and key, plus seeing policemen around. On the other hand, hanging around the city at all hours wasn't all that weird. It was hard not to learn Brawling, Carousing, and Streetwise, at least a bit. Nobody really considered it odd for a leather-jacket-clad teenage punk to be lurking in the city at 3 a.m., getting up to no good. I'm positive that would shock some, though! Quote:
I'm sure there are other skills like that . . . ones that get a "/TL" in the game but really only exist in a narrow slice of time, making the skill irrelevant or nonexistent on both sides of that time slice. Quote:
Flash forward to today and I'm not doing any of the above. Instead, I'm an editor of roleplaying games. Meanwhile, contemporaries I know who went into setting up and repairing computers, electronic synthesizers, phones, security systems, etc. own businesses and/or are retired at age 50-55, their bills paid entirely by the present-day obsession with all things electronic.
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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12-01-2020, 09:30 AM | #24 | ||
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Late TL8 skills (almost) everyone has
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Also, I think cars are headed toward the same automation as phones and PCs. Already, I have friends whose car parks itself – 100% hands-off, I mean. I suspect GPS-guided, self-driving vehicles will go from fascinating proofs of concept to consumer products within a generation. Quote:
Technology is ever-expending and ever-complexifying, and advances because subcomponent technologies that used to be specific skills and professions can be automated out of conscious existence. That isn't new or specific to our age, but a consistent trend through all of history . . . I rather doubt that, say, the average Roman living in Rome could mine ore, smelt it, forge it into metal artifacts, etc., yet Romans had plenty of metal artifacts. That's the way of things: populations grow, better technologies are needed to support them, and the earlier technologies behind those better ones become "assumed." The fact that this has been a consistent trend for millennia leads me to doubt that we're suddenly on the brink of apocalypse. Now whether individual people in our society like the fact that automation is closer than ever to "forcing" them to spend their life on games and hobbies instead of work is a whole other matter. I think that for every person who's petrified at the thought there's one who's sighing, "Oh, finally."
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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12-01-2020, 09:44 AM | #25 | |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: Late TL8 skills (almost) everyone has
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Collaborative Settings: Cyberpunk: Duopoly Nation Space Opera: Behind the King's Eclipse And heaps of forum collabs, 30+ and counting! |
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12-01-2020, 10:02 AM | #26 |
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Kentucky, USA
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Re: Late TL8 skills (almost) everyone has
I wasn't thinking so much a realistic prediction as a (silly) After The End explanation of
"Why is there so much loot still around?" "After some super hacker killed the central planetary AI, most people had no idea where the delivery drones brought their food from and starved in their apartments. I'm just glad leather with spikes was fashionable when it happened!" Real systems tend to be too distributed and redundant for single point of failure apocalypses. On a more serious note, retirement disease is a real thing, a lack of purpose and social role will actually kill you. But I also know people who consider work a necessary evil to sustain their real life in our (crude) virtual worlds, so I'm not worried about people keeping occupied as AIs take over everything productive.
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GURPS Fanzine The Path of Cunning is worth a read. |
12-01-2020, 10:14 AM | #27 | ||
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Late TL8 skills (almost) everyone has
Got it!
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On a more mundane level, there are "live to work" people and "work to live" people. I'm a "work to live" person . . . I have no problem admitting that if I won the lottery, inherited from a rich uncle whom I didn't know I had, found a shipping container full of small, unmarked bills, or the like, I'd stop working for a living tomorrow and feel zero guilt. I don't believe that I need to have an external purpose to matter, or that some supernatural entity is keeping score based on what I do in this life. I'd devote my time to Argentine tango, which is entirely my internal passion, and more than enough to give me a reason to go on. If someone told me, "How can you dance when your mind and money could be doing better things?", I'd just walk away from the conversation because I doubt I could find common ground with such a person.
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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12-01-2020, 10:20 AM | #28 |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Late TL8 skills (almost) everyone has
That's something that should be possible to work around. Part of the pre-apocalypse backstory to Death Stranding involved humans still doing deliveries (and one presumes other tasks), despite drones and the like being perfectly capable of it, precisely because some of them started going a bit crazy without a job to do. In a "future of leisure" setting, you could easily have some humans with what roughly amounts to make-work to help them feel more fulfilled (these may well be the PC's!).
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12-01-2020, 10:32 AM | #29 |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Late TL8 skills (almost) everyone has
Thinking about it, my last point is something to bear in mind if you're creating characters for a game.
Games aren't always or mostly reality simulations. Even campaigns set in the present are often escapes in which the PCs are idealized selves – alter-egos who get to do what the players would like to do rather than what they must do. People like that can have utterly different skill sets from what we consider "necessary" and/or "universal," yet remain plausible in the stories they're part of. It's a bit like how all cast members in many films and TV shows are good-looking people with great voices. The roles they play depict people with a weird level of social and professional competence, and far nicer homes, cars, and wardrobes than their ostensible jobs could pay for. And they can set aside such mundane things as housekeeping, taxes, or childcare – unless a specific plot calls for them not to – without dire consequences. For instance, I'd happily be some guy with high DX, HT, Appearance, Charisma, Independent Income, and Wealth, whose main "on screen" skills are Dancing, Professional Skill (Mixology), several Connoisseur specialties, and a nice cross-section of social skills . . . say, Carousing, Diplomacy, Public Speaking, Savoir-Faire, and Sex Appeal. Would that be a realistic person? Probably not. But alter-egos don't need to be. That's something to consider, too.
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
12-01-2020, 11:44 AM | #30 | |
Join Date: Jan 2014
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Re: Late TL8 skills (almost) everyone has
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-> Computer Literacy, the ability to use computers -> Familiarity, understanding how to use a skill with computer equipment. Knowing how to use Final Cut Pro is obviously different from splicing film by hand, but both are film editing (not sure of actual skill). Working with a massive General Ledger on paper is different from Quickbooks (or whatever is used in enterprise), but both are Accounting. -> Computer Administration/TL (IQ/E) [Average?], which is the skill of IT professionals (who aren't programmers). DBAs, Security, Sysops and others end up here. Definitely necessary if you want "realistic" computer hackers. |
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