08-16-2010, 02:04 PM | #61 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: A-way down South in Dixie
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01-10-2019, 02:04 PM | #62 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: A-way down South in Dixie
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Assuming a character has both Cooking and Housekeeping, which skill does he use for "cannin"? This is relevant to a PC of mine and a PC in a campaign where I'm the GM. They both have Cooking (Southern* Cuisine and Cajun Cuisine respectively) at about four or five levels higher than their (still respectable) Housekeeping. Can they use their higher Cooking skill levels for canning fruit and making jam or is that exclusively Housekeeping? The Cajun is also a master at Gardening, with a herb garden and an orchard, but I figure that skill at growing the incredients is not strictly speaking necessary to be good at canning or have a legendary jam recipie. Aside from this GURPS question, I've also resurrected this thread because when I'm not playing a very Good Ole Boy Southern PC, I'm having to breathe life into a cast of NPCs where everyone is either Caribbean or Southern, mostly from the Gulf Coast and various Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic sea ports. Desired advice and speaking patterns include: Texas offshore oilmen, fishermen and general roughnecks from the Gulf Coast. East Texans. Very specifically; Houston, Galveston and Jefferson County, inc. Beaumont and Port Arthur. Cajuns from East Texas and Louisiana, specifically Atchafayala Basin Cajuns. Creoles, anything from Louisiana through every type of Caribbean immigrant. Shrimp fishermen, crawdad pickers, oil rig workers and other riverine or nautical Louisiana types. Mississippi, along the river, Jackson, Gulfport-Biloxi. Alabama Gulf Coast. Florida, Tallahassee and panhandle ('Lower Alabama'), as well as sea ports all round Florida, from Pensacola all the way up to Jacksonville. *Grew up in Alabama, stationed in North Carolina for several years, on and off, married a Georgia girl and lived there for several years.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! Last edited by Icelander; 01-10-2019 at 02:18 PM. |
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01-10-2019, 02:39 PM | #63 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Shoreline, WA (north of Seattle)
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Re: A-way down South in Dixie
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In both cases, they'll usually have the option of working with a substantial circumstance bonus from time taken, equipment, and reference materials, so they will usually be working (IMO) at Skill+4 at least. Quote:
In any case, if you have any questions about FSU's library system, I can give you some answers that will be a decade out of date, but... |
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01-10-2019, 03:26 PM | #64 | |||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: A-way down South in Dixie
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Now I can tell the player of 'Nonc' Morel that his canned figs, peaches or paw paw butter are not simply extremely good (Housekeeping at skill 15), but actually gifts fit for a king... or a centenarian billionaire (Cooking (Cajun) at skill 20, I think). Quote:
What neighbourhood, suburb or area would be suitable for someone who was equal parts beach bum and redneck? As in, the kind of area where young men race boats and other watercraft, water skiing or kite surfing might be done by the more affluent (but ideally still vulgar) and boys might have long blond hair and walk around wearing beach clothing or overalls with diesel and grease in them. What's a high school where the football team is all important? If it matters, who were top dogs around fifteen years ago? If a Tallahassee lad were to join the Navy right out of high school, would he almost certainly be working class or would it be considered reasonably normal for an athletic boy from a middle class family to do so, assuming that he was bored with classroom instruction and had an interest in firearms, engines, boats, swimming, diving, parachuting, extreme sports, adrenaline and explosives, so he figured he'd get paid for playing with Uncle Sam's toys? In other words, is avoiding college and joining the military as an enlisted man viewed as exclusively something for people who have no economic alternative, or is it a fairly normal career choice, like learning a skilled trade? When talking about things back home, what would Bo Johnson call his home? Would he refer to how things were back in Florida? In Tallahassee? Tally? His specific neighbourhood or suburb? What regional eccentricities of speech identify someone as from around Tallahassee? How do I differentiate Bo Johnson, out of Tallahassee, FL, from Dale Johnson (no relation), out of Houston, TX, as well as from Dr. Alfred L. Lapointe (born in DRC, college in Austin, TX, PhD in English literature from Cambridge, UK, no accent unless he's trying for one)? Well, perhaps just, if any of your fellow academics had secretly found out that the supernatural was real and were studying it without coming out and saying so, which departments would they have been from and what courses would they have been teaching?
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01-10-2019, 07:07 PM | #65 |
Join Date: May 2009
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Re: A-way down South in Dixie
Scots people don't like to be called Scotch, because it's a drink.
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01-10-2019, 09:09 PM | #66 | ||||||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Shoreline, WA (north of Seattle)
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Re: A-way down South in Dixie
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Now the redneck side is a lot easier; he probably just lives outside of town. Maybe the grandfolks have a homestead out in the country. I had a buddy at FSU who was pretty much in that situation - his mom lived on a couple acres about 30 minutes outside of town and that's where we'd go for a bonfire once a year. He'll favor trucks or muscle cars, most likely, and the boats will be fast fishing boats, not cigarette boats or cabin cruisers. Either way, he's almost certainly going to be big into fishing. Quote:
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Some local color: If Bo knew or was interested in anyone from the artsy side of FSU, he probably got dragged down to the Railroad Square "arts district" - basically about a single block of warehouses that are (as of around 2004) being turned into studios and such. It's a good spot for New Age weirdos to hang out in a town that's not really into New Age weirdos. Also - and mostly unrelated, but it's the kind of thing I think a non-local might not know - the Florida state capital building is extremely phallic. It's a skyscraper flanked by two domes, and these are beautifully framed when you're driving west on Apalachee Parkway toward downtown. Also also. Near Tallahassee is Wakulla Springs, where they filmed a few Tarzan movies... and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. It's lovely, has a historic hotel on the premises, and would make for a very good set piece, what with the alligators and the flocks of vultures. |
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01-11-2019, 02:00 AM | #67 | ||||||||||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: A-way down South in Dixie
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That's what I get for picking a pretty name and not looking more closely at a map. Quote:
I think that moving him a couple of hours west is probably best, even though it is clearly a lot more fun saying 'Tallahassee' than 'Panama City' or any number of smaller towns by the seaside there. 'Choktaw Beach', 'Miramar Beach' and 'Okaloosa Island' might be promising names, if any of them are suitable. 'Bagdad' has a certain cachet, too, and 'Avalon Beach' is nice and romantically named. As long as the locals can be fairly Southern, (Burt Reynolds, Sonny Shroyer, pretty much every character in 'Cool Hand Luke' who wasn't Paul Newman), but some of them make their living catering to tourists having fun on beaches, we ought to be good. Quote:
As for boats and other watercrafts, I was imagining small boats with outboard motors, as well as maybe water scooters/jet skis/sea-doo. In fact, I think I might make his father's current job either renting or selling a variety of personal watercraft and small boats. Quote:
At 6'3" and 200 lbs., I imagined that Bo might be a star pass rushing linebacker (mainly to avoid 'everyone was QB1'). Might it be better to make him a tight end or safety? What position would you make him? Quote:
I imagine that if Bo had been able to tough out four more years of classroom instruction and go to college before joining the Navy as a naval aviator or officer with engineering background, his parents would have been overjoyed. And Bo might have enjoyed being a naval aviator and been good at it, the only problem was that he was not willing to do four years of mats and physics before Uncle Sam* would hand him toys to play with. Not when he could join on a Delayed Entry Program while still a senior in high school and demand a chance at BUD/S, actually having decent high school grades despite being focused in other areas (star athletes get away with a lot) and, of course, having the physique of someone whose hobbies include a lot of what SEALs have to learn (swimming, boating, running, diving, etc.). *Not Uncle Tom. Quote:
Unlike all of the PCs, Bo doesn't speak multiple languages and have either a superlative education or the remarkable collection of disparate knowledge collected by a genius autodidact. He's smart enough to have made it through SEAL selection and training, but he's not nearly as smart as any of the PCs. In GURPS terms, he hasn't spent any points on languages and that reflects a relative lack of linguistic facility. Bo is a lot better at practical problem-solving under pressure than he is at book learning, or a lot of other things, for that matter, like acting out a role, picking up auditory cues and mimicking, music, etc. Basically, Bo is good at being a SEAL or the Monster Hunting equivalent, but wouldn't be any good if the CIA tried to recruit him to be a superspy covert operative assassin. Quote:
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As the PCs are all apparently asexual, married to their jobs (or even Fanatical about them) or else so socially awkward that it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment when someone attractive of any preferred sex notices them, Bo Johnson, as one of the six NPC members of their Monster Hunting team, will be a contrast to their dour dating lives by having a series of ill-advised hook-ups with types he really should have grown out of dating. Not everything you need to rescue your allies from is necessarily physical danger. Quote:
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I don't actually remember any details except the weird food and terrifying swamp people (to my young eyes, at least), but it might have been Wakulla Springs. In any case, very, very different from the other parts of Florida that I have visited, mostly concentrated within a hundred miles of Miami, Tampa and Orlando, respectively. I mostly picked Tallahassee because I liked the sound of the name, it seemed appropriately located and because Bo Johnson is meant to be from the northern Florida of rednecks, gators and strong accents, not the southerly*, tourist and retirement community parts. *But not at all Southern. Last edited by Icelander; 01-11-2019 at 01:49 PM. |
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01-11-2019, 02:38 AM | #68 |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Texans, Around Houston or so
Any Texans living near Houston or somebody who knows such a person, how do y'all talk, an' act an' sich?
What will serve to illustrate that a character is a Texan from Galveston, Houston, Port Arthur or other neighboring communities, as opposed to someone from the Alabama-Mississippi Black Belt or, indeed, any other parts of the Deep South? How are Texas oil rig roughnecks, boaters, sailors and coastal industry people (inc., I suppose, small town football players) different from West Texas oilmen, ranchers and small town football players? What are local foods that are popular in and around Galveston and Houston? What would someone visiting from Louisiana, either rural Cajun or urban New Orleans, make of people in Houston and Galveston? What about a foreigner who had visited most of the Gulf Coast and lived in Florida for a while, what would he find notable about Galveston, Houston, Beamont, Port Arthur and any places within driving distance he might visit?
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01-11-2019, 03:23 AM | #69 | |
Join Date: Mar 2008
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Re: A-way down South in Dixie
Your comment on languages made me wonder. From what claims to be an official forum, a 2012 post.
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01-11-2019, 03:33 AM | #70 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: A-way down South in Dixie
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He might have attended some Arabic, Farsi, Pashto or Urdo training in the latter parts of his career, but given that biographies and memoirs indicate that plenty of SEALs in the 2000s and even 2010s only had enough command of languages in their operational area to recognize a couple of words, I doubt he realistically needs points in any languages in GURPS terms. Briefly, yes, it is true that the SEALs are adopting many of the methods that work for the Special Forces in operating among the local populace, but the majority of people who were SEALs at the height of Afghanistan had not yet attained the linguistic and cultural proficiency that the Powers That Be would like to see for the future FID and irregular warfare arm of NAVSPECWARCOM. It's still plausible enough to differentiate Navy SEALs from Army Special Forces by keeping in mind that the SEALs do Extreme Watersports, i.e. have a more comprehensive training regimen in operating at sea, boating, diving and in unusual infiltration techniques, whereas the Special Forces are Warrior Diplomats, better at languages, cultures and social stuff. It's not an exact cut-off and is a matter of degree, but it's still a fairly valid set of stereotypes. It might indeed.
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Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! Last edited by Icelander; 01-11-2019 at 03:38 AM. |
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