01-12-2019, 12:04 PM | #231 |
Banned
Join Date: May 2017
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
Please do not take out of context what I write because then you will reach wrong conclusions. These are the origins of the initial capital, we are talking about a few million dollars, then obviously they devoted themselves to more things, imagine that they invented Facebook, or male contraceptives, for example.
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01-12-2019, 12:12 PM | #232 |
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: OK
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
Was the AI the result of their biological research? Is it a biological creature they created? It sounds like someone succeeded at creating the singularity and is using that to take over the world.
How do you intend to use this entity in the story? Are the player characters acting in opposition to it? Are they its agents? Are they people who just happen to be in the world, and you're exploring the effects it has on the world that way?
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01-12-2019, 12:12 PM | #233 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
In the first place, raising a personal TL gives a character the option to learn skills at the higher TL, but it does not give them knowledge of those skills. They need to study them. Since you are talking about their being the creators of the higher TL innovations, there are no teachers for the skills, and no textbooks they can study on their own; they are going to have to learn at on-the-job rates, 800 hours per character point. And they are going to have to do this while running huge business enterprises and doing scientific research (not to mention carrying on complicated and obsessive personal lives).
In the second place, and more important, a higher personal TL "is most useful if you also have access to high-TL equipment." But every single piece of high-TL equipment is something they are going to have to invent, and build prototypes for, and then debug. And until they do that, they do not have a TL9 laboratory or productive facility where they can work on building TL10 prototypes, and so on. In our society, if I wanted to work on developing TL9 electronics, or medicine, or crops, I could order all kinds of equipment from catalogs published by scientific and industrial suppliers; I wouldn't have to build everything myself. But there are no suppliers for TL9 equipment to be used in advancing TL a further level. To make such equipment available, I have to raise the society's TL, not just my own. The ability to do such things solely with one's own resources is precisely what the cinematic advantage Gadgeteer confers; it has no place in a realistic campaign.
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01-12-2019, 12:14 PM | #234 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
If you do not want to be taken out of context you need to provide the context. Your style is one of giving hints, and leaving the context unspecified; there is no way to discuss what you are talking about without taking you out of context.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
01-12-2019, 12:22 PM | #235 | |||||
Forum Pervert
(If you have to ask . . .) Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Somewhere high up.
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
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The Mary-Sue Party. Quote:
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So, none of your advanced technology exists. But only for that gadgeteer. As Bill just explained (as I was typing this), if they want to mass-produce anything they either need to raise the entire TL of the society, or have gadgetter. |
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01-12-2019, 12:59 PM | #236 |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
Modern scientific research, technological invention, design and, obviously, manufacturing, is not carried out by one genius or even a few people. It's a massive organisational process and everyone involved in this process, in GURPS terms, needs the right TL for the task, or else you're going to have penalties (and if only one person out of the whole group has TL11 and the rest have TL8, the penalties will make the task functionally impossible).
Gadgeteer is specifically the GURPS Advantage that makes inventing function like it does in comic books. Without it, there are no world-changing supergeniuses who can somehow do everything that in real life takes a whole society to accomplish and can't be controlled or predicted. In order to be able to work on TL10 or TL11 inventions, let alone make anything that is TL10 or TL11, you need a society of millions (at minimum) and probably an entire economy of billions, who have TL10 or TL11. There is effectively no realistic way for an individual or small research team in absolute secrecy to manage to produce any TL10 or TL11 projects on any kind of scale without the economy of a whole TL9 or TL10 world available to them. That requires Gadgeteering. In real life, experimental R&D projects are, at most, one Tech Level ahead of the world and even then, they need the resources, knowledge and backing of a lot of people who in that very limited field, effectively have science and technology skills of one TL higher. That's normal, as technology is usually in an experimental stage for a long time before it's available to the public, which is what determined what GURPS TL the world is set at. But while blue sky ideas are a dime a dozen, no one is secretly manufacturing TL10 technology in the real world.
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01-12-2019, 01:02 PM | #237 |
Munchkin Line Editor
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Austin, TX
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Re: Comment my megacorporation
OK, this discussion is going nowhere and it's not getting better.
Alonsua, you cannot give a patently unrealistic situation and expect to explain it by waving your hands and saying "the steps I haven't bothered to explain justify everything," particularly when the explanations you DO offer betray a lack of understanding both of the GURPS rules and of the American political and economic systems. You do yourself no favors by refusing to have a good-faith conversation about the flaws in your system and ignoring many of the points that have been brought up by multiple people. If you had shown a willingness to engage in an open and honest discussion on the weak points of your campaign framework, even if that meant reworking many of its base premises -- or just scrapping the whole thing and starting over, which might be the best answer -- this conversation would be allowed to continue. You haven't come close to doing that, and you don't seem to understand why it's frustrating everyone else. If the choice is between frustrating you by closing your thread and frustrating the rest of the GURPS forum, sorry, but I'm siding with the majority. Do not PM or email me about this. If you want to appeal, write to forums@sjgames.com.
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