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Old 02-27-2016, 02:55 PM   #131
Mailanka
 
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Originally Posted by Kalzazz View Post
As a note, while I am of course open to having my mind changed

This is actually an interesting enough thread I am willing (within reason) to do actual homework assignments that are challenged such as 'make a character using template' or 'answer why I am not using these cinematic rules'
I want to be clear about something: I'm not answering you because I want to change your mind. I don't really care what you do in your game. I hope my material is useful to somebody, and you're somebody, so it would be nice if you found it useful, but let's be honest: We run games in different ways, and that's fine, even good.

It's good because your perspective will challenge mine. I view your comments as challenges that I need to answer, not for you, but for me and the quality of my work. "Why not rifles," you ask. If I cannot give a good answer then that might be a problem. I can give a good answer, so it isn't a problem (that's not to say you couldn't do it another way! It just means I have sufficient justification that I, personally, do not need to worry about the approach I've chosen). "WHy not more ST?" I can tell you why not more ST. "Why not allow more versatility? Like a more melee-focused bounty hunter, more Wrestling, more Shortsword?" Uh... hmm. Good point. "Do you really need all three talents?" Ah... well, they do a nice thing, and I could make them work... but on second thought, I think I'm better off with just one.

Your questions, whether I end up agreeing with your approach or not, strengthen my work. And as you've noted, my answers (and my own questions) whether you agree with them or not, strengthen your game. That means we're having a very productive discussion.

You've certainly improved the quality of the Iteration 3 templates (Our discussion made me go back and give them a more critical look and the Commando really benefited from it, especially since he's the one template that hasn't had a signature character or a playtest).
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Anyway, so don't feel pressed to go straight to 'and heres the finished product' stage on my account. I am way more interested in seeing the evolution of a template and reading explanations of how/why the template was made than I am in just seeing a finished template etc

I probably just come across as impatient because its exciting and I want to see more!
Oh, it's not you. I just don't like to waste people's time, and I worry that I might be, but my compromise is the summary post I do at the end of every iteration, so people with reasonable attention spans can pop in and go "Oh cool, templates and rules I can actually use"

(Plus in the long run, I mean, you don't want to wade through tons of journal to run Iteration 6 Psi Wars. You just want to run Iteration 6 Psi Wars)
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Old 02-27-2016, 03:36 PM   #132
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I wasn't trying to imply that you were, just pointing out that its been cool and useful and I've been picking up a few things thanks to your being kind enough to answer questions, things I wouldn't have picked up just being shown the finished product

And I meant the 'open to having my mind changed' remark in that while I have been enjoying the iterations, I won't count out the possibility that the final end result will be so amazing to make all this discussion and such just pale in comparison

And yeah, the summary pages are good, because otherwise trying to actually find anything on a blog can be a real bear

You may run extremely different games than I (though admittedly, I don't know exactly how your games actually unfold in play), but yeah, you definitely prepare games waaaaaay differently than I do, if someone asked me for my campaign notes I would just give them a bewildered look and ask 'what notes?'

The joke about 'and what happens when someone wants to be a cook?', yeah, that isn't a joke, thats my game. Literally the last quest I ran in my Tanuki City USA campaign involved a PC restaurateur checking resumes, interviewing, hiring a cook, and serving notice to the new cooks former employers, complete with an Iron Chef style cooking battle with celebrity judges and secret ingredient . . . . . I can assure you, when I started that campaign I absolutely had no plans whatsoever of running the 'Lets hire a cook!' quest (since you often plug books, I will do that here to. I rolled out the secret ingredient and the celebrity judges using DF 8 Treasure Tables, so the ingredient to be cooked was Narrative, and the judges were an Elk, Geometric Designs, and a Dress)
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Old 02-27-2016, 03:54 PM   #133
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Oh, it's not you. I just don't like to waste people's time, and I worry that I might be,
No need to worry about this! I'm having fun following this whole process.

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Old 02-28-2016, 11:38 PM   #134
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Today, we start Iteration 3 and the next data dump with a brief post on why technology matters so much for a sci-fi setting, the course I want to take with Psi War's technology, and what references I'll be using..
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Old 02-29-2016, 09:07 AM   #135
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Today, we start Iteration 3 and the next data dump with a brief post on why technology matters so much for a sci-fi setting, the course I want to take with Psi War's technology, and what references I'll be using..
A question of technology and spaceships:

I've long been struggling with making reactionless drives for a setting, ones that would be, well, vaguely compatible with operatic expectations. Notably, I want them to, much like in Star Wars, not be useable as neither kinetic-kill WMDs nor perpetual motion engines. I.e. I want them to be only useable as a technology of transportation.

How can that be done? Pseudovelocity seems like almost required to prevent the WMD/KK clause, but that opens another can of worms that risks turning it into a perpetual motion machine, and I still want power generators and finite batteries/capacitors to be a thing in the setting.
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Old 02-29-2016, 02:01 PM   #136
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A question of technology and spaceships:

I've long been struggling with making reactionless drives for a setting, ones that would be, well, vaguely compatible with operatic expectations. Notably, I want them to, much like in Star Wars, not be useable as neither kinetic-kill WMDs nor perpetual motion engines. I.e. I want them to be only useable as a technology of transportation.

How can that be done? Pseudovelocity seems like almost required to prevent the WMD/KK clause, but that opens another can of worms that risks turning it into a perpetual motion machine, and I still want power generators and finite batteries/capacitors to be a thing in the setting.
I ended up abstracting most of it away, but if you had to pin me down and say "Carefully define the technology of your engines," I would call them boost drives.

First of all, the vast majority of your transportation is done with FTL. That's what really matters. It skips over 99.9999999% of your travel distance, and whatever technology you pick at the tail end for your maneuvering is just the odds and ends of movements. You just leapt over lightyears, and now you're fussing over how you'll move a few thousand miles. So that's trick one: Choose a form of FTL that makes your actual maneuvering as irrelevant as possible.

Then choose an engine that won't break your setting. For example, if you want to have quick travel but you worry your players will somehow turn a reactionless engine into a perpetual motion engine and, having those sorts of players, you still insist on running a space opera game? Use high-efficiency, high-thrust reaction drives, like the super fusion torch. Not worried about perpetual motion engines? Use reactionless engines. Want engines that actually work like you see in the movies and video games? Use boost drives: A boost drive has pseudo-velocity, which is how these things clearly work, because if you shoot a ship's engine, it drifts much more slowly than it was maneuvering. Second, ships seem to have a "maximum speed," which makes no sense with real engines, but makes perfect sense with boost drives.

The final solution, and most important, is that if you're going to run a space opera in the vein of Star Wars, you need to not worry about the physics of it too much. I mean, Han Solo's maneuver in the Force Awakens literally makes no sense. Nobody can have that kind of reaction time (I think you're getting into sub-planck-time reaction time there). In clone wars, people have staves that can resist a light-saber blow, but nobody makes armor out of that stuff why? And what evolutionary forces made a hutt possible, and how did they ever manage to forge an empire of terror and crime across a major section of the galaxy?

The answer to these questions and more is usually "Stop worrying about it and learn to love the lightsaber fights!" or "Run a different sort of space opera," both of which are very good ideas, but Psi Wars is definitely more the former. I'll look more into the latter later (possibly much later, so don't hold your breath)
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Old 02-29-2016, 10:41 PM   #137
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Today, I look at FTL, how its choices can impact our setting, and make some choices about how to apply it to Psi Wars.
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Old 03-01-2016, 12:58 AM   #138
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I ended up abstracting most of it away, but if you had to pin me down and say "Carefully define the technology of your engines," I would call them boost drives.

First of all, the vast majority of your transportation is done with FTL. That's what really matters. It skips over 99.9999999% of your travel distance, and whatever technology you pick at the tail end for your maneuvering is just the odds and ends of movements. You just leapt over lightyears, and now you're fussing over how you'll move a few thousand miles. So that's trick one: Choose a form of FTL that makes your actual maneuvering as irrelevant as possible.

Then choose an engine that won't break your setting. For example, if you want to have quick travel but you worry your players will somehow turn a reactionless engine into a perpetual motion engine and, having those sorts of players, you still insist on running a space opera game? Use high-efficiency, high-thrust reaction drives, like the super fusion torch. Not worried about perpetual motion engines? Use reactionless engines. Want engines that actually work like you see in the movies and video games? Use boost drives: A boost drive has pseudo-velocity, which is how these things clearly work, because if you shoot a ship's engine, it drifts much more slowly than it was maneuvering. Second, ships seem to have a "maximum speed," which makes no sense with real engines, but makes perfect sense with boost drives.

The final solution, and most important, is that if you're going to run a space opera in the vein of Star Wars, you need to not worry about the physics of it too much. I mean, Han Solo's maneuver in the Force Awakens literally makes no sense. Nobody can have that kind of reaction time (I think you're getting into sub-planck-time reaction time there). In clone wars, people have staves that can resist a light-saber blow, but nobody makes armor out of that stuff why? And what evolutionary forces made a hutt possible, and how did they ever manage to forge an empire of terror and crime across a major section of the galaxy?

The answer to these questions and more is usually "Stop worrying about it and learn to love the lightsaber fights!" or "Run a different sort of space opera," both of which are very good ideas, but Psi Wars is definitely more the former. I'll look more into the latter later (possibly much later, so don't hold your breath)
Well, I have a fondness for the approach of "create a setting in such a way that the desired genere is a natural outgrowth of the setting". E.g. the sort of tech that reactionless hyperdynamic space-operatic dogfights are a natural consequence of it. Such that making kinetic-kill vehicles and eternal rotational power generators (as opposed to 'plasma reactors' or whatever) are naturally impossible as a result, not because I have to discourage the PCs (and players) from finding smart applications of existing technology. You seemed to at least have sympathy to such an approach in your posts.
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Old 03-01-2016, 01:05 AM   #139
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Well, I have a fondness for the approach of "create a setting in such a way that the desired genere is a natural outgrowth of the setting". E.g. the sort of tech that reactionless hyperdynamic space-operatic dogfights are a natural consequence of it. Such that making kinetic-kill vehicles and eternal rotational power generators (as opposed to 'plasma reactors' or whatever) are naturally impossible as a result, not because I have to discourage the PCs (and players) from finding smart applications of existing technology. You seemed to at least have sympathy to such an approach in your posts.
I do have sympathy with that approach, but the first principle of Psi Wars is "make something that looks like Star Wars." The result will be something that looks a lot like Star Wars, rather than necessarily an exploration of "Hmm, well, what happens in a hyperdynamic universe?"

I do actually touch on something that begins to look like a hyperdynamic universe (which is a thought I had on the way home from work, which is also a pretty good explanation for why a boost drive works the way it does), but I don't do it because I want to explore a hyperdynamic universe, but because the result "looks like Star Wars." For Psi-Wars, I want starfighters and I come up with excuses to make them happen, rather than looking at fictional physical models and hoping starfighters pop out.

I'm not saying that your approach is a bad way to create a setting (though if I had to pick a "first principle," I think your core activity should be your first choice, because fun gameplay typically trumps setting rigor for actually getting people to sit down and play a game), just that it isn't the approach I'm taking for Psi Wars.
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Old 03-01-2016, 01:08 AM   #140
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I do have sympathy with that approach, but the first principle of Psi Wars is "make something that looks like Star Wars." The result will be something that looks a lot like Star Wars, rather than necessarily an exploration of "Hmm, well, what happens in a hyperdynamic universe?"

I do actually touch on something that begins to look like a hyperdynamic universe (which is a thought I had on the way home from work, which is also a pretty good explanation for why a boost drive works the way it does), but I don't do it because I want to explore a hyperdynamic universe, but because the result "looks like Star Wars." For Psi-Wars, I want starfighters and I come up with excuses to make them happen, rather than looking at fictional physical models and hoping starfighters pop out.

I'm not saying that your approach is a bad way to create a setting (though if I had to pick a "first principle," I think your core activity should be your first choice, because fun gameplay typically trumps setting rigor for actually getting people to sit down and play a game), just that it isn't the approach I'm taking for Psi Wars.
Oh well. It's just that I once started a thread whose concept was largely "what sort of laws and tech constraints* are needed to produce a setting that looks like Star Wars", and lately I'm reminded of this idea, to a large extent by your posts.

* == As opposed to dramatic conventions, but I don't recall pointing that out explicitly.
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