03-01-2015, 05:56 PM | #21 | |
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Re: What do you want in a Transhuman Space game (as a player)?
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I suppose you'll want to say that playing soccer is a valuable activity. But that's a subjective opinion; not everyone values sports. And on the other hand, a lot of people value the social coolness of smoking (note that Constanza was taking a course in hardedge dance that her father paid for!) and/or the neurochemical effects; that's a subjective value judgment, but no more subjective than thinking a winning soccer season is a good thing, worth risking lasting injury and lifelong health issues for. There are health issues for a lot of things other than smoking. Do you want to say that children should never have ice cream? Or the caffeine in cola? Or, for that matter, watered wine, in the Mediterranean style? I don't think it's an inevitable assumption that the future is going to share present-day expectations that children will be shielded from every possible risk. THS has the European Union if you like that sort of thing; societies with lower CR can plausibly have different customs, and people with different attitudes.
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03-01-2015, 05:57 PM | #22 |
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Re: What do you want in a Transhuman Space game (as a player)?
I also fully understand modifying a setting to cater to players' and/or GM's quirks, squeamishness, etc.
Like a hypothetical player that moved from Haiti just not wanting anything to do with slavery in any form.
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03-02-2015, 02:47 AM | #23 | ||
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Re: What do you want in a Transhuman Space game (as a player)?
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You have a point there regarding this specific article that I brought up. |
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03-02-2015, 03:01 AM | #24 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: U.K.
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Re: What do you want in a Transhuman Space game (as a player)?
As you seem to be obsessed with the horrors of that particular article, it was clearly worth mentioning.
But anyway, the whole question of "canon" in TS is a little more fuzzy than with some game lines. This is not Original World of Darkness. There is no metaplot. Frankly, I assume that everyone's campaign will wander a little bit away from the kernel of the books, sooner or later. Like the game rules, the published setting data is ultimately a toolkit for GMs. But I want it to be a toolkit where the tools all fit in the box together, and where none of them make my head hurt to look at them. (A bit of recent history: I was, to be honest, a little bit uncertain about Wings of the Rising Sun when David pitched it, because it involved adding a whole significant organisation to the setting that hadn't been mentioned before, complete with a large number of space stations in LEO. Not inconsistent, but a bit ... out of the blue. But then I decided that it was too cool to turn down.)
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03-02-2015, 04:12 AM | #25 | |||
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Re: What do you want in a Transhuman Space game (as a player)?
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If I'm obsessed with anything, it's the biotechnology of all sorts; and yes, I feel that Bioroid Bazaar / the other related thing are more biotech-pessimistic than e.g. Broken Dreams or In the Well, in overall tone. Quote:
I see the setting books of TS as the toolkit for campaign-building, not worldbuilding. Say there's two campaigns, one about weird memes in the High Frontier and Deep Beyond, another about criminal investigations in USA/Mars. It's reasonable for one of those campaign to include Xenocop and Valkyrie PCs and NPCs 'on the stage' and for the other not to; but it's highly weird for the setting to include or not include Xenocop and Valkyrie designs depending on the campaign being run if* the setting is taken 'by the book'. If the setting is taken in modified form instead, then of course it's OK, but that's different. Now, different books contradicting each other, or book saying something like 'well, book 1 said C, but who knows, any one of A, B, C, D, E might be true' make it hard to achieve a single 'by the book' variant of a setting. I like having the option to play the Default Variant (Unmodified) setting, because it allows cleaner integration of setting facts into the lives of PCs. Quote:
* == Please don't cut out this section when quoting, as that would misrepresent my post. |
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03-02-2015, 07:49 AM | #26 |
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Re: What do you want in a Transhuman Space game (as a player)?
Aren't you talking about "what I want in a book" rather than "what I want in a game"? They're not exactly the same question.
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03-02-2015, 01:34 PM | #27 | |
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Re: What do you want in a Transhuman Space game (as a player)?
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Of course any group of people can become paranoid about anything. That won't magically make it rational or scientifically defensible. Soccer dangers are the same as for any sport or athletic activity. It's not as prone to TBI and sudden death like American football, rugby, or gymnastics.
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03-02-2015, 01:37 PM | #28 | |
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Re: What do you want in a Transhuman Space game (as a player)?
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The moment anything is added or subtracted, even PCs, the setting changes from R.A.W. and what authors were thinking when writing them.
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03-02-2015, 01:40 PM | #29 | |
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Re: What do you want in a Transhuman Space game (as a player)?
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03-02-2015, 02:35 PM | #30 | |
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Re: What do you want in a Transhuman Space game (as a player)?
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Yes, smoking can kill you, or lead to horrifying debilities. But human beings do all sorts of things that lower their life expectancy or risk lasting bodily dysfunction or both. It's their bodies and they have a right to do it. For that matter, I'd say that they have a right to commit out and out suicide. When you're talking about children, whose parents have to make decisions for them, I'd agree that the parents have an obligation not to kill them, not to deprive them of what they need so that they die of, say, starvation or cold, and not to allow them to do suicidal things. But "something that has a probability of killing you in the long run" (the CDC estimates a 10-year decrease in life expectancy) is not the same as "suicide." If an adult lights a cigarette, I don't think it's rational to treat them as if they were shoving the barrel of a .44 magnum into their mouth. There are societies that practice the close supervision of parents and that require parents to prevent their children from doing anything that would impair health or decrease safety. We call that trait "high CR" in GURPS. In societies with lower CR, I figure a lot of things will be left to parental discretion. Montréal is CR2, which I figure is less regulatory than the current US. Now, in fact, I gave the players a moment of creepiness with that initial notification, because it suggested that Big Brother was watching and was going to threaten to take away Gianni's custody of his daughter, which is way more controlling that American child welfare authorities currently would be about this; that is, I gave a hint of "you've fallen into an authoritarian panopticon state!" But then I reversed that by having them leave it up to Gianni what to do about the situation. . . .
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