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Old 08-07-2010, 10:17 PM   #111
lexington
 
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Default Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality

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Originally Posted by Edges View Post
I certainly don't mean to offend anyone.

Sure the question could be extended to the entire book. But I only asked about the part I was interested in knowing about. Besides, there's enough expert chat on this forum in the areas of LT armor and weapons that I am convinced that that area of expertise is well represented. But are any of the authors or play testers experts in Esoteric Medicine? If so, I'd be curious to learn what discoveries they've made. If not (and maybe even if so), I would expect (based on the level of research that appears to go into other GURPS books) that they did some research. I'm just wondering how much they did and how serious it was.

It's not a trivial question. The effectiveness of complimentary medicine is controversial. If the authors have taken the stance of proclaiming the truth behind various modalities, I'd like to know (as a consumer if nothing else) how much stock I can put in it, so to speak. Not that I'm going to choose a doctor based on a gaming book. But I've enjoyed learning from GURPS books so far.



Yes, it certainly is. It's one which I didn't ask because of course, how could anyone know what anyone else would expect.

If the authors did conduct hard research, I would be interested in knowing that they've done so and what the results were irrespective of my own expectations. If they turn out to match my expectations, sweet... confirmation. If not, sweet... a learning opportunity.
All the tech books so far have had a list of annotated citations. I'm sure you'll be able to find the books they used to get information about medicine.
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Old 08-07-2010, 10:30 PM   #112
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Default Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality

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Actually, we should be good to move that forward by Monday. We moved all of the Ninja bits into the new DF12, so now it's just GURPS Penguins of the Renaissance. Then we're going to pawn off the Renaissance stuff by making your Florence book required reading (and page-referencing all of the key history), and move the penguins into the delayed-but-alive GURPS Bestiary series.
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Old 08-07-2010, 10:37 PM   #113
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Default Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality

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All the tech books so far have had a list of annotated citations. I'm sure you'll be able to find the books they used to get information about medicine.
Of course. But that means I have to do some research myself! : )
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Old 08-07-2010, 11:29 PM   #114
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Default Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality

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Of course. But that means I have to do some research myself! : )
It's not that hard, there are some scientific medical journals and online article repositories. ScienceDirect, Lancet, SciELO (which is mostly free, dunno how much is available in english, but I'm guessing a lot).

Articles are pretty short, and sometimes just by reading the abstracts you can learn a lot. It really doesn't take a lot to find out the latest.

From what I've been studying lately, all signs point to placebo. There's no doubt it helps, it just doesn't seem to help anymore than wearing a funny hat and really believing in it (which can do wonders, I promise you :P). Ofcourse, it's hard to research some stuff... homeopathy is clearly placebo-effect. It's hard to do acupuncture clinical trials, because it's hard to have a double-blind set-up (you KNOW you're just pinning at random). There was some research being done to make "fake" acupuncture needles, so you could have a proper double-blind trial (trained acupuncturists can use them, apply to the correct points, but the needles don't have the properties that they're supposed to need to work, and they don't know it).

Studies that say "x people out of N got better" are pretty useless... you need a control-group and a double-blind method, for starters.
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Old 08-07-2010, 11:56 PM   #115
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Default Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality

I was loaned a book that offered a literature review of attempts to assess the effectiveness of alternative medicine; it was my main source for "does it work." Other than that, I read as much medical history as I could lay hands on.

Low-Tech explicitly discusses the placebo effect, and takes the position that "I'm seeing a doctor, so I'm going to get better" is inherent in all medical care and is already factored into the basic "under medical care" roll. Any Esoteric Medicine treatment that actually works does something over and above the placebo effect. There's a lot of guidance on judgment calls and how the GM should make them, including what kinds of things might be helped by what alternative treatment. But generally, I went for "this treatment may give actual benefits in these specific cases; those benefits won't be as good as modern medical care provides."

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Old 08-08-2010, 06:56 PM   #116
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Default Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality

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Low-Tech explicitly discusses the placebo effect, and takes the position that "I'm seeing a doctor, so I'm going to get better" is inherent in all medical care and is already factored into the basic "under medical care" roll. Any Esoteric Medicine treatment that actually works does something over and above the placebo effect. There's a lot of guidance on judgment calls and how the GM should make them, including what kinds of things might be helped by what alternative treatment. But generally, I went for "this treatment may give actual benefits in these specific cases; those benefits won't be as good as modern medical care provides."
I see room for fleshing out the treatment given Esoteric Medicine in Fantasy-Tech. Based on the above remark about the placebo effect, maybe we could tentatively assign the title Panaceatic Medicine?
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Old 08-08-2010, 08:05 PM   #117
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We had Dan Howard dress up in armor, and I whacked him with swords until he was seriously injured. Then, we had a witch doctor use TL1 alternative medicine on him and measured its effectiveness
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Low-Tech explicitly discusses the placebo effect, and takes the position that "I'm seeing a doctor, so I'm going to get better" is inherent in all medical care and is already factored into the basic "under medical care" roll.
But is that really universal? What about the "I'm seeing a leech, he'll probably maim me for life and give me warts." effect? I've read that in past centuries, doctors weren't viewed with a lot of confidence in western society, owing to the abundance of quacks.
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Old 08-08-2010, 08:28 PM   #118
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Default Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality

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Scientific.

Unbiased. Objective. Inclusive of a significant sample size. Publicly available.

If it was acecdotal, was an effort made to get a broad base of reports?
If it was a literature review, were there archeological/anthropological citations or did it come from someone's blog?
If it was experimental, to what degree was the scientific method followed?
If there were reports from experts, were only one or two views represented or were a variety of types interviewed?

Etc.
Any 'alternative medicine' that has been subjected to the above is no longer alternative medicine. If it works, it is now simply called medicine.

By definition, alternative medicine is stuff that cannot be shown to work with the above methods.
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Old 08-10-2010, 06:45 PM   #119
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Default Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality

I just picked it up today and am already making plans for it...it fits right in with my Zarahemla campaign. I'm especially intrigued by the vimanas, although mine will probably be vril-powered.
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Old 08-10-2010, 07:31 PM   #120
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Default Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality

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If it was acecdotal, was an effort made to get a broad base of reports?
If it was a literature review, were there archeological/anthropological citations or did it come from someone's blog?
If it was experimental, to what degree was the scientific method followed?
If there were reports from experts, were only one or two views represented or were a variety of types interviewed?
It sounds as if you are expecting the authors, or the playtesters, to have done some of all of this. If so, you radically misunderstand the level of resources that it's practical to commit to a project of this type, at this level of funding.

For most of this book, no primary empirical or documentary research was done. The most notable exception was that one of the playtesters took his musket out into the rain to test his ability to load and fire it—which qualifies him as a Hero of the Soviet People First Class in my book.

What we did was to consult the best published research we could get hold of. For example, my library now includes copies of Sean McGrail's survey of low-tech boatbuilding and Tracey Rihll's study of catapults. I spent a lot of time picking books from the shelves of the local university library. We preferred scholarly books to popularizations; we preferred books of any sort to online sources; we preferred specialized online sources to Wikipedia, which we did our best to use only as a pointer to original publications. We argued over the merits of each other's sources, and looked for more recent findings; for example, the view of the role of the stirrup in charges with couched lance has radically changed in recent years. In short, we tried to find out as much as we could given that we had limited time, minimal budgets, and only the personal expertise of a collection of interested gamers to draw on.

Then there were the heroic sidetracks, such as the hundred or more posts about the proper mathematical modeling of energy storage in bows. . . .

But we didn't personally verify any of this stuff. The best I can say is that it's as historically and scientifically accurate as our source material could make it, and that we used the best source material we could track down. If you can find inaccuracies, you should submit errata.

Bill Stoddard
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