08-07-2010, 10:17 PM | #111 | |
Join Date: Jan 2010
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Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality
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08-07-2010, 10:30 PM | #112 | |
Dog of Lysdexics
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Melbourne FL, Formerly Wellington NZ
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Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality
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08-07-2010, 10:37 PM | #113 |
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: GMT-5
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Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality
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08-07-2010, 11:29 PM | #114 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: in your pocket, stealing all your change
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Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality
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. |
08-07-2010, 11:56 PM | #115 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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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." Bill Stoddard |
08-08-2010, 06:56 PM | #116 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality
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08-08-2010, 08:05 PM | #117 | |
Join Date: May 2007
Location: Twin Cities, Minnesota, U.S.A.
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Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality
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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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I have Confused and Clueless. Sometimes I miss sarcasm and humor, or critically fail my Savoir-Faire roll. None of it is intentional. Published GURPS Settings (as of 4/2013 -- I hope to update it someday...) |
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08-08-2010, 08:28 PM | #118 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality
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By definition, alternative medicine is stuff that cannot be shown to work with the above methods.
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08-10-2010, 06:45 PM | #119 |
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Sierra Vista, Arizona
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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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"It's never to early to start beefing up your obituary." -- The Most Interesting Man in the World |
08-10-2010, 07:31 PM | #120 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: GURPS Fantasy-Tech 1: The Edge of Reality
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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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cabaret chicks on ice, low-tech |
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