The Gaming Den

It's fine in single author fiction for a transport beam to bounce a phaser one week and not do that the next. But in a cooperative storytelling game it has to be knowable whether you can bounce a phaser off a transport beam or not - because one of the characters is a frickin engineer and all his pl...

As long as they for a consistent set of physics that actually describes the world you want its fine. If its contradictory someone will notice and if its a big enough contradiction the game will collapse. Most of the time people don't even think about that stuff. I mean, we know that Star Trek trans...

Sorry for being unclear, I was imagining an airborne submarine or bathysphere. Maybe with float-stones magically shaped into the skeleton of the ship and then armor plating it. Something where you internalize or incorporate the float stone itself into the structure of the vessel. I guess the chain g...

Why would you build underneath the brick, as opposed to atop it? Because when the weight of the cargo is underneath the fixed points push to one side or the other is forced against gravity rotationally. But if you put the weight above the fixed points the lateral force pushes it down. Thus regular ...

Why would you build underneath the brick, as opposed to atop it? That would make you top heavy, and more likely to flip over. I thought we had established that these things weren't subject to random flipping? You know, in case we have all the guys with beards on one side of the boat or something. E...

And yeah, gondolas attached to bricks is pretty much the concept here. -Username17 As opposed to hot air balloons? I mean, I can see why they'd use the floating bricks, what with having the floaty rock and the skymages, but you have to realize that people are going to continually make that connecti...

But if you think that the various religious groups are going without a fight, you're crazy. The Mormons and Catholics and Muslims will never accept a future where our children are "soulless abominations." And they will keep having human babies, and they will train them up as suicide bombe...

Why not go with the hollow world being an actual Dyson sphere left over from a super-advanced civilization? The sun is roughly 93 million miles away from the surface, most of it is empty space vacuum, and there's some other planetary bodies floating around in there. Well, probably not, as they were ...

My original thought was for the low end to be about a 1m, 6 tonne cube. This would allow for people to make Terra style flying by standing on a flying rock rocks, but not Magneto-style "I fill my suit with flying sand and fly" suits. That being said, I do like the idea of a flying surfboa...

For what it's worth, I think that Elennsar's take on morality (you can make moral behavior the scoring mechanism, not an instrumental tool) and his intention of end the campaign in death are both fine, and I might play a game on that basis. I might be able to get behind some sort of scoring mechani...

I dig the stone surfboard idea. That sounds cool.

By the way, its something like this: To fear God and maintain His Church To serve the liege lord in valour and faith To protect the weak and defenceless To give succour to widows and orphans To refrain from the wanton giving of offence To live by honour and for glory To despise pecuniary reward To ...

Well, good luck with that. I'm out. I have no interest in a game that's going to preach at me.

Its also an attitude that's generally mocked as being pointless -and- profitless, as opposed to hard but meaningful if you succeed and well, if you fail, you were going to die anyway. If you want something where it will mean something, just not something that makes you better off, then join the clu...

Why is it a problem if a game matches those beliefs? Having the result for a good life, with all the sacrifices thereof, be worth it is fine...but a large part of that should be "you feel you did the right thing and that was the right thing to do", not that after sixty years of weary drud...

Elennsar wrote:http://civilwartalk.com/

A site that manages to be both civil and informative in discussing the American Civil War.

FrankTrollman wrote:Next person who tells me slavery wasn't the cause of the civil war gets the Declaration of Causes of Secession shoved right up their ass.

-Username17

Am I to understand that you are proposing that you support the child in this analogy that will live forever? In this analogy I would be supporting the child that would live forever. Apparently in this analogy you would be supporting the child that looked more like you. -Username17 I'd actually supp...

We are under no moral compulsion to let our created children get to that point if doing so would harm our biological ones. There are a finite number of resources. If we have a second child who comes to adulthood, they will take resources from our first child. Are you saying that we don't have a mor...

My definition is limited to a more direct progression, coupled with an idea that our ultimate future selves is something that we can collectively become and not merely witness the creation of. So... you think that you have a moral imperative to kill other peoples' children in order to keep them fro...

Skynet exists in a universe with closed-loop time travel where all events are predestined, and there are no choices. Therefore moral choices have no bearing on things one way or the other because there are no choices . There is only the appearance of choice, and the capacity of thought. The skynet ...

I don't agree with your assessment, but I see where you're coming from now. edit: I would point out that Skynet made the decision to launch the missles first. It was not humans deciding to beat down the future children, it was the future children deciding to proactively erase the past. Is Skynet sti...

Simplified: Evolution of humanity = awesome. Replacement of humanity by something we create, not become = not awesome. Was that better? That's fucking insane. Those two things are the same thing. We create children out of amino acids contained in the hamburgers eaten by our females, or we create ch...

Frankly, if humanity creates something that can replace us and wants to replace us, it damn well should replace us. And my point is that if we can win that fight before it's begun, we should. Not that we should be luddites with our head in the sand, not that we should be afraid of technology or sci...

If, for some reason, it does have to work that way, then we are justified in refusing to create a race of beings to be our equals or superiors. Wait, what? You are probably the first person I've ever met who claims that they want to fuck people they regard as worse than themselves so that the next ...

How about this, as creators of this mythical future technology, it is our job to make sure the technology does not work in the way you propose, Elennsar. If, for some reason, it does have to work that way, then we are justified in refusing to create a race of beings to be our equals or superiors.