The Gaming Den

Normally I just enjoy reading this thread, but Juton, this is totally crazy. Video games were totally something that nerds did. Not that long ago. Like, when I was a kid. They now have basically 100% market penetration, but that's because Sony and Microsoft went after the jocks and at the same time...

I wonder how big the market for rules light games really is. If you want to grow the pie higher you start with rules-light. People just don't have the attention span and/or riskiness with their money to give something a try. When you get them hooked is when you start pimping out expansions. The pre...

Huh, that's cute. Don't think I've seen that before. solution: Then it's two circles, you have heights varying from sqrt(1-x^2) to (1 - sqrt(1-x^2)) so you integrate \int_0^{sqrt{2}/2} 2 sqrt{1-x^2} - 1 and at this point we decide that doing it i...

Frank--no, I do. DSM sort of pointed towards this, but I often write "a/bc" when I mean "a/(bc)", at least for private notes. The physicist I was talking to was saying she'd be uncomfortable writing "a/bc" ever under any circumstances because it's so ambiguous. Just lik...

We don't believe it because as far as I know, I have never in my life met a working mathematician, scientist, or engineer who cares about any of this stuff, actually uses it, or would rely on it to clarify ambiguous notation. I don't think I've met anyone who would consistently interpret "a/bc&...

You know, if I were smart I'd just ignore Doom because he's proven himself crazy. But I did want to jump in and suggest that his dogged use of "arabic notation" is extremely odd. Wikipedia says there is something called arabic notation but it's the notation that people use when they're wri...

Doom wrote:Jada, damn, that's hysterical, but I don't think anyone will fall for it.

Fall for what? That's how I and basically every mathematician I work with handles things.

Good lord, you people are going to make me actually post on this unbelievably idiotic topic. Is there anyone other than Frank who isn't trolling? Doom, I feel sorry for your math students. Really. This is the kind of fetishistic obsession with arbitrary trivia that gives us a bad name. As an actual ...

Fectin: and that meets Frank's requirement that the legwork minigame can push the failure thresholds up (or down). When you define the facility, you write down a series of fault thresholds and what happens if you hit that many faults--and most of these things add in more tests that your team of lanc...

Okay, let's start with a laundry list of mechanics that need to be well-fleshed-out (like, better fleshed out than in Shadowrun IV.) Sure. [*] The heroes will try to break into one or more places, by cover of night, without being caught and/or without anyone knowing they were there. We're doing goo...

This remind anyone else of some of the stuff Frank did for the SAME system? You know, where mental water damage made you suggestible, mental fire damage made you panicked, and so on?

DrPraetor: Yeah, I wasn't suggesting that we actually ditch fault dice. The existence of two types of dice allows you to construct more interesting and subtle modifiers to your tests, and do other cool things like the "thin ice" mechanic. But it is kind of nice that for the basic test you ...

And if you wanted a love potion for blacks you'd dump in hot sauce, watermelon rinds, and fried chicken. I never got this line of reasoning. Fried chicken and watermelon is delicious, any white person who can't admit this is a liar. Why do people make fun of black people for loving delicious food? ...

Separate point: would it be better to look for 4-6 on penalty dice as well? I get the thematics, but looking for all instances of 4-6 is easier than looking for 4-6 and red or 1-3 and black (or whatever color your dice are). That would have a certain ease - you count all the 4-6s and then do it aga...

I'd also suggest that you can really look at the whole thing as porn, in the same sense that a Jet Li movie is "fight porn" or a fashion catalogue is "clothes porn" (and I have friends who refer to both that way). Some of it is over-the-top descriptions of sex with no redeeming v...

Stahlseele wrote:

Chamomile wrote:The quote is evidently a direct quote from Colonel Santiago.

Ah, thank you.

I'm pretty sure the quote is actually "Man has killed man," and wikiquote e.g. backs me up, but she speaks with a pretty thick accent so it does sound like "men."

Okay, so it's not that 30% of the population which is _actively pursuing employment_ has employment. It's that 30% of the population, period, has employment? I'd make that more clear. Yeah, I agree. It's worth noting that the "employment rate" is the employment to population ratio, and no...

For what it's worth, the webcomic Schlock Mercenary has a take on easy and instant FTL which allows FTL missiles but doesn't make them dominant. Basically, you can warp stuff around instantaneously whenever you want, but it's also pretty easy to put up a field that blocks warping. So if you're a mil...

It cuts your speed roughly in half and means you can't take any actions, but someone has to do it. You still have the option of putting the bucket down and helping out. It's what I always did. Yeah, ways around it. Still dumb. But I never had to figure them out because in general I don't play multi...

What is a Bucket Bitch? Is it some kind of euphamism for a porter or pack mule or something? The conceit of Crystal Chronicles is that the world is covered by miasma which kills people, and can be held at bay by these crystal things. As an adventurer you carry around a crystal chalice (the "bu...

Frank did say order of cost, not order of degree of enhancement. It's totally plausible that an enhanced bio hand costs more even if it doesn't give as many plusses (I'd assume it gives less stress and is also less detectable).

Endovior and zeruslord: I'm pretty sure I've decided my objection is irrelevant at best. Relativity is weird.

Frank, I'm pretty sure you're quoting me, not Grek. And you're right that the accelerations people can get are totally irrelevant to anything useful--but that's very specifically not what I'm talking about. I'm actually totally ignoring velocity, and assuming the Earth and Mars are stationary with r...

So far as any in-universe experimentation goes, relativity just doesn't seem to apply to things that travel faster then light. Instead, instant FTL signals always just seem to arrive pretty much instantaneously, and without doing anything that would obviously violate causality from a universal time...

Problem: Spells ignoring the speed of light mean that you can use magic to transmit information backwards in time. how? the distance is pretty limited . . In the broader sense, time travel is pretty disappointing. When you travel very fast, time moves more slowly for you. That makes you everyone el...