Agemegos

Re: Massive engineering projects? I suggest that you not walk but run to your library to borrow a copy of Robert L Forward's Indistinguishable from Magic (ISBN 0671876864). Or buy it second-hand through Amazon. This book will tell you all you need to know about beanstalks, rotorvators, magnetically-levitated towers, fountains, pellet streams, antimatter-powered rockets, using antimatter for explosive materials forming, interstellar lightsail vessls, starwisps, and lots of other ambitious concepts that are currently in the realm of hard SF. It also contains some of Forward's fiction: but you have read worse. I can also recommend that you try a bit of Google research on "Stanford torus", "Bernal sphere", and "O'Neill cylinder". There is a bit of an overview at http://www.l5news.org/index.html

Re: Generic Star Hero Galactic Map Suitable I don't know. But this one is informative and interesting. http://members.nova.org/~sol/chview/milkyway.jpg

Re: Generic Star Hero Galactic Map I keep getting the following error: 'Too many redirects occurred trying to open “http://www.anzwers.org/error.htmlâ€. This might occur if you open a page that is redirected to open another page which then is redirected to open the original page.' Can anyone suggest how I might get to the content?

Re: Galactic Coordinates Spherical co-ordinates have three disadvantages compared with polar co-ordinates. 1) They require more trigonometry in distance calculations 2) They make it more difficult to locate a point on a polar projection (such as a view of the galaxy from along its axis) 3) In the case of the galaxy all the points of interest (stars with habitable planets) are confined to the disk (the central bulge consists of closely-packed red giants, and the halo stars are all low-metallicity Population II stars: neither of which types is capable of shepherding a habitable planet, see http://www.solstation.com/stars.htm). That means that phi will always be a small value. I'd recommmend spherical co-ordinates for a more spherical object such as the core or the halo, but the disk is essentially cylindrical, and polar (cylindrical) co-ordinates will work better.

Re: Help with detective/PI skills Concealment Conversation Stealth Shadowing Security Systems Criminology Deduction Streetwise Tracking Lockpicking

Re: Open or hidden dice I roll them in the open. I've found that it keep players on their toes if they believe that I will let them suffer the consequences of their actions. It allows them to to enjoy their successes more, too. There was a phase during which i gave PCs 'script immunity', but I didn't like the results. Players who got themselves into sticky situations, rather than taking advantage of my mercy to get the Hell out, would press on, effectively taking their characters hostage against the the consistency and plausibility of my settings and scenarios. In the end I had to start killing the hostage, and go on killing quite a few hostages, even though it mean scenarios and even campaigns collapsing. It took me a lotng time to re-train them into taking threats seriously, and I wish I had never let them get lax.

Re: high medical tech, physicals & psych exams Mine too. Which is why I think that the point rewards for taking on various disadvantages ought ideally to be adjusted so as to encourage character-players to take diasads that provide prominent, robust, re-useable grommets for the GM's plot hooks, and to discourage character-players from taking disads that make their charcters (for example) uninterested in NPCs, sullen, inert, and trammelled around with annoying inabilities. I once had a player who wanted points for his character being so suspicious that he refused to co-operate with the other PCs. I forbade it of course. He went on to play it without collecting the points. I sacked him. So the problem is not insuperable. Anyway, let's just say that I don't mind at all that GMs customarily give codes of honour more points than they are really worth as limitations, and don't charge for the way they empower a character.

Re: Campaign Brainstorming: "The New Abbey" Umm. I don't guess it is important, but the law of conservation of energy is not one of Newton's. It is the First Law of Thermodynamics, and it was formulated by Julius Robert von Mayer in 1814, which was almost ninety years after Newton died.

Re: high medical tech, physicals & psych exams Well, I have often thought that it was a (minor) problem with the HERO System that its disads system gives points to balance out weaknesses, and not to encourage players to give their characters heroic qualities, defining quirks, and ringlets designed to catch plot hooks. But things stand as they stand: unless my GM tells me about a house rule to some different effect, I feel inhibited from asking for points for a disadvantage that doesn't significantly hamper my character.

Re: high medical tech, physicals & psych exams There is a certain problem with taking a temporary and transient aspect of a character as a disadvantage and collecting points for it. If the campaign is resumed, Jake will soon have accumulated a year or two of experience of living and working on Refuge (the planet where we ended up stationed) and in JD field investigations. Then I will have little choice but to buy off these disads. Now the theory of HERO System is that an 80+45 character ought to be just as capable and fun to play as an 80+50 point character, because the five extra points of disads ought to balance out the five extra points worth of characeristics, skills, and perks. But I find in practice that (1) the power of five more points of abilities is well worth the inconvenience of 5 points worth of disads, and (2) well-chosen disads often make a character more fun, not less. In any case, I rarely want to buy off disads (especially if they are hard to replace), and like to remain up hard against the disad caps.

Re: high medical tech, physicals & psych exams True, but when adventures are your work, anything that frequently significantly hinders you in adventures is going to show up on performance review. If the orders are very unlikely to require that I do anything other than do my best on the adventure, how does that hinder my character? And if it doesn't hinder my character I shouldn't have points. If the superiors and Secret Service watching my character are only looking out for incompetence, goofing off, misfeasance, malfeasance, and corruption that he isn't going to do that isn't a real disadvantage either. Well, the character is already in play, and I'm not sure that either (i) the GM would be happy about my redesigning him at this point or (ii) that the adventure we played the other night is going to continue into a campaign. (Problem one: I live 750 km from the GM and other players. Problem two: an issue I had over a sudden discovery that an autolasercannon was being treated as an area-of-effect attack has turned unintendedly acrimonious.) But just as an exercise: PROBATIONARY AGENT JACOB ARMAN Jake Arman is a recent graduate of the Justice Department Academy, aged 22, and in his probationary year as a field investigation agent with the Imperial Justice Department. He grew up in an orbital facility (therefore in Imperial Direct Jurisdiction), and apart from a few fortnight-long excursions while he was at school, a couple of field trips while he was at teh Academy, and a few holidays on such congenial planets as Gogmagog and Reykjarvik, he has never lived on a planet in his life. Like all people raised in Imperial boarding schools, Jake was raised to be truthful and reliable, and to judge untruthful, unreliable, deceptive people harshly. He won't lie (or will do so badly), will feel compelled to keep his commitments however lightly he made them. Like all people raised in Imperial boarding schools, Jake was raised to abhor mass killing, and to feel it the duty of every person to do their possible to prevent it. This teaching took especially strongly in Jake, and he is a fanatic even by Imperial standards. Jake will condone or do anything necessary to forestall a possible mass murder. Like many Imperials, Jake does not understand why many colonials resent the Empire and dislike its officials. And if he did, he would have precious little sympathy. He tends to despise colonials, who, as he sees it, pursue their own interests instead of doing the decent thing and joining the Imperial Service. However, he has absolutely no problem with people from colonial backgrounds who do join the Service. Although well-trained, Jake is as yet quite inexperienced. He still carries a standard-issue stun-pistol, while most experienced field investigators consider them perfectly useless. As a field investigator with the Imperial Justice Department, Jake has the legal right to wear armour and carry arms in any jurisdiction, to go into any colony or province as his duties require, without hindrance or let, and without requiring a visa or any form of approval. He has the power to arrest on his own authority anyone except the Emperor, an Imperial Senator, the Independent Commissioner For Justice, a deputy commissioner for Justice, if he has a reasonable belief that they have committed an offence under the Imperial Crimes Act (as amended) or any act outlawed by the Treaty of Luna (Imperial Constitution, basically). He has limited powers of search and seizure relating to crime scenes, hot pursuit, and imminent destruction of evidence. He has access to an Assistant Imperial Prosecutor who can get him arrest and search warrants on merely probable cause. However, the use of these powers is subject to various civil liberties protections. To obstruct Jake in the course of his duties is an Imperial offence, punishable by psychological reconstruction (a.k.a. mindwipe). But, since Jake is only on probation, he is only allowed to exerecise these powers under the supervision of a permanent agent, and he is not empowered to delegate any part of his authority to temporary deputies. When at work (and unless there is any special call for mufti) Jake wears a Colonial Office uniform with an Imperial Marshal's badge. But since he is on probation there is no distinction lace in Justice Department red, and rather than having the Justice Department sword-and-scales logo embroidered on his cuff it is merely embossed on gold buttons securing white tabs to his cuffs. He does, however, carry a warrant card identifying his as a Justice Department Officer. Jake is not yet experienced enough to wear armour as a matter of habit, and he carries a standard-issue stun pistol in his belt-holster (and a light, quality DEXAX needle-pistol in a shoulder holster, as a backup). Tath may, however, change dramatically as soon as he is shot, or after the first time he plugs three ineffective stun-shots into an armoured, drugged, or painkiller-equipped perpetrator. Jake is very young-looking: slim, smooth-faced, and boyish. Most people will take him for about sixteen years old, and many will have trouble believing that his is capable, resolute, and vested with authority. Like all Imperial servants whose duties put them in the way of being shot, Jake has a ''military and police" grade "reinforcement" modification (+10 BDY, does not count towards CHAR maxima). This is invisible to external appearances, but would show up on any security screening or medical imaging. Imperial penal theory does not hold with punishing criminals, least of all by imprisonment. There are fines and even non-injuring corporal punishment for misdemeanours and for other offences in which the judge finds an absence of felonious intent. Anyone who commits a felony with felonious intent is treated as psychologically defective, and is cured (by psychological technicians of the Corrections Division of the Imperial Justice Department). This works. But it has problems as a deterrent. Some perpetrators consider that the only problem with getting caught would be losing the gains of their crimes. Others consider psychological reconstruction to be tantamount to death. Either way there is no disincentive to resisting arrest, and the only disincentive to doing so with lethal force, by murder etc. is the danger of being shot dead while resisting. But the policy of the Justice Department is against teaching field investigations agents to carry lethal weapons and shoot to kill: Jake will only have been told about this by surreptitious intimations from experienced field agents on the Academy staff. Jake has an Imperial accent and Imperial manners. A lot of colonials resent the Empire and dislike its officers and nationals, whom they consider to be high-handed, supercilious, domineering, meddling, inflexible, hard-nosed fanatics, who completely disregard everybody's interests and consider only their own duty. Since Jake works in the Justice Department he is subject to the lawful orders of: the Independent Commissioner for Justice, any deputy commisioner for justice, the Assistant Commissioner (field investigations), the Justice Department Chief of Bureau in whose bailiwick he finds himself (ie. the JD chief for the system he is posted to), the lead investigating agent of any case he works on, his field team leader, and (as he is on probation) the most senior JD officer present where-ever he is on duty. Like anyone, he is subject to the court orders of any Imperial judge in whose jurisdiction he finds himself. Of course, this becomes relevant more often for a JD investigator. {Note: Imperial judges are appointed by the government of the colony in which they exercise jurisdiction (or by Parliament if there is no government). Their role is to protect colonial liberties. They are Imperial officials, but not responsible to or loyal to the Empire or its cause. Political appointees, they often act out of political motives.) The Justice Department (in the persons of Jake's superiors and various persons charged with keeping an eye on internal affairs) monitor Jake's conduct and affairs to make sure that he is not corrupt or acting under any form of duress, coeercion, or undue or inappropriate influence. Somewhere in the background is the Secret Service, whose brief is to see that no Imperial Servant commits any act of misfeasance or malfeasance, or acts corruptly or under undue or inappropriate influence, coercion, or duress. The Secret Service is aware that the Justice Department investigates malfeasnace, misfeasnace, and corruption inthe Imperial Service, and that its people thererfore sometimes come into conflict with corrupt, peculating, and rogue Imperial officials. Imperial Service recruiting and promotion processes rely on a science of psychology that is as far ahead of Freud and Jung as the Du Pont Chemical Company is of Dalton. So although Imperial servants are not incorruptible, they are at least very rarely corrupt. Nor incompetent. On the other hand, they That's all i can think of at the moment.

I designed the setting of my usual SF games (Flat Black) to run under an obscure SF/GP RPG called ForeSight. But ForeSight has been out of print since 1986, and it getting to be hard to find players who have access to a copy. Players are understandably less than enthusiastic about playing a game that has 120 pages of rules in 9-point type if they can't study them in spare hours. And I am understandable toey about offering long-term loans of either of my precious copies. A new edition of ForeSight is on the ways, but I am afraid that the designer will be axing some of my favourite rules systems. On of the frequent players in my Flat Black campaigns is a keen Hero System buff. He occasionally runs a Flat Black adventure, and when he does so he naturally uses Hero System. I, too, have tried one campaign under Hero System rules. Also, there is a publisher with half-baked plans to produce a Flat Black comic with a Fuzion tie-in. And another of my old players is a GURPS enthusiast. So what with one thing and another I have occasion to think about running Flat Black adventures under a system in which (unlike ForeSight) it is important that player characters have disadvantages. This raises an important issue because one of the features of the setting is that the best medical technology is very good. Severed or crippled limbs can be replaced using clone-android technology to produce synthetic allografts, and so can malfunctioning organs. Even allergies and addictions can be cured. It is therefore very difficult to justify a character having or long retaining any significant physical limitation. Furthermore, psychiatry is also very well advanced, and developmental psychology has spawned an engineering discipline, which is used in schools, at least on advanced colonies. The result is that many of the more severe (and valuable) psychological limitations are also implausible. Though I must confess that certain pro-social limitations and cultural features can be worth a few points. So consider the case in which a GM is running an adventure or campaign following the work of a field investigating team from the Imperial Justice Department. None of the characters can have any significant physical limitation, because they wouldn't pass their annual medical if they had. And they can't have any sort of debilitating psych lim either, because (a) they wouldn't pass their annual psych exam if they had, and ( if it gave them any sort of trouble they could easily get it fixed. The same applies to Enraged or Beserk. JD people are very mobile. The Empire only posts about one per twenty million population to any planet, so a series of investigations will take a team of four all over a territory that is the social size of a large country. Even if the character's friends and loved ones are not safely ensconced in a high-security Imperial Enclave or safely at school in an orbital habitat, it is hard to rationalise their getting involved in adventures with any sort of frequency. Reputations are pretty tricky, too, except for the general reputation "high-handed, inflexible, holier-than-thou, supercilious, meddling S.O.B" that goes with being an Imperial Officer. This brings us on to disads that go with the job, such as 'subject to orders', 'monitored by superiors', and 'monitored by the Secret Service'. I have trouble seeing it as a character disadvantage worth points that he or she has a characteristic that necessarily goes with being a character in the given campaign. If you are going to claim points for those, I reckon you ought to pay points for having sweeping powers of arrest, for it being a crime to hinder you in the execution of your duty, for having the right to go armed and armoured in any jurisdiction without let or hindrance (eg. from customs and immigration officials), for having the power to deputise temporary deputies, for being able to call for backup when needed. Best, in my opinion, to treat it all as an implicit package deal. Besides which it is far from clear that the PCs are going to come out ahead. If you are fortunate enough that that the GM sets his campaign on a planet where the colony has discrimination as a social feature you can play a member of the discriminated-against race, class, or sex. But discrimination isn't worth a lot of points if you can arrest anyone who hinders you in your duties and get them mindwiped^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrehabilitated. Tony had us generate characters on 75 based points with up to fifty points of disadvantages. No mention was made (fortunately) of a limit on the number of points that could come from any one category of disads. And Tony allowed 'subject to orders', which I think was generous, considering that the only orders we were likely to get amounted to 'go on the adventure and do the best you can'. And I think we all took psych lims representing our dedication to the Imperial cause, justice &c. the result is that I think that 40 of the 50 points my character scored for disadvantages were not really legitimate. But what do you do in such a situation? Get people to build 110-point characters with 15 points of disads?

Re: Tanker Truck explosion suggestions When I was at school I put up the strongest resistance to doing any sort of drills in arithmetic, as a result of which I came out of high school and even my first years of Uni needing a calculator for double-digit arithmetic. Then I gave up D&D for more arithmetic-intensive RPGs such as Champions, James Bond 007, and ForeSight. Now I can add up the bill in a restaurant in my head, reading it upside-down, before the cashier can ring it up on the till. Never let anyone tell you that playing these games spoils your education.

Re: Name My Evil Alter Ego Dr Maxwell's Demon? Demon Maxwell? Professor Carnot? Dr Enthalpy?

Re: Campaign Speculation: please read, comment Fair enough. I don't see that it is necessarily true that one can't program a whole personality. But it might just happen to be true, at least at a particular stage of technological development. So if you want it to work out that way I don't see any problem with that as s technological assumption. I'd still expect a command economy directed by a psychotic robot to produce a miserable and improverished economic slagheap rather than a burgeoning economic miracle of material utopia. But what the Hell? You've got bug-bodied aliens invading a terraformed Mars: a little thing like ten insane AIs that are idiot-savant economic micromanagers isn't going to cost you anything that you haven't already paid. I can't tell, because you haven't yet developed any of the sort of stuff that I am interested in: social institutions, customs, aspirations. I will say that I have always found it rather tricky to handle markedly unfamiliar cultures in times of strain and rapid change. Players have a hard enough time with alien cultures while they are static, or with changing cultures that are familiar. I would be afraid that players would find it difficult to learn and keep hold of their characters' motivations in a culture that was both alien and under strain. I have to ask what some of the features are for. Why bother to have an inhabited Earth if nothing goes in and nothing comes out. It might as well be a cinder or a cesspool unless you are going to use it for something. Every feature you put into a setting costs you. It costs you skull-sweat in working out its connections to everything else. It costs you exposition that has to be written and read. It costs you in raising the height of the learning curve that the players have to climb. It costs you credulity on the part of the players (they have only so much credulity to spread around on elaborate premises: use it all up and they start asking 'now why should that work out exactly right for that?'). I don't in general say "Keep it simple, stupid": complexity is fine so long as you are getting bang for your buck. So far here it seems to me that you are spending all your bucks on keeping Earth and Mars separate, and nothing on making either of them interesting. Why not forget Mars and move your setting to an STL colony in Epsilon Eridani? Then lightspeed delay (which comes free) will keep you cultures separate without your having to dick around with a sky ceiling (which costs you exposition and player credulity). Why not make your communist AIs sane but inadequate, rather than preternaturally competent in one way and so badly flawed in another that it is incredible that anyone should ever put them in charge of so much as a cloakroom? You may have good answers, but I haven't seen them yet. General note: an interesting idea to think about does not necessarily result in an interesting setting to play RPGs in.

Re: Campaign Speculation: please read, comment Paranoid as in "afflicted with a psychosis characterised by systematic delusions (as of grandeur or persecution) but usually without hallucinations"? Or "a bit suspicious and grandiose"? If the people who programmed these AIs were clever enough to program artificial intelligence, and clever enough to solve the Economic Problem (and without using price incentives ), who could they be so inept as to write delusional AIs? Indeed, how can the AIs optimise allocations if they are delusional?

Re: Campaign Speculation: please read, comment Why not? This socialist utopia can motivate workers without using incentives and pull off at least five other economic miracles that I can think of, but it can't cope with migration or trade? Why not?

One of the things that really impressed me about Justice, Inc. was the neat and effective rules that gave sizes to smallarms and to the places that characters typically carry them, with rules about how well-concealed a weapon was in a carry. I thought that those rules worked very well in Heroic-scale campaigns, gave characters a reason to carry small-calibre weapons, and supported, for instance, James Bond's preference for a Beretta .25 (and, later, a Walther PPK). I was disappointed when those rules were not continued in Hero System, and all pistols were made equally concealable. Is there any hope of their coming back in a later edition?

Re: Classes in Star Hero I've run and played a lot of SF games, though admittedly not all of them have been under Hero System. Apart from roles that are specific to particular settings, such as 'Jedi', "lensman', 'psionic' and the like, I find that the following types tend to emerge: 1. Clunk. A combat character who specialises in shooting people with civilian smallarms. Often has good stealth skills. 2. Driver. A specialist in driving and piloting. 3. Technician. A specialist in fixing thinks that have suffered combat damage, in hacking security systems, etc. Medical and paramedical skills are often included. 4. Second-storey man. A specialist in breaking in to places, with skills usually at climbing, lockpicking, security systems, systems operation, and computer hacking. 5. Hacker. 6. Face-man and Face-woman. Specialists at social interactions: Conversation, Disguise, Seduction etc. Surprisingly often these turn out to be lawyers. In my experience 'scientist' is usually more of a special effect than an adventure specialisation.

Re: How do you get players to role play in genre? How familiar are your players with the comic-book superheroes genre? When GMs ask for advice about weaning players off hank-and-slash I usually advise as follows: Start a new campaign. Pick a genre that the players are familiar with from literature and drama (so that they know the genre conventions pretty well) but that they aren't used to role-playing in. Encourage the players to generate characters that conform to genre conventions. It doesn't matter if they are cliché. Particularly, I like to ask players to start out with a character concept that can be summed up with one nounqualified by one adjective, and tell them that (aside from some physical characteristics and game mechanics) is all that I will write down in my notes, and therefore all that I will take into account when GMing. Run a series of adventures with strong support for PCs to engage in the kinds of non-combat activity that is conventional in the genre. Play up to the PCs, so that the events of the adventures, reactions of the NPCs etc. depend on, emphasise, and reinforce the players' choice and portrayal of their characters' qualities. Then, once you have shown players the rewards of non-combat-centred RPGs, you can start another new campaign and switch to the genre you wanted in the first place. The idea is that this approach disengages player's assumption that RPGs are necessarily like what they are used to, gives them a clear framework within which to engage in non-combat activities, and then rewards their first fumbling successes, not with an arbitrary reward of experience points, but with cognitive assonance and a big dose of the pleasure that character-focussed RP brings. Now, as you might guess it is usually people who have become jaded with dungeon-crawling fantasy games, and whose players refuse to 'play right' in more literary fantasy, to whom I have occasion to give this advice. And then I usually suggest the detective/mystery genre and the comic-book superhero gnre as offering genre conventions for extensive non-combat adventure activity and a world setting that is detailed and familiar enough that the players can think of lots of non-combat things to do. But you have already tried comic-book superheroes, and it doesn't seem to be working. Perhaps you might like to try a limited campaign in some other genre that is even more familiar, or has even clearer non-combat opportunities. Had you thought of an eight-week season of "CSI" adventures? How about a Western miniseries? Or a film noir detective agency campaign inspired by "The Maltese Falcon" etc. What genre do your charcter-players like that has lots of non-combat stuff supported by its conventions?

Re: Exceptional Starship Crews Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevski was a Russian mathematician (1792-1856) who (with Janos Bolyai) laid the foundations of non-Euclidean geometry, and was rector of the University of Kazan. Already famous as a mathematician, he was promoted to 'sort of famous' by the song "Lobachevsky", which is about academic plagiarism, and was written and performed by Tom Lehrer. The song doesn't have anything to do with Lobachevski, except for using his name. As far as I am aware there is no contention that Lobachevski was a plagiarist.