TheDarkness

Where's that confounded bridge?

If I want a lot of monsters of different kinds, I'll usually try to take things subterranean. Maybe have my players trying to get to an ancient dwarven city to find some tome, this way they can end up having to go through kobold territory(and it doesn't matter whether good or evil, kobolds will take joy in lobbing SOMETHING at the players if they are foolish enough to go through their lair), there can be giant blind worms, undead dwarves from the great battle that destroyed that particular dwarf kingdom, ghosts, all sorts of things. That's the nice thing about subterranean tunnels that stretch for miles in all directions, it makes a nice self contained place that explains why all these monsters don't disperse a bit, and a place where all sorts of unsavory NPCs who don't want to be found can be found. Occasional balrogs with faulty understanding of what a bridge can support as well.

Texans are Finnish?

L. Marcus was forced to walk many miles once because he lost one of his coconut halves.

I think it's doable, as long as the GM is not trying to lead the decision making. After a time, the players should know the GM pretty well. They should likewise know that GNPC or PC, the ideas they present might not be best for the group regardless. The assumption that the GNPC will always be railroaded is predicated by the assumption that the GM uses all NPC interactions to railroad. I know more than a few GMs that are not averse to having NPCs give unreliable info and bad ideas. If the GM is actually role playing, the usefulness of a GNPC in railroading is heavily mitigated. The NPCs character traits should railroad the GM more than the players.

Is that near Helsinki?

I've seen pictures of people's bookshelves in the thread about people's hero collections. There's a lot of dogs in great danger!

Not to digress too far, but how I handle it in my game. Zombies are not so much sentient, as dead flesh animated by evil forces. Skeletons are the same, just not worried about head shots. Vampires are like a photograph of a particularly evil person whose moment of death, in addition to being a point in their evil, is shaped by the choice of being bitten and becoming a vampire. No sparkly vampires, no moment of redemption, as they aren't truly beings, just the constant repetition of the sorts of evil that person was in life given supernatural power. The actual person ceased to be at the moment of death, the vampire itself is merely a tribute to that evil, and, as such, vampires can only be made from those willing, and, if the original person is in there at all, they, in gaining all power based on the wish to continue their evil, lose all choice in actions where they are not in keeping with that evil. They are essentially trapped in a centuries long loop of repeating their worst behavior. Same with liches. Other undead are, essentially, different forms of one or the other. Dragons, I tend to not tie motivation to their color. What sort of dragon it is is defined by it and its motivations. Question for ninja-bear: it might be easier to come up with ideas if we had some background to the type of world or story you are working with.

Here in China, you can get Durian pizza, aka stinky fruit. Love the stuff.

Alwin13 wasn't expecting that.

In agreement with Lawnmower Boy, there seems to be this idea that the 'upper end' of skills is where the problems will lie for automation. I tend to disagree. The entirety of all modern legal systems in the world are much easier to put in a computer than to emulate a more competent Lucy pulling chocolates from a production line. Ad hoc solutions abound in the manufacturing world, if this line is not working properly, that does not mean the best production choice is to stop that line, there may be no choice but to keep running it and having people separating things by hand and moving them by pallete jack to the area they need to go, and then, once the distribution goals of the day are reached, the line can be repaired. In that process, probably the easiest part to automate would be defining the distribution goals. Probably the hardest would be the robot that has to now take things off of the line that are actually meant for other lines, find somewhere to put it, send it off and put an empty pallete in its place, stack a series of boxes whose shape and size cannot be predicted ahead of time so that they won't fall off the skid, etc. That's what happens when one scanner goes out, or the system behind that scanner. If the scanner is toast, stopping the line may not be an option, and another scanner may take time to arrive by robotic car, dealing with traffic situations caused by weather. In point of truth, I'm not sure we wouldn't be far better off with robotic lawyers whose cases are presented by actors, and I suspect this would be far simpler than manual labor robots. Don't even get me started on contracting. If the robots have any programming that requires things to be up to code, EVERYONE, EVERYONE would find their house torn down the first time they tried to remodel anything. Which is probably part of the robot overlords' plans. Then, of course, it's to the HEMA camps with all of us. Mining is another area where I could see it being problematic. Really, any manual labor tends to involve an imperfect walking environment, no matter the initial design of said environment, and, let's be clear, computers effectively mastered chess long before they could walk like a toddler on perfectly flat ground, much less tight quarters. The EASIEST tasks for a computer are not those involving physical motion at all. I think we project our own views on what is 'highly skilled jobs' in a way that would make no sense to a theoretical sentient computer.

Thinking about a potential game today, medium sized flying monsters caught my fancy. My main problem was, I couldn't think of many that were monsters versus animals or winged people looking.

Are you fearing he'll be lost in space?

Death tribble's tribble mounted tribble cavalry swept all before them until they encountered a long line of fairly small shrubberies.

Actually, the larger risk is that the point at which unemployment becomes a fairly consistent measure for extreme regime changing civil unrest is much lower in percentage than the numbers we're talking. But, if you grew up on post apocalypse movies, if it does come to pass, just about any fashion choice will soon be in. I actually don't imagine that economics in the future will resemble what it is now. Unless we don't automate all that much more, but that just serves as incentive for another country to automate and outperform. And then, we'll be serving foreign robots, and that's madness! We want our own robot overlords! Remember, cylons eventually had all kinds of models, handsome, pretty, or deadly looking. If we let the brits get the lead, it'll be daleks everywhere, and there's really no hot daleks, though they do have a respectable probe. And that was the moment when it occured to me that there are probably dalek fanfics that I do not ever need to see.

One of the things that gets me riled up is, yes, information is often right there, right there, just grab it(unless it's behind a subscription or something, journals, I'm looking at you), but unfortunately, all the bad information is ten times as prevalant because it's easier and can easily be turned into short-term gain if only enough people click on it, and it's always free to click on it. On the flip side, my experiences here in China have taught me that the more that propaganda is used for, the less that the people who believed it before believe it now. It may still work, but it does not work based on belief in it. Fortunately, our machine overlords will not need our votes.

Is that near Helsinki?

I sort of take the position that, orcs and such, are a bit Tolkeinish in my world, but taken to another level, as in, they aren't a race, they are twisted humans, elves, what have you, when it happened in their lifetime doesn't matter. Ugly weird creature hanging around, no normal motivations because they are something else now. Only the flesh is sort of original. Undead fit the same category. Small dragons can be interesting, depending on the world. You can never have enough evil dwarfs(again, not a race, a group of dwarves who have a reputation for evil and are evil). I find having some evil dwarfs really makes the regular dwarfs that much better. I mean, they're stronghold is going to be really tough, they are armored and armed to the gills, tireless, and probably encountered in the mountains unless a group is moving out to find some desired treasure. Even groups of dwarfs who are merely difficult to get along with make things more interesting when you have to deal with them. The nice thing about eschewing evil races is it gives the opportunity to have a member of the bad group who is good, and may even desire to help the characters. That said, YMMV. Huge snakes, huge wolves. I think one thing that many games get wrong is they end up making animals like huge wolves easy fights, giant snakes a walk in the part. One area may be quite wild and known for fearsome wolves. This could be a time for a ranger to shine, as they might be able to form a bond with the pack. Werewolves. Don't go out on the moors at night!

Ethics itself, as far as codified ethics, is itself a technology that became more able to deal with nuance over time, as far as it has been conveyed in different societies. Of course, we could argue that in the West, we are two millenium away from times when there were actually people who attempted to live by a codified ethical system, and in both the West and the East, such systems became loaded down with political and cultural baggage that tended to reduce their effectiveness. Further, the ability of societies to project the ethical conundrums of new technologies into the future has often been the impetus and/or justification for a number of heinous things. The science of genetics, applied to making life better, turned monstrous very quickly not because of the technology, but because of the flawed ethical judgments on defining what would be best for mankind. When ethics has not, in large part, experienced the same development, in a purely practical sense(as ethics, not as a way to hold together societies, or underpinning for other movements, solely as practical ethics), as other technologies, it will always lag. Unfortunately, ethics as a topic(but not as a practice) has uses for politicians, people who love their authority at any level(whether parent or teacher or leader or boss makes little difference), and so it gets subverted and loaded with things that are not themselves related, and becomes something one displays oneself on shorthand versus actually practicing with an emphasis on all the meanings of the word practice. Regardless, it's probably unwise to be the second person in a sometimes unfriendly neighborhood to figure out how to make tempered steel.

They're always hiring at the soylent green plant.

Pariah once attempted to throw a famous musical star in order to coin the phrase 'Pariah Carry' for his new throwing technique, but his susceptibility to high frequency noise forced him to flee before carrying out his plan.

Judging from some of the comments I've noticed lately, I'm wondering if a concentrated effort to encapsulate Hero games(as in adventures and scenarios) on roll20 so that there' more resources there might not be a step in the direction of moving to spread the game.

How did the Legion not have a whipping boy?

If he does so multiple times, would that be serial bowels?

I tend to think in terms of environment, so I try to pick creatures that help flesh out the feel of the place. I'm actually working on ideas for a swamp, and what would really work well, not just from a monster perspective, but, for instance, what animals a ranger might befriend, etc. Likewise, if it's an urban setting, I lean towards things that can exist without drawing attention to themselves. Ghosts, formless demons, shape changers.