Gnaskar

Re: The Sanity Stat Copied directly out of the Campaign Handbook, here are the rules I use for sanity in my sci-fi horror campaign. They have proven to be brutal whenever the players come across a particularly horrible monstrosity, but are otherwise kind enough to only slowly drive characters insane. I use one or two d6 sanity attacks for mildly disturbing events, three to five for "typical" horrors (things that make the players visibly disturbed when I describe them), six to seven on the really bad stuff. Sanity In addition to the common characteristics the campaign uses three new ones. Normality (NOR) uses Ego’s cost structure and represents how well in tune the character is with society. At Normality 0 the character is essentially a sociopath, and not playable. Normality Defense (ND) uses Energy Defense’s cost structure (including resistant and hardened options) and represents the character’s ability to cope with things that are just fundamentally wrong. A high ND character (6-9) is a jaded veteran, while a low ND character (1-3) is timid and/or squeamish. Sanity (SAN) uses Stun’s point structure and protects the character from going insane the same way Stun protects him from going unconscious. [TABLE=width: 615] [TR] [TD]Characteristic[/TD] [TD]Weak[/TD] [TD]Challenged[/TD] [TD]Average[/TD] [TD]Skilled[/TD] [TD]Competent[/TD] [TD]Legendary[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]NOR[/TD] [TD]1-2[/TD] [TD]3-7[/TD] [TD]8-10t[/TD] [TD]11-13[/TD] [TD]14-19[/TD] [TD]20+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Examples[/TD] [TD]Borderline psychopaths[/TD] [TD]Necrahlyte cultist, Most 13 year olds[/TD] [TD]Average person[/TD] [TD]Office Workers[/TD] [TD]Never been outside the habitat[/TD] [TD]Your inquisitorial contact[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]SAN[/TD] [TD]1-5[/TD] [TD]6-15[/TD] [TD]17-25[/TD] [TD]26-35[/TD] [TD]36-50[/TD] [TD]51+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Examples[/TD] [TD]infants, Deadpool[/TD] [TD]Shell Shocked[/TD] [TD]Average person[/TD] [TD]Veteran Cop[/TD] [TD]Elite Soldier[/TD] [TD]Eliezer Yudkowsky[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]ND[/TD] [TD]0-1[/TD] [TD]1-2[/TD] [TD]3-4[/TD] [TD]5-6[/TD] [TD]7-10[/TD] [TD]11+[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Examples[/TD] [TD]infants[/TD] [TD]EEEK! A mouse![/TD] [TD]Average person[/TD] [TD]Trained Cop[/TD] [TD]Combat Veteran[/TD] [TD]Batman[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] Taking a Sanity Hit When something unspeakable jumps out at you, you first roll normality. Each point you succeed by is a dice less of damage and success is another dice automatically removed. To put it another way, succeeding exactly is one less die total and succeeding by 3 is four less die. Whatever damage remains is applied against your Normality Defense, and then your NOR and SAN as like with normal attacks. Going Into Shock A character who suffers more SAN loss than he has NOR remaining (after the attack) is in Shock. When the character goes into Shock the player may chose to have the character flee, fight in a frenzy, or cower. This effect lasts until a successful NOR or EGO roll. Running out of Sanity When the character finds himself at negative SAN he becomes a gibbering wreck. Whether he curls up into a ball, hides in a corner, or starts unloading his gun at the nearest horror while screaming incoherently is up to the player and the situation, but in any case the character isn't going to be very coherent for a while. He then has the make EGO rolls to do anything other than flee, fight in a frenzy, or cower, and to change between these three responses, until his SAN is returned to positive. A successful PS: Councilor roll (with a penalty of -1 for every two points beneath 0 the character's SAN is) taking one minute can get him coherent again. He can still not be called normal by any stretch of the term, but can at least follow instructions and be convinced to have emergency therapy. His SAN is then reset to 0. After recovering to positive SAN, the character must make a NOR roll with a bonus as though assisted by the PS: Councilor roll that helped him recover to avoid permanent harm from the experience. Failing gives him a new Complication related to what drove him over the edge, or worsens an existing one by 5 points. Regaining SAN/NOR Lost Sanity and Normality can be regained with careful counseling and down time. A successful PS: Councilor roll made within a day of receiving SAN loss recovers 1d6 + degrees of success SAN points (up to the total lost within the last 24 hours). Success also cures 1 NOR damage. This represents grief counseling, venting, or other psychological treatments, and takes an hour (only one attempt may be made per person in a given 24 hour period). Through organized group therapy, a Councilor can help up to five people recover at once this way. Note: providing therapy deals 1 SAN point of damage to the Councilor whether successful or not. This is why every psychologist schedules regular trips to another psychologist. After the initial shock has died down and the horror has been imbedded in the person’s soul, it is a lot harder to recover. Each week of successful therapy (requiring a PS: Councilor roll for the therapist and a NOR roll for the subject) heals 1d6 SAN and the normal BODY damage as NOR.

Re: More space news!

Re: More space news!

Re: More space news! This is why I prefer an old stand by: Artificial gravity. Set up a rotation crew capsule and you can easily have Martian gravity, or earth gravity with a bit of effort. As for moving things, it's generally easier to move things around when you don't have to compensate for other forces like friction gravity (at least when dealing with solids and gasses. Liquids are different, but that's why we have artificial gravity).

Re: More space news!

Re: More space news! The sample return missions, not so much. Thermal, visual and radio scanning from lunar orbit, on the other hand, provides a fairly good idea. Mind you, we won't know for sure until GRAIL finishes it's mission in May. The moon has a 1.6 km/s gravity well to overcome, while few asteroids have more than 50 m/s gravity wells (meaning near-Earth asteroids are "closer" by the usual space standards, allowing the same launcher to move about 80% more payload to a NEA). And you can use a far cheaper railgun (and lighter) to move the resources back to earth. By the way, these aren't some small temporary mining sites we're talking about. A single small asteroid weighs on the order of a trillion tons. For comparison: Earth's total iron use in 2004 was about a billion tons.

Re: More space news! The ISS model would be a satisfactory start. So permanent or semi-permanent infrastructure with rotating (but constant) crew. A constantly crewed colony does of course open the theoretic possibility of someone choosing not to return.

Re: More space news! Of course, by '85 (when the early plans for ISS were proposed), each and every one of those points had gone out the window. The lower payload recurring costs were for the fully reusable "B" shuttle, which was never developed (Funding for it was cut). The idea of widening the fairing past the radius of the rocket meant that rockets could launch near arbitrary volumes. The era of 25 ton satellites was long gone. And the shuttle never did manage to launch the required USAF payloads to polar orbit. Neither did it ever live up to the '60s specifications. So, by this the plan should be: step one: Build orbital research facility. step two: Master living in space. step three: Master orbital refueling. step four: colonize lunar poles. so my question is this: Where is step three? For that matter, rather than complaining about the effects of zero gee on the human body, why aren't we testing artificial gravity by rotation? NASA has spent the last forty years listing the technology they would need for the next great mission when explaining why we haven't done it yet, and doing everything in their power to block projects that aim to acquire those technologies. And that, to bring the whole thing back to the beginning, is why China is going to leave you in the dust.

Re: More space news! One word: Skylab. A space station launched by a Saturn V. Or more. Under the assumption that orbital assembly is difficult, and it is, one would think it would be cheaper to produce two berthing ports rather than THIRTY. NASA would have saved at least 50 billion.

Re: More space news! The ISS has to date cost tax payers about 150 billion. Mir, built using many of the same technologies, but using a heavy disposable booster rather than a space shuttle, cost 4.7 billion. The cost of a Saturn V launch (in modern currency), is 1.1 billion dollars. The cost of a shuttle launch is 1.5 billion. The Saturn V has seven times the payload capacity. It took 27 shuttle missions to put ISS together; about a third of the final cost of the station. And that's before we start with the fact that orbital assembly is extremely difficult and thus expensive, so the rational thing to do is to do it as little as possible. The ISS is made of 16 pressurized modules, each weighing less than 20 tons (because that's all the shuttle could carry). Had the mission been designed for a Saturn V launch, it would have taken two launches to provide the equivalent living space (one orbital mating of pressurized modules*) and a third to bring up the solar panels and other utility modules. Factor in maybe five to ten shuttle launches for EVAs related to initial assembly (unless you really want to be efficient, and use a pair of Soyuz's for the same task, at a tenth of the cost). Even if we assume no reduction of cost for reducing the number of connections from 15 to 1 (unlikely to the extreme) we've still saved 30 billion dollars (not counting what could have been saved by not using the shuttle for resupply missions [lets launch 120 tons into orbit to move 5 tons of cargo to our destination]) . * Typical counter argument one: They wanted to practice orbital mating. But if that was the objective, why not then launch two 10 ton modules (where half of the weight is fuel) and repeatedly put them together and take them apart, rather than making what is largely a zero gee lab hugely more complex, and far less stable? The problem with NASA is seen in the number of ex-NASA employees that have stories of good ideas being ignored because the efficient solution doesn't provide jobs to the people who voted for senators A through X, or contracts for the corporations that paid for their elections. Robert C. Truax (Sea Dragon, and the lighter variants), Robert Zubrin (Mars Direct), and Michael D. Griffin (who made the above arguments while serving as the Administrator of NASA). I know it is expensive. 100 billion is a massive amount of money. It's just a lot less than 150 billion.

Re: More space news! Then why has NASA systematically cancelled all proposed ISS orbital refueling experiments? The only refueling experiment ever done was in 2009 by the US Air Force, and that was geared towards figuring out how propellant acts in zero gee to build more efficient propellant tanks rather than refueling. And why has NASA systematically cancelled all proposed artificial gravity experiments? The negative effects of zero gee is one of the known problems with living in space, yet the last experiment in preventing it predates Apollo. NASA didn't choose the ISS route because it was the best choice for humanity, they chose it because they hoped it would bankrupt the soviets, tie up their scientific resources and give the already obsolete shuttle program something to do. If the goal had been to build an international space station they would have done it in three Saturn V launches at a tenth of the cost.

Re: Your evil army Kale, Necromancer and would-be god: Demand that every soldier in the army go out and acquire a suit of black full plate, a good weapon, and a black onyx gem worth at least 500 gold pieces. Holds weekly sacrifices of the ones who return successful, and reanimates them as skeletons (with their old souls or equivalent stored in their skulls). With a force that large, and with his magical talent, he could rule the world. Captain Citadel: Would turn them over to the US military, who he trusts absolutely.

Re: More space news! SpaceX finally gets permission to dock with ISS, despite Russian complaints delaying the mission by two months (again). Insistently and in no way related to this, Russia currently has a monopoly on bringing stuff to the ISS for about 6 times the price SpaceX is offering. Meanwhile, Russia also has the world's only know stockpile of Pu-238, a vital component in all deep space power and heating systems. NASA is welcome to it as far as Roscosmos is concerned, for the appropriate price. Remember how international cooperation between the USA and USSR in space was a sneaky plan the bankrupt the Russians? Good luck with that.* * Yes, I know, it worked 20 years ago. That also cost us (humanity) the third most awesome rocket of all time (and the most awesome that was actually launched), but that's a rant for another day.

Re: Possible HERO System Supplement Kickstarters From Steve -- What Interests You? At the most basic level, I'd be willing to pay 25$ for any hero system supplement unless it gets published at a time I'm completely strapped for cash. I'm one of them completists, I guess. As for the specific examples: Mythic Hero: 25$ I know a bit of trivia about the gods I tend to use in games, and I mostly ignore the prospect all together. It's mostly something I'd buy for the same reason I pick up GURPS books; The fact that its a detailed information source already looking at the gaming angle. Cyber Hero: 50$-100$ I've always wanted to run this kind of setting, but never had the time to put together my own. Dark Champions: 50$-100$ Again, one of the things I've always wanted to run, and in fact have run a couple of sessions of. An updated chapter on crime and terrorism, and how to use them efficiently in game, would be very worth while even if the gun stats and package deals don't change that much. STORMlords: 50$-100$ That sounds awesome. I was sold at "magic from dresden files". And the rest just makes it sound even more cool.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... We've started up a semi-regular Eclipse Phase campaign, and though we've been through two sessions, I still don't know the character's names. So they're generally referred to by party role. We're all secretly working for Firewall* while having infiltrated an intelligence organization in the corporate controlled inner system. * An agency basically fully consistent of player characters [that is, a startling collection of outcasts and misfits], dedicated to saving the transhuman race from [often self-inflicted] extinction. We're the guys who chase down rogue WMDs, eliminate the super-intelligent AIs that have a habit of going Skynet, prevent wars, etc. Faceman (FM): A triple agent, having originally infiltrated the intelligence organization for the Titan Commonwealth, a cyber democracy modeled after Scandinavia before being recruited by Firewall. Me. Combat Monster (CM): An American soldier who was sold into slavery for the corporations following the apocalypse that nearly destroyed humanity ten years ago. Spent years as a miner on the martian surface, before escaping with the help of Firewall. Psycher (P): grew up over the course of 3 years in a corporate Virtual Reality simulation. Like everyone else in that experiment, he went insane, and likely murdered several people as they were accidentally given psykic powers and escaped. Worked as a crime scene "investigator" for various criminals before being recruited. Tech-Priest (TP): An engineer loosely based on the warhammer 40k tech-priests. Specializes in hacking and creeping people out (due, for example, to spending most of a day caked with blood without noticing or the hundreds of robotic spiders that crawl around on him). Does not consider himself human, and generally blames humanity for most things. You may have noticed that none of us actually like the corporations we're working for, and that said corporations would likely want most of us captured or killed if they found out who we are. Hilarity ensues. Finishing up the character sheets: CM: What is T-ray vision? GM: Allows you to see through walls, clothing, cover, etc. CM: So, pervo vision then. TP: Awesome, I also have tentacles. Doctor bot: You look like you're bleeding furiously. Do you want help with that? ... CM: I cast perception. ... CM: Aren't orbital colonies kinetic kill weapons? ... CM: We're physicists, not languageists. ... FM: I have the horrifying feeling that nothing can possibly go wrong. Three personalities in one body: CM: I have these … guy helping me.

Re: Unwilling Bank Robber Captain Citadel is a fully equiped CIA listening post, so has no problem tracking down the responsible parties. He's also naive enough to believe the man and a demolitions expert to boot. He's been working on a holographic projector, so may be able to use that to fake the victim's return to the bad guys. If it works correctly, this time.

Re: What FTL Drives do people use in their campaigns? And what techno bable do you us The Shepherd Effect Drive was invented in 2523 by The Shepherd. The first successful faster than light flight was made only two years later, and the first intersystem jump was made three years after that. Most history books refer to what followed as the Golden Age of Humanity. But what history books don’t record is what happened half a century later. In 2579, a private freighter ship disappeared on its way to Sirius, and was assumed to have had suffered a fatal malfunction. It reappeared in the Sol system three weeks later and docked with an orbital habitat. Official records claim what happened next was the result of a containment failure in the habitat’s anti-matter reactor, and dismisses the contents of the broadcasts made prior to the explosion as hallucinations brought on by the poisonous fumes of the failing containment system. It was around that time that The Shepherd discovered that hyperspace wasn’t the empty featureless plain he had thought. Hyperspace, it turned out, was as close as one could get to the traditional depictions of hell, and the “demonic” entities that resided there were all too happy to be given a way out. The Shepherd shut down all other processes and devoted its full attention to this new discovery for a whole week . It concluded that going public with this information would completely ruin the human race, which had already grown dependent on intersystem trade. Instead, it funded a clandestine organization dedicated to keeping the forces of the void at bay. The Shepherd’s Inquisition, as the organization became known, exists to this day, though in a slightly modified form. While they were originally focused purely on hunting void entities and preventing void intrusions, contacts tended to call on Inquisitors whenever anything strange happened. Veteran Inquisitors were thus, through simple experience, generally the best men for the job whenever something odd occurred, leading them to being called to handle it more often. Bowing to the inevitable, The Shepherd expanded the organization’s brief to cover other unusual occurrences. Shepherd Effect Drive The Shepherd Effect Drive consists of a Faraday cage surrounding the vessel and the Drive itself. The Drive sends a pulse of magnetic energy through the Faraday cage in a pattern carefully designed to generate a magneto-gravitonic field. This creates a singularity, a hole in the local space-time, which sucks the ship in. Once in the Void, the Shepherd Effect continues sending low frequency pulses through the Faraday cage. This has the double side-effect of creating the distinctive black emptiness associated with the Void and protecting the ship from the Entities that dwell in it by creating a near impenetrable barrier. It’s also how the ship can move in the Void, using the magneto-gravitonic (aka Shepherd Effect) field to push the ship along at insane speeds. The Shepherd Effect Drive emits a low frequency hum best described as a thump when in use. In ships that don’t dim the lights while in the Void (a common tradition), it also causes the lights to pulsate in time with the thumps. Most experienced spacers are as used to this sound as they are the life-support sounds, and thus tend to ignore it (until it isn’t there). Some people experience nausea while in the Void, which modern science attributes to reactions to the EM radiation. Even so, The Shepherd is known to keep a close eye on these kinds of people wherever they’re discovered. Nausea during the transition is more common, and is probably because of the rapidly shifting gravitational fields involved and other side-effects of entering a singularity. The Drive In Game Terms Shepherd Effect Drive: Faster-Than-Light Travel (1 Light Years/day), Instant Lightspeed (38 Active Points); Increased Endurance Cost (x5 END; -2), OAF Bulky (Faraday Cage; -1 1/2), Side Effects (Void Phenomenon; -1), Costs Endurance (-1/2), Requires A Roll (17- roll; -1/4). 6 Points. The Required Roll can vary depending on how well maintained the Drive is, damage to the Faraday cage, environmental factors, etc. An ill-maintained, damaged pirate ship might be as low as a 12- in some cases. Failing the roll by one or two leads to relatively tame Phenomenon occurring; more strange than actually dangerous. Lights flickering on and off, power surges, sudden winds in places there shouldn't be, food rotting away over night, etc. Failing by three or more, on the other hand, can lead to anything from a demon manifesting on the bridge to the ship (and everyone on board) being torn inside out. If you're “lucky” you get a sneaky, malicious demon intent on drawing things out by killing of the crew one by one in ever stranger accidents rather than an unstoppable combat monster intent on wholesale slaughter.

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN) Technically, it have been. Time dilation effects have been observed, light bending around black holes has been observed (that's actually the most common way of finding black holes), length dilation has been observed. Einstein's Relativity and Newton's mechanics have both been proven experimentally (in fact, most high schoolers do experiments that prove parts of Newtonian Physics). The problem is when we can apply them. Newton's laws fail when relativistic effects are involved. Relativity may fall apart at the quantum scale. We don't know (Einstein spent most of his life trying to find out). String theory and quantum mechanics isn't actually a theory in the same way as Newton's laws and Relativity are. Newton's laws and Relativity describe why things act as they do in addition to what they'll do in a given situation. Quantum sciences have only managed to explain what particles do, without looking at why. String theory is an attempt at explaining why, but thus far is untestable, and hence useless as a scientific theory.

Re: The Last Word That's wizards of the coast for you.

Re: Cybernetics and Bioengineering: what are YOUR limits?

Re: Transplanted Immortality Also used in "Pandora's Star" by Peter F. Hamilton. I'd go for it (in about 50 years). I am my memories and beliefs, so if they're in a body, so am I.

Re: Cybernetics and Bioengineering: what are YOUR limits? Belief in the undead does make someone a fanatic. Ok, I have no clue how I managed to make that typo. The paragraph was supposed to read: Belief in the undead doesn't make someone a fanatic. Murdering someone for being what they are does. Whether that “what” is a religious affiliation, sexual orientation, political view, or undeathness is immaterial. Something like that actually. We’ve already figured out how to activate that part of a rat brain with a chip; it isn’t too far of a stretch that this kind of input could be linked to sensors in the relevant regions. As for the other participant’s pleasure, suffice to say the technology exists. It may benefit from some refining, but it exists.

Re: Cybernetics and Bioengineering: what are YOUR limits?

Re: Cybernetics and Bioengineering: what are YOUR limits?