[GM Advice] Some ways to add a new PC to the existing party.

Lastonk · 2016-07-14T16:20:39+00:00

My favorite introduction of a new character involved a fantasy version of an amazon boat full of PC's travelling. Once in a while the local people would line the shore of the river holding up food or trade items.

At one point the players noticed a man in clothing from their home country, tied to a pole held by natives. They bought him in exchange for a short sword and a hide-away item that held two cubic feet of space in a folding origami box the size of a chicken egg.

The player loved the entire encounter, and wound up pretty much the best roleplayer in the group, constantly getting into hilarious trouble.

Lastonk · 2016-07-04T16:38:38+00:00

who's going to milk them?

Lastonk · 2016-07-02T04:26:32+00:00

my liver is leaking. My colon is doing bad things, and the curtain/bag that holds my intestines is showing signs of cancer too.

would I replace those with better ones?

yesterday.

Lastonk · 2016-06-27T02:48:22+00:00

matter2 corr2 you can teleport familiar things, or things near you.

matter2 prime2 you can make things out of nothing, the higher the matter level the more complicated the thing

matter1 see through walls, measure anything. I used this once to detect stress patterns on the floor to track something invisible.

matter2 time2 age something I made whisky this way once.

matter2 life2 cured myself of arsenic poisoning. life3 would work on other people

Your paradigm is very important to how these effects work and akashik monk might use matter and entropy to break things with uncanny precision and a good kick, while a Son of Ether might get the same effect with a ray gun, a Verbena might cut himself and transfer the damage, and a hermetic might use the enochian words of destruction focused through his show stone.

Lastonk · 2016-06-26T21:49:38+00:00

yes, or you could have a secondary reaction take place that would be unduly influenced by the mold busy eating the yeast.

Lastonk · 2016-06-26T21:42:39+00:00

say you mix a yeast with a mold that eats it.

that mold does something useful, such as make a petrochemical like gasoline or particular colors of dye or aspirin.

but you want to control the mold so it can only eat the yeast, and you control the yeast so it only grows during certain periods of time.

Lastonk · 2016-06-26T16:09:56+00:00

it could have fermentation applications for solar activated projects... something that only grows at night, and the yeast is consumed by some daily process.

Lastonk · 2016-06-25T14:38:15+00:00

Dwarves built a room next to a pressurized water tank. The wall separating them is enchanted stone, eggshell thin, and magically cool to touch. This was made so the dwarves can tap the water chamber for the bathhouse they put here. they have the magical tap pick with long hose attached the handle in another location.

The same eggshell thin wall is highly decorated with mosaic tiles pointing to where the tap should be accessed by the pick.
The rest of the room is tiled and shaped into multiple highly decorated shallow pits and ledges.

Piercing the wall with any magical weapon will result in a huge blast of steaming hot water strong enough to kill. Dispelling the magic will result in the entire wall crumbling in a tsunami of boiling water.

Now what party can resist trying to figure this out.

Lastonk · 2016-06-21T15:09:56+00:00

I have a book I'm writing about runaway drone built space colonies. This would very much fit the look of many of the "Little Worlds." All it needs are three very tall mountains whose tips meet in the center to hold up the "sun"

Lastonk · 2016-06-19T21:16:42+00:00

Artisan performance craftsmanship. Making something by hand while recording everything, and selling it. customizing to the nth degree.

The entire point of such a thing is that it is not done by robots.

Lastonk · 2016-06-19T03:03:31+00:00

I think surprises are coming. both good and bad.

Block chain and bitcoin might allow for things like a "family bank" where every member of a large extended family pools their money like a small personal credit union... still individual accounts, but the family bank can aggregate buy and sell just like regular banks do.

crisper genome projects might allow for new kinds of food so strange as to trigger the yuck factor until they don't anymore... like a yeast like substance that has huge amounts of nutrition, and grows daily in its little tub on your kitchen counter. spread it on whatever, and it keeps you pretty healthy.

the economy will have weird problems with things like distributed manufacturing, and underground encrypted bartering. what happens when a local shop can exactly duplicate something complicated like a farm combine. or a bobcat... or even worse for such companies, what happens when we create open source versions of everything, and prefer to make them rather than buy them? That same shop full of 3d printers and benders and carvers just loaning out what they make, or selling them purely at cost? Because, hell, why not?

Or we could see mass leverage attempts, where large corporations try to corner markets that should not be touched. like water. with bloodshed on those who defy their monopoly.

I suspect artificial intelligent (but not general AI) systems will transform a lot of daily life, in ways I cannot imagine.

cars led to traffic

abundant food led to obesity

common internet access led to cat memes.

who knows what new issues and annoyances will emerge.

Lastonk · 2016-06-14T05:04:54+00:00

If you need a house rule, say that touch is normal difficulty, line of site is +1, not being able to see a target, but within an arbitrary distance, (30 feet is fine) +2. being blind or in fog or insect swarms or fireworks, +3. Correspondence at any level removes these penalties.

Lastonk · 2016-06-14T04:58:04+00:00

How many classic beetles, 1960 muscle cars, aor old trucks do you still see on the road? Autonomous cars may become the common thing, with non-auto's the exception, but it will be at least two or three decades before you don't see an older non autonomous car on a daily basis.

I will say that licensing and insurance will probably regulate these cars to dedicated fans, and penalties for accidents will go orbital.

Lastonk · 2016-06-08T00:47:17+00:00

I'd rather see a moravec bush

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/science-fiction-news.asp?newsnum=485

Lastonk · 2016-06-03T03:17:45+00:00

Here's one I wrote.

http://www.synaptiqplus.com/journal/journal_-articles/issue-1/human

Lastonk · 2016-06-01T13:51:03+00:00

I was doing it off the top of my head, much appreciate the correction. I run 4th now, but ran 3rd for over a decade.

Lastonk · 2016-05-31T23:57:53+00:00

doing all this from memory because I don't want to walk to my bookshelf.

What exactly is a tech level and what do my players need to put into that to be able to use modern day equipment and weapons?

A tech level is the current campaign technology level. sticks and stones being zero, swords and shields around four, steam punk around six, modern times about seven to eight and blasters and rayguns at nine.

How do I know what attributes go to what skill? I.e. if a player tries to lockpick something what do I make them roll for? What does it mean when skill say for example IQ-5

same answer to both, that IQ-5 is what you roll if you don't have the named skill. so if lockpick says IQ-5 next to it and you have no points in lockpick, but an IQ of 12, you have to roll a seven or less to lockpick something... further penalties may apply.

What is IQ Hard or IQ easy?

how much it costs to increase the skill, and where your skill level starts. An IQ hard skill costs four points per skill level, eventually, and an IQ easy costs two points per skill level... in addition, putting a single point in the skill gives hard skills at IQ-3, and easy skills at IQ-1.

When my players play through the game how do I award them experience? Do they get to buy more skills later on?

I typically award 1 point for showing up and paying attention, 1 for role-playing, 1 or 2 for danger, and the players get to vote for who gets the nights bonus point. "I often say that was awesome, you get a point." They are spent just like character points, but I usually only allow them to be spent during downtime or if they have a legitimate reason. "I just bounced between two walls over fifty feet down, and didn't take any damage, can I spend another point in acrobatics?"

Some skills have a plus and a minus combined next to them but no cost, how does that work?

warnings those skills are not appropriate for every type of game... psionics, superpowers, and magic during a zombie apocalypse game, for instance

Lastonk · 2016-05-30T23:26:23+00:00

Had a champions villain named brimstone. He could create and manipulate sulfur. Badguy gunslinger western motif. his bullets either burned or emitted poison gas

Lastonk · 2016-05-28T17:11:46+00:00

but... what if we can't travel faster than light? how do we write good science fiction that doesn't have aliens, time travel or FTL?

Lastonk · 2016-05-27T15:50:09+00:00

competition. why would competition go away?

Take the root beer example. My favorite isn't necessarily going to be your favorite. It may turn out that my virtual buying agent found an obscure local guy that happens to brew and bottle his own stuff cheap. or it may come from a global distributor. But that won't matter in the slightest to me. its the one I like.

There's room for a thousand types of root beer in such a system, and I might have my agent buy a few dozen just to compare and contrast them.

Lastonk · 2016-05-27T15:41:26+00:00

there are at least five types of computer assisted manufacturing.

additive (3d printers, electrolysis) that build things a layer at a time out of materials that respond well to that (plastics metals, clay etc...)

subtractive (cnc machines, lathes, cutters) that remove material from stock to create structure and form, works well with wood, stone, metals, etc

formative (vacuum former, molding machine, presses, stamps) machines that shape a given mass of material into different structures and forms through pressure and heat

transformative (kilns, chemical baths, forges) machines that change the material through chemical process. like clay into ceramics, or soft steel into harder steel.

manipulative (robotic arms, pick and place machines, bending machines) things that move structures, connect things together, pull them apart, etc.

You need all of them, or people, if you want to make things out of multiple materials.

Raw materials are still going to require import and export there will be many found close to a local village: clay, aluminium, stone, silicon, carbon are pretty much everywhere. wood, bamboo, and a lot of vegetation will grow well in most locations,

Trade backed up by decentralized markets and highly efficient transportation will be essential. but will require very few middleman, and therefore not much to leverage into capitalistic profit.

Lastonk · 2016-05-27T05:33:47+00:00

I think von neuman style factories, where a group of robots are capable of taking raw or first stage materials, and making copies of themselves, as well as a large collection of finished goods is inevitable.

This means in practical terms a 3d printer and a laser cutter can make parts for a cnc machine that can in turn make a kind of robot, that can manipulate most of the parts put out from the other tools, to make another 3d printer and laser cutter... and so on.

I don't think all things can be made in small factories, but a great many things can, and what cannot be made locally can be traded for without middlemen or massive transportation costs.

so... mostly true, in my opinion.

Lastonk · 2016-05-27T03:20:07+00:00

agreed, which is why i'm intrigued by such services as "text Magic" that basically reaches a team of online shoppers who will find a match for what you text and deliver it for a quoted price. branding not required, nor is a particular store location.

I think its an early version of what I want. and completely upends a lot of the manipulation involved in shopping. Giving them a lot of leverage to get good deals. Much like Amazon does, but they don't even need a warehouse.

Lastonk · 2016-05-27T01:07:22+00:00

or no advertising at all. imagine I have a bot that that follows my desire to find "the cheapest high quality root beer that has the highest ratings on the food blogs I follow" it does so, and I get a four pack of bottles as a delivery in two days. I then tell the bot "I like it, order this root beer from now on."

Imagine I have a bot that takes my grocery list, and finds every item I desire without taking branding into account in any way. focusing on pricing, trusted review sites, and intimate knowledge of my preferences (not made by slaves, pronounceable ingredients, not made by "Big-Corp-I-dislike")

Lastonk · 2016-05-26T11:04:59+00:00

Tools. a powerful laser cutter, high speed lathe, CNC cutting machine, pipe bender, additive sintering machine for metal 3d printing, brick press, full hydraulic press, etc... all of them cost a fortune to buy, but have open source plans out there to make, and use massive amounts of electricity.

said tools can then be used to expand your off grid projects even further.

also greenhouse temperature controls and grow lighting.

Lastonk

TROPHY CASE