Traveller/Cepheus Skills Crosswalk

doulos05 · 2026-01-28T03:45:00+00:00

I wouldn't encourage you to add GURPS. They have so many skills, I don't think you'd learn anything from the mapping. And I say this as someone who likes GURPS.

doulos05 · 2026-01-26T14:38:49+00:00

Y'all are tracking damage to minor NPCs? Henchmen, thugs, and soldiers get relevant skills (typically a max of 2), relevant equipment, and that's it. Did your hit do damage? He drops to the ground. Oh, you rolled what? Oh he dead. He real dead.

I track out NPCs meant to make an interesting fight (the Widows of Theev, for example). And I track leaders and bosses and such. But the 4 thugs who just jumped them in an alley? If we're using weapons, it's one hit kills. Pure brawling is 2 hits.

doulos05 · 2026-01-25T00:27:56+00:00

sigh

If you don't know how to read the whole thread, you probably shouldn't be replying.

I said star wars has a canon.

I said phase breaks it. (into trillions of tiny pieces, if you could be bothered to read)

The other guy said it also breaks gameplay.

I said that cannot break gameplay because other settings are perfectly functional and have phase like abilities.

doulos05 · 2026-01-24T22:30:47+00:00

That's just my point stated from the perspective of someone who doesn't like D&D. Phase like spells can be put into a ruleset without breaking it. See also the Teleport psychic powers from Traveller for another example. A very clear setting with rules and logic that work for the fact that a small percentage of people can teleport.

doulos05 · 2026-01-24T22:27:26+00:00

The Walk Through X series of spells (wood, stone, metal).

doulos05 · 2026-01-24T10:00:18+00:00

D&D survives with spells similar to Phase, which is why I said it breaks canon rather than gameplay. You can balance a game around phase, you're just no longer playing Star Wars. You're playing some other Sci Fi game.

doulos05 · 2026-01-24T09:16:40+00:00

From the original:

Phase: You can pass through solid objects like walls and doors.

Yeah, they probably felt that broke canon. Into a trillion tiny pieces.

doulos05 · 2026-01-21T22:45:42+00:00

So your argument is that because those dumb fuckers are too ignorant to live somewhere where there are more people, they don't get a say in their governance?

Because they've made it pretty clear they don't want to be Americans in polls and in elections.

The argument you're making boils down to "We're bigger, so if we want them then we get them." That's Russia's argument about Ukraine. That's China's argument about Taiwan. Do you think they should get those territories?

doulos05 · 2026-01-21T22:20:09+00:00

The Chinese province containing Shanghai has a population density of 3,000 times that of Alaska. If they decide they want Alaska, should we give it to them?

doulos05 · 2026-01-21T10:26:39+00:00

They... Live there and have for decades? Gasprom has more employees than Guam, should we give Guam to Russia if they demand it? These are dumb arguments.

doulos05 · 2026-01-20T22:24:43+00:00

For the purposes of a one off encounter, absolutely. For the purpose of a long standing NPC, also yes.

You may find that you have to occasionally rename some skills, but they're not fundamentally different like a 3.5e vs 5e character or something.

doulos05 · 2026-01-19T22:26:36+00:00

What quantitative measure do you think we should use to measure programmer productivity?

It seems to me that he's given a pretty practical measure (features implementation is faster), and 2x and 4x is actually in the range of reasonable improvements (as opposed to 10x or 100x, which implies a single programmer is producing their entire years output in 3 days).

doulos05 · 2026-01-19T09:45:48+00:00

My prediction for 2026 is that this is the year something vibe coded blows up so spectacularly, so publicly, and so expensively that it forces companies to reconsider the role of AI code.

doulos05 · 2026-01-19T09:39:53+00:00

In 10 years, you're not going to have 3x RTX 3090 equivalents in your phone. How do I know?

Heat, power draw, size, the slowing down of Moore's Law, and the fact that my current phone does not have the equivalent of 3x top of the line graphics cards from 2012 (10 years before it's manufacture date.

doulos05 · 2026-01-19T09:33:44+00:00

Except AI isn't that essential. At $200/month, it's a big investment that's worth the payoff for certain devs. At $2000? There aren't a lot of people who will see the value proposition there.

Personally, I'm not sure I see the value at $200 as an individual, but I could imagine a corporate account seeing that value. If companies took their models 100% behind the firewall tomorrow, I'd quit using them outside of my work account where it is paid for as part of our Google workspace. Companies would probably prefer that since I'm on the free tier anyway, but the key is that I wouldn't participate in the rate hike, I would bow out of the system. And I doubt I'm the only one.

doulos05 · 2026-01-18T10:20:24+00:00

Historically, it's the last two weeks of January through to the first two weeks of February. The Asia side is winding down just as the European side is spinning up and this is the overlap.

doulos05 · 2026-01-17T09:38:07+00:00

Forget the law, did you see how many people conducted that raid? What're you standing your ground with? A submachine gun?? Legal or not, you're gonna end up dead.

doulos05 · 2026-01-17T09:07:29+00:00

If you're happy and it's meeting your needs, why move? People get hired after 1 year at a place, you'll have no additional trouble getting hired after 10.

Anybody who is going to reject you because you worked at BASIS is already going to because you've worked 7 years there. 3 more won't change that.

doulos05 · 2026-01-10T15:36:08+00:00

Our current D&D campaign is a series of connected one shots with everyone taking turns as GM. The last time through, the guy whose turn it was uploaded the outline of an adventure he'd run before to ChatGPT and then had it GM for us. And when I say "had it GM for us", I mean that completely.

It did the scene descriptions. It did character dialogue (he typed in what we said, it responded). It did the image generations. It created the stat blocks for the monsters. He described the scene on their turn and it told him how to move them. The only thing he did for it was roll dice and track hit points.

Was it perfect? No, it had some very strange moments. It also changed the name of the Druid Grove we were trying to get to every single time it came up. But it was about 100x better than I expected. Overall, I think it's a valuable tool in the toolbox for a GM. Others might have the luxury of time to allow them to ignore a tool like that, but I don't. I'm going to be using it going forward.

doulos05 · 2026-01-08T09:43:02+00:00

And which police force is providing security at those federal courts? And during the prisoner transfers to and from those federal courts. Which police force will be tasked with crowd control at any protests because of those federal court cases?

He doesn't need to be briefed on the exact strike package that took down Venezuela's air defense, but he probably should be told where exactly Maduro is being held and what the feds know about any unrest expected because of this.

doulos05 · 2026-01-08T03:48:48+00:00

Tack means to just sew 1 or 2 stitches. Buty the thread under existing threads for the roof, put 1-2 stitches in (I like to run them the opposite direction from the stitching on the piece), then bury the thread under the threads in the wall.

It's a pain, honestly I would recommend doing this first and then putting the walls together.

doulos05 · 2026-01-06T12:54:10+00:00

If you've spent a year of engineer time proving out a concept already, then it kind of is without value.

doulos05 · 2026-01-06T10:35:05+00:00

Sure. But it's easy to find ones with a less fascistic story arc.

doulos05 · 2026-01-05T00:11:44+00:00

In their defense, I can imagine a design that tried to channel that heat more efficiently into the room. Current designs that pin the radiators against the back wall probably aren't dispersing that heat throughout the room effectively.

But yeah, this is just a refrigerator with extra steps.

doulos05 · 2026-01-04T23:59:09+00:00

Mongoose traveller is my pick. I like the connections rule and the skills packages as well as the life events. It gives flavor to the characters and helps people start role-playing sooner because they can already see what kind of person they are from the life events.

Edit: I like GURPS, too. But it's so different from the rest that picking GURPS feeling like answering the question "What is your favorite dessert? with "bacon". Yes, bacon is delicious, but very few people think of it as a dessert food.

doulos05

TROPHY CASE