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Re: REKT: Little Questions Thread

#123
Talvieno wrote:
Fri Aug 03, 2018 2:16 pm
They believe it's about the victory, or about being different, or about combat. What is actually fun is the journey and roleplaying, and triumph over odds, and a good story. If you notice, none of those things are things a player has any control over: that is entirely in the hands of the GM. (The players may be able to handle roleplaying on their own, yes, but it is the GM that gives them the opportunities to roleplay in the first place.)
yeah, no.
thats at best partially correct.

the most fun i had with PnP games i had with things the GM had no control over or influence on.

first two are from the RL rounds i played with my exgf and friends of her.

we had a paladin player who was just pathetically bad at being both lawful and good, his prime solution was to murder and steal everything
he was also declared to be pedophile from a series of statements.

second occasion stemmed from us having to get out of a cultist camp with a prisoner we were supposed to get out there.
we spent an hour discussing how to set fire to the camp most effectively to distract the cultists so we could escape.
the only thing preventing our chaotic neutral tiefling sorceress to set fire to the other prisoners we didnt need as a distraction was that i, the main (neutral good) healer, would have denied her my healing efforts if she did. (we ended up saving them as well)

it was pure hilarity and nothing of it stemmed from our novice GM. (besides her not actively interfering to prevent it)

third example is from here, when i confused the hell out of Dino with the "PvP" action i put on him, nothing you did either.


so your gist of "you cant have fun without me explicitly holding your hand to do so" is kinda wrong :P
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Re: REKT: Little Questions Thread

#124
((I talked this over in PM with Cornflakes yesterday and it was figured out, but for posterity's sake, and the sake of everyone else reading this, I'm going to respond here. Cornflakes felt like I was being arrogant, calling the players stupid, saying that they couldn't have fun without my hand-holding them, and saying that the players know nothing and only the GM does.))
Cornflakes_91 wrote:
Sat Aug 11, 2018 10:56 am
so your gist of "you cant have fun without me explicitly holding your hand to do so" is kinda wrong
Being completely honest: I didn't mean that at all. The best fun is had without the GM's intervention - completely without the GM's intervention - but the GM can shape things behind the scenes, such as giving your paladin things to steal and murder, or pointing out new and interesting aspects of your cultist argument. I'm not saying the GM is the fun, I'm saying that they create the world. That's all. The world is the stage, but the stage is just a stage without the characters to act on it.

As to the "players are idiots" sentiment:
I think I may not have gotten my intentions across. My players aren't idiots. None of them are. All of you guys are wicked smart - many of you without a doubt smarter than I am, possibly by a fair deal. Sometimes that makes me feel a bit inferior, especially when you start in on more scientific subjects that I'm not very knowledgeable in.

The players don't "need" the GM to have fun. Fun is made by the players, with the exception of the story. If you guys do nothing interesting, I can't make anything interesting happen. I can throw interesting things at you - I can set the stage - but if you fail to interact with it/in it/around it, the story is just useless noise. The roleplay is the fun part, but the players need the story and setting to set up a stage they can act in.


As to "you don't know anything, only the GM does":
I'm mostly talking about newbies. When I talk about veterans, often != usually. It just means it happens. Everyone "learns" "how to RPG" at different rates. Some people learn more quickly than others. To other people, everything in the game is stats and skills to them - it's all just numbers. They don't really "get" the roleplay. I mean, obviously, you do: your three examples were all about roleplay, right? And the roleplay is the fun part. Early on I thought that rules and stats had to be "just so" or else "the game will suck" but it's actually a lot more complicated than that, and there's a lot more leeway when good players and a good GM are involved, because a good player won't want to be too overpowered, and a good GM will know how to tweak things so they'll never feel like there isn't room to advance. In that regard, the stats and skill play a lesser role in making the game fun than it may immediately seem to a new player.


As to being arrogant: I most certainly hope I never become so. That's a step on the path to becoming a bad GM: when you ignore what your players say and stop "listening" just because you think you know everything already. You stop growing, and you stagnate, and in the stagnation you lose the ability to learn and adapt - and it's essentially a permanent condition, because even if you're told you're stagnating you won't believe it. A GM should always, always challenge themselves to learn, and always keep an open mind. That's why I gave each of the recent posts in this thread a day's thought to think about it before I responded. I wanted to understand exactly everyone's perspective before I replied, so I could see it from their angle; I wanted to query what I was saying myself to see if perhaps I was in the wrong. That may not have come across clearly, though. I'm bad at communication sometimes, but I'm trying to be better.
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Re: REKT: Little Questions Thread

#127
The kind of stuff you can do with a smallish telescope and a spectroscope + some cameras - looking at stars and planets (in-system planets, obviously) telescopically in different spectra (normal, IR, UV), taking emission and absorption spectra of stars, atmospheres and illuminated gas clouds, measuring star positions and luminosities and stuff.

Reason I'm not sure it's possible is that using a camera as a telescope is probably stretching things a bit, and the spectrographer might only be short-range (made to analyse samples only) :) but it would be fun
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Re: REKT: Little Questions Thread

#128
Well, that whole thing poses a bit of an interesting puzzle I suppose - mostly because I need to have realistic-sounding things to say whenever you want to look at something. Also, you're an astrophysicist by major iirc, so this is kind of your turf to begin with - coming up with something "believable" is more difficult if it's meant for you than if it's meant for someone else.

For a lot of things, I'll have everything set up already. Most planets will already have their orbital period and such mapped out. I could let you do it for other things I suppose. There are some things you mentioned I'm not sure of though.
in different spectra (normal, IR, UV), taking emission and absorption spectra of stars, atmospheres and illuminated gas clouds, measuring star positions and luminosities and stuff.
I don't really understand a lot of this. I get luminosity, at least. I can give a value for that, in theory, and as long as you don't perform too much math on it, it'll probably be believable. The IR/UV stuff I wouldn't even know how to approach. :lol:


To be clear: I love the idea. I'm just concerned I don't have enough knowledge to make it work. If you think I would, then I can let you do a short questy-thing that'll get you access to the Nemesis's scanners - after they're repaired, of course. I'm not sure that the MUSE would have quite the resolution/range necessary for what you're talking about, but the Nemesis scanners probably would. The Nemesis is a sort of exploratory solo battle carrier, after all. (It's also a support ship, but only when in a fleet. That may or may not happen in this campaign.)
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Re: REKT: Little Questions Thread

#129
Well, reasoning behind it is - I really like the idea of doing a GK roll for astrophysics (because of obvious reasons) since you listed it in your examples list.
However, knowledge only gets you so far - I can't tell you what type a star is or what a gas cloud is made of by looking at it. You kinda need ways to measure stuff. At least, if I want this GK thing to ever actually come up. (Not much point in learning to determine things we already know from the starmap)
Using the Nemesis' scanners would work, I guess, but how do I use those on a mission?

As for the bg - I'd be stating what it was I actually wanted to measure. :) The method is just RP fluff, and should be fairly basic anyway - more advanced concepts won't really be useful in REKT (I'm not gonna measure the cosmic background or the expansion rate of the universe...well, probably not :ghost: )

e.g. emission and absorption spectra is where you look at the emitted light per wavelength to determine what elements are in something, but it only works for stuff emitting light, or transparent things where light is going through.
So I as a player would say
I use the camera to try and observe if the nebula is luminous. If it is, I take a spectrogram of it, and calculate from that its elemental buildup. If it's not, I look for a good background star to make an absorption spectrum and determine the same

whereas all this means for you as a GM is
Hey Tal, what stuff is this thing made of?

As you can see, as long as I roleplay it properly, you don't actually have to understand what I'm saying, as long as I'm already describing how I'm doing it in the first place.
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Re: REKT: Little Questions Thread

#130
Hmm, that's a really good idea. I'm 100% on board. Off-mission you could lead some of the scanner team if you wanted I suppose (provided you get the roll ofc). In addition I could make it so that only the more traveled-to planets show up with data, and the rest could be scanned and such.

As to the MUSE... I could make a cheap addition to the MUSE (250, 500 creds, something like that) which would let you do a bit of stargazing stuff. There will probably be plenty of missions with astronomical oddities (I mean, I do quite often design missions around them) and that could lead to a lot of fun RP situations. It could accomplish something legitimately "useful" in a gameplay sense too.
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Re: REKT: Little Questions Thread

#131
I like all of that :D (and yes, only in case of success on roll of course)
It doesn't have to be the muse, by the way, I just looked for the closest thing we had to what I wanted to do - but putting a telescope you want to point at stuff on the robotic arms makes sense either way, really.
(though I probably would want one of those Armored robotic arm armored arm armor for your arms-armed armored robotic arms that are on the armory to add list as well, then :ghost:
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