Shopping. Rar.

[active_apathy]

So, I was shopping for miscellaneous learning supplies, because that's pretty much what you do when it's nearly time to go back to your learning for another fun-filled semester.

And, well, it's never actually fun, because it's so carefully timed to coincide with (a) small children going back to school, and (b) everyone else working on being a right pain. And succeeding.

Seriously, these people all make me want to find some kind of aerosol spray version of necrotising fasciitis¹. You want to block the aisle? Flesh-eating bacteria! You want to hold everyone up to argue about five cents difference on a price? Flesh-eating bacteria! You want to crowd thoroughfares in a cluster of utterly unrelated mobile phone conversations? Congratulations, here's your fasciitis necroticans, enjoy. You'd like to run into me with a trolley²? Come closer, there's enough flesh-eating bacteria to go round⁴. Please, don't shove, otherwise everyone gets microbial death.

So, what news is there today?

Firstly, Borders had Gneil's Don't Panic, which I immediately wanted to buy, then didn't, because I wouldn't have had the moneythingies to do so. However! It will be bought in the not-too-distant future (ie, after Lady Friday is out. And if my opportunity to buy it clashes with the release of White Night, then Don't Panic will just have to wait.)

Which reminds me!

Dear man in bookstore,

it's ok. Really. In fact, I'm happy that you've finally shown to me that I have no need of physical space in which to exist. Certainly, it made my day that you didn't bother with so much as a word before deciding that the only way to transport your oh-so-important self to other bookstore locales was right through that spot where I was standing.

If you're planning a repeat performance, it may even contribute to my happiness to know you'd tried to similarly shove your way past, say, a sugaro cactus. Of course, I'd have to demand pictures for that one; I've never seen an ethereally nonexistent cactus before, and it'd be wondrous to examine a photographic record of your cactaceous⁶ endeavours.

With vanishing regards,
active_apathy

PS: Could I maybe interest you in a nice, fresh vial of necrotising fasciitis?

So, yes. Also, apparently, escalator etiquette in the modern world is such that you only stand to one side when the second half of the escalator has broken down, and thus everyone has to walk up. Doing so in single-file? Actually not helpful, though it would've been good on the part that was still moving.

And then, then there was the psychotic bus driver, whose sole contribution to this entry will be his attempt to crash and kill us all. He was - apparently - unsuccessful, unless I am, in fact, dead, and all the ills of my day prior to that trip were a kind of advance payment on hell.

So, that was my day. About the only good part is that I seem to have developed a new approach for rapid-deployment nakedness, inasmuch that I can successfully arrange my clothes so that the simple act of stopping inside my room (and, sometimes, shrugging slightly) can make them fall off. There are benefits to this approach, not least among which the fact that I get to use the phrase 'rapid-deployment nakedness'.

And now, footnotes, though you've probably already read them all anyway.⁷

1. I'm moderately obsessed with it at the moment, possibly because it has a strangely cute name for something that will do its level best to kill you in no time at all.
   
2. Seriously³. My leg still hurts.
3. ... I blame Shonda Rhimes. At least I'm not (yet?) using "too much water under the thing or whatever".
   
4. And I just looked this up to see whether it was properly 'go around', 'go 'round' or 'go round'. And my source was inconclusive, which means I need to find an idiom dictionary⁵.
5. Oh, yes. They exist.
6. I'm not sure whether I can actually use this as an adverb, but I couldn't find a proper adverbial form for 'cactus', so it was a choice of 'cactaceous' or 'cactoid', and 'cactaceous' sounds much better. Cactoid - to be perfectly honest - sounds like a name for some spiny green superhero whose superpower is standing in the desert for long periods of time.
7. The little superscripted numbers tend to have that effect. Indirectly, this also means that the end of my post is actually at the end of my post. Curious.
   

Comments

[ryttu3k.livejournal.com]

Footnotes are cool.

Necrotising fasciitis!

[leila82.livejournal.com]

This is the major cause of nec fasc. Even cuter now!!

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

As I may have commented elsewhere, cutest. s. pyogenes. ever. :D

Also, now I want cute plush microbes.

[leila82.livejournal.com]

I personally covet syphillis, like, so badly. Seriously.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

I can see why. The pox is possibly the cutest microbe ever.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Also, did I mention how much it amuses me that you abbreviate necrotising fasciitis? Because it kind of does.

And can the plush microbe heal it with love?

[leila82.livejournal.com]

Oh noes, my abbreviations are transferring over into LJ comments!! This is not good; 2 world colliding and all.

I think the entire world would be better off with plush microbes.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

And you've commented on wanting plush!syph, which may or may not be a symptom of your world collision thing. Taken together with the abbreviations, though, the results are fairly conclusive.

Quite. People would be a lot more calm about H5N1, for instance, if only it were cuddly.

[mrpyro.livejournal.com]

Footnote 4 appears to be recursive...

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Oops, fixed now.

[fireflyfailure.livejournal.com]

I like 'cataceous.'
Footnote number seven is ingenius.
Also, your icon = ftw, as they say. :P

[fireflyfailure.livejournal.com]

[ by 'icon' i mean jayne + turtle icon. there is no better combination, except possibly wash and plastic dinosaurs.]

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

In reference to your plans...

14. I will leave around vials labeled "X-tra healing" filled with strawberry flavored plague.
From: http://www.angelfire.com/d20/mrbinkythejackalope/comedy/demons.html

a new approach for rapid-deployment nakedness, inasmuch that I can successfully arrange my clothes so that the simple act of stopping inside my room (and, sometimes, shrugging slightly) can make them fall off.

This I have got to see ;)

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

It's not difficult. It mostly just involves careful manipulation of various fastenings. The bit where it gets really odd is that it takes me more time and effort to take a t-shirt off than it does for virtually any other garment I'm likely to be wearing.

Also, hee. Made with artiificial strawberry flavouring product and 100% natural yersinia pestis?

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

That's because your shirts can't take advantage of gravity, while pretty much every other article of clothing can. Blame your shoulders.
(Though I am a bit disturbed by the idea that your underwear can fall off with as little as a wiggle. If mine were that loose, they would drive me insane all day even with other clothes holding them up)

There's a fabulous discussion about diceless SotC going on the list right now. I just made a post in response to someone else's proposals. I'm debating moving apathy_games over to using such a diceless system. Thoughts?

(And why aren't you people posting?)

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Most underwear can be easily moved to a point where it can pretty much just fall. It's not 1807.

I haven't really been following the thread. I'm guessing it'd work out as something like SotC using the pips mechanic from Pace, or such. But, if you'd like to, feel free to put it to the group.

(I thought I posted last, and the time before that. There's other people to poke.)

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

(I only poke you because you're one of the only people I talk to outside of game)

Well, yes, you can pull them down to a point where they fall, but that's not really "staying still" or "shrugging slightly" now is it?

I don't know Pace. The core of the system is that you get X tokens, and don't roll. You spend tokens to get pluses on "rolls" (up to 4 as usual) or voluntarily take a negative "roll" to get tokens back. No tokens = roll of zero = result of just your skill.
Plus some stuff about refresh rates and the like.

The alternative was to go with my usual PBP system, which is that I just arbitrarily decide all outcomes and tell the group such.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

The original specification calls for rearrangement of clothes on the way, such that the eventual trigger for nakedness is- no. I'm not going to talk about nakedness as though it's engineering.

Pace is pretty good. Pace is entirely free. Pace is... pretty much like that. Pace can be found here, and includes notes on using it with other systems, including Fudge. And SotC is a build of Fate is a version of Fudge, so, yay.

Essentially, it has some extra bits. The GM has a somewhat-set allocation of the same tokens (which, IMO, makes things interesting), refresh rates are less important, and you can spend more tokens than you have left (which brings consequences later).

Its default Pace-as-Fudge-dice setting is to just use Fudge (or, for us, Fate) points as the tokens. In Fate3/SotC, this is even easier: you toss about FPs as a dice mechanism, tag them to aspects for better results, and you get a pretty simple diceless system. Why that needs such a long thread mystifies me endlessly. :)

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

Hrmm, I think I'd prefer keeping your basic tokens and FP separate. You want to use the basic shifts on a regular basis, and make them equally easy to regain. FP are not as easy to regain, and there's not nearly as big a supply of them.

Also, FP serve two functions over and above basic tokens. First, they can let you exceed the +4 limit, and second, they can be used after you see the results of your original effort.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Then the easiest way of doing that is treat FPs as per normal, and the tokens like pips in out-of-the-box Pace. Unless you desperately feel the need for a refresh rate, that is.

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

I'd need to read Pace to see how pips work out of the box.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Default pip behaviour in Pace is...

*rereads*

...good for Pace. It's probably best to keep three things, namely:

- gaining pips for selling off a result
- spending pips to improve a result and
- being able to spend pips you don't have, with a consequence

The trick after that is picking a sane refresh rate. I'd be tempted to just say that they refresh at the same rate as FPs, or maybe the refresh rate is tagged to number of skills (ie, 15), or something like that.

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

The one I ended up with was fairly simple. Take a - to your roll to gain pips, spend them for +, or don't spend anything and just get a result equal to your base skill. I'm not so big on the spending pips you don't have with a consequence idea. I think just taking a - to a roll to gain pips works out pretty much the same in the end. If you're running short or out of pips, you take a couple bad rolls (with the accompanying consequences for making them) and regain some pips to use next round. The obvious approach to game that is to take a -4 on an attack roll... no real consequences to that. Except for Spin, of course, but unless the opposition has spin-using stunts, it's not a real problem. May have to fix that.

The refresh is the key point - there are really a couple questions about refresh.
1: How often do you refresh? Same time as FP (which is mainly just at the start of a session) or Once per scene seem to be the only real options
2: Does a refresh bring you up to the rate (like FP) or does it add that many to your pool (allowing stockpiling)?

And then yeah, how much. Which can only be determined by playtesting, I think.

Someone suggested a rate of 35, because that's how many ranks worth of skills you get in the SotC pyramid.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

35 is, I think, patent nonsense. Even starting with one is an improvement over 4dF, so I'd be comfy with 15, refreshed at the same time as aspects. Per scene is over the top; it means you essentially go into each new conflict with a fresh batch of pips, which means there's no real benefit to, say, collecting pips from the minions to tear slices off the Big Bad.

One per skill also scales it nicely for the minions (and companions and such), so, yay.

Overspending is just one of those ideas I irrationally like, similar to letting someone spend their wound track as FPs if they're truly desperate.

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

Even starting with one is an improvement over 4dF
In a sense, yes, and in a sense, no. So you have 1 pip. You spend it. Now your actions are completely deterministic AND predictable. Everything comes down to "Is my skill higher? Yes I win no I lose." No variance. Sure, your overall "roll equivilent" average is better with that one pip than straight 4dF, but the gameplay loses out.

The real point behind having a bunch of pips is that the GM also has a bunch too. If you both have roughly equal amounts, then it's statsitially a zero sum game, and you're both equal to having 4dF instead in the long run. Sure, your results average higher... but they still average as equal to the GM, which is the real point.

A lot of pip allocation, refresh rate, and the like also comes down to the difficulties that the GM throws at you. If I accost Kat (Weapons 4) with Inigo Montoya (Weapons 5), then you need to be constantly burning FP to even have a chance. With minimal pips, you may run out very quickly. With a non pips just FP approach, then you're really screwed - unless you burn at least 2 FP per round, you're going to be taking damage and doing nothing to him guaranteed. You need one FP to get past his skill and poke him, and another so your defense is enough to hold him off. Unless you can take him out before you run out of FP, the fight is a foregone conclusion. ANd if you burn all your FP on him early in the session, then you're absolutely helpless in the final showdown later.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, there's the other thing. And the thing that thread needs to do - badly - is to get away from the idea that diceless needs to simulate dice.

A diceless mechanic with metagame currency for improving (or for reducing) a character's performance isn't about playing like the dice. The question that the player has to ask themselves is closer to 'how much do I want to win this conflict?' - which makes life much more interesting anyway.

Still, 35 is a bit too much. If you're going to make pips have some kind of importance, then they need to be reasonably scarce. Not stupidly scarce, mind; just scarce enough that the player needs to keep deciding how badly they want to win. And that keeps consequences and concessions important too.

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

The quantity of pips depends entirely on the game environment you're playing in. If it's expected that you'll need to spend 1 or 2 on every task to succeed, then you're going to need a decently large pool to last out a session. If the norm is that you can bypass most challenges without spending any, then a smaller pool is just fine.

Session length is also a huge factor on pip availiability. 15 pips may be fine for a 3 hour game, but my friday D&D sessions were generally 8 hours long. 15 pips wouldn't last the whole night.

The more conflicts you have, the more pips you're likely going to need as well, just because conflicts will spend them faster than simple skill tests.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

(oops, apparently not. *goes away to post*)

[laurenmitchell.livejournal.com]

In my world, pushy-man-in-bookstore type people get elbowed. Hard.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Oooh... good plan. Possibly for some of them I'd need those shoulder-length latex gloves vets use, just to deal with the whole deliberate touching thing.

[goblinpaladin.livejournal.com]

Rapid deployment nakedness, huh?

[This is a post brought to you by the letter Perverted and the Number No-one's surprised.¹]

I'd just like to mention that I now wish I had a can of necrotising fasciitis, oh yes. Except I kinda wish I had one retroactively, so I could use it on my old pawnbroking customers.


---
¹May not be a number.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Everyone seems to get stuck on the nakedness. :)

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

You're just so lovely, can you blame us?

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I'm almost tempted to write an entry along the lines of "Hey, I'm posting naked just so I can say that I'm posting naked, wheeeeeee, nakedness.", just to see how many comments it'd get.

And then I realise I'd get sidetracked. There'd be an aside about how my clothes would be quietly napping on the floor, with the hem of my skirt gently snuggling the toe of a shoe, or something like that. And then there'd be my theory that irritating tags or stabby underwires are a result of grmupy clothes. And then, after a whole fascinating discourse of textile personification, there'd probably be something else even more strange.

Which - admittedly - would be fun. But it'd also invalidate the experiment.

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

The experiment wouldn't work properly, as you've contaminated the working environment already. We're already used to random posts about nakedness and the color of your panties, so for many regulars they just don't register on the radar, unless you inflate them with Linda Brand Catchphrases™ like "rapid deployment nakedness".

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

The environment can't be that contaminated; rapid deployment nakedness seems to be getting rather a bit more interest than aerosol flesh-eating bacteria.

[palmer-kun.livejournal.com]

That's because spray-death, while fun, isn't that interesting. It's right up there with the much wished for "smite" key.

Rapid Deployment Nakedness is much more interesting.

And my point was that RDN is more interesting than generic "I'm naked" and thus it's getting responses.

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure it's cactoid, cactaceous does sound better but also sounds like a paleontological term describing the sudden flowering of cacti through-out the prehistoric world.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

So that's why the dinosaurs died. It wasn't sudden but inevitable betrayal after all.

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

Cactaceous traitors. *nods*