The Old Hack

This reminds me of an experience the father of a friend of mine had. This was due to computers in the Danish Bureau of Taxation not handling rounding very well. One fine day he received a letter from the Bureau of Taxation informing him that he had an outstanding tax of 0.00 Danish crowns, to be paid no later than the first of the following month. He shrugged and filed the letter vertically. (In Danish office lingo, the wastebasket is also fondly known as the vertical file.) Two months later he received a very strong letter warning him that since he STILL had not paid his outstanding taxes of 0.00 crowns, now six weeks overdue, the Bureau of Taxation demanded that he pay within the next two weeks or face a ten percent additional tax as well as paperwork fees, and if he still refused, they would take him to court. For some reason, the local post office refused to let him send a money order for the Bureau of Taxation for the sum total of 0.00 crowns. So he called the Bureau of Taxation and asked them what he was supposed to do, or if he should just wait until the case went to court. It took some fifteen minutes of panic on the other end to find the case and kill it. Apparently they were not very eager to present their end of the case to a judge.

Not really. Especially not with those whose wrongs give edge unto the swords that make such waste in brief mortality. *sigh*

Whew. And hopefully you'll get over that soon, Prof. Bureaucracy is a maze that is meant to make its victims feel dumb.

She needs to get into the spirit of it. Tell her that she should give them a "no worries, she'll be right."

To be fair, Jerry, right now it would probably be a bit of a challenge finding any immortals who are all that much younger than you.

http://www.egscomics.com/?id=2338

If you want to post about matters not pertinent to EGS, that's what the Off Topic forum is for. In fact, you can more or less post about anything you like there as long as it respects the forum rules. Rumours notwithstanding, one does not actually get black marks for inadvertently being on topic in the Off Topic forums. o.O

Well, he had just lost a girlfriend so it is not an entire impossibility. Hrm. If I had lost someone dear to me and binge-watched something, I wonder what it would be. Possibly Fringe. That might give me a decent chance of becoming a mad scientist like Walter. How about you guys?

The Moderator: Yes it does. In the future, kindly ask such questions there.

Sort of.

My suggestion is: skip the Asian and similar cultures you have not read up on till you have the time. Also, you are doing science fiction. It is not impossible to make up decent monsters, merely challenging. Do as much as that as you feel up to, your game will be the better for it. Players will appreciate meeting something that isn't Recycled Space Ork #477. Alternately: find someone with a good appreciation of Asian cultures. Ideally someone Chinese for Chinese creatures, Japanese for the Japanese ones, et cetera. Consult them for their takes on your ideas. Pay close attention to them, they are the experts. We have at least one Filipino poster here, they should have their own take that is just as important. And while I do not want to depress you: take even what you know about European/Western creatures with a grain of salt. I have seen interpretations of Scandinavian mythology that made me cringe. Hitler notwithstanding, Scandinavia does NOT have a population of Nazi werewolves in our mythology. It is always a good idea to check your assumptions. Big tip: if you do use mythological creatures or merely strange ones, it does not hurt to give them understandable motivations and behavior patterns. I may be preaching to the choir here but it is often a good idea to spend a few minutes thinking about what the creatures might be engaged in when they are not eating adventurers. I am guilty of horrendous stuff myself, such as the ravenous packs of half-starved polar bears rampaging across the endless ice plains of Futilia IV, but in my defence I was deliberately parodying bad sci fi there and not even bothering to make up an ecology that could explain their existence.

Oh, I am not belittling any of these weapons. I am merely wondering why all daggers in that world are apparently forged with high breakability as a feature.

I did like that bit in Jaquinto's 'Swashbuckler' where, whenever a rapier or epée clashed with a dagger, the dagger had a one in six chance of breaking. As to real life disarming, I saw a HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) practitioner who said that the simplest way to disarm someone in a swordfight would probably be to injure their weapon arm.

Monster lists are a huge problem in convincing science fiction stories spanning large numbers of planets and environments. They really need to be very extensive in order to avoid repetition, not to mention varied in nature. In the earlier mentioned Star Wars: the Old Republic, a big problem is that so many monsters look like one another even on planets halfway across the galaxy from one another. This is of course partly because of the game engine -- good models take time to create and you can only have so many unless you are prepared to spend ludicrous amounts of money and programming time on them. Then, as mlooney hints, there is the whole problem of discovering all the species extant on a whole planet. Humanity has existed on this planet for thousands of years and we still occasionally discover surprising new variants. Imagine just landing on a new world and then trying to work out what and where and how many potentially dangerous beasties there might be. Especially given that even on Earth, good camouflage has long been considered a winning evolutionary move. mlooney, if you need a helping hand with monster lists and ideas for same, or even reading and editing them, I'd like to offer a hand. Or even some general editing. If nothing else, maybe I can provide some useful opinions or at least act as a sounding board.

It might conceivably be part of a Sister Act, with Mrs Kitsune played by Whoopi Goldberg.

Fair enough, and I'm not saying you have to be. But it sounded to me like you wanted to see a huge battle scene of Sith versus Jedi, and I tried to deliver. My apologies if it disappointed. :/

Bah. That is utter redundancy. I could have managed that in only 490 pages.

Ah, that's the problem. Star Wars: The Old Republic was set in the time before the Rule of Two was instituted by Darth Bane. In fact, you could with some justice claim that these times were the entire basis for the Rule of Two. The ideal of the Sith was that some day the Sith'ari, a perfect being, would come into existence. Obviously all the followers of the Sith Code wanted to be it. It led to a massive chaos of plotting, backstabbing, manipulation and betrayal that more often than not caused the Sith to be their own worst foes. The Sith Emperor came very close but in the end his plans were undone by all the mad internecine treachery of his own followers. In the aftermath of the fall of the Sith Empire, Darth Bane came into being. The last remnants of the Sith were busily wiping themselves out and the survivors mostly got hunted down by the Jedi. Darth Bane realised that in order to reach the goal of the Sith and achieve the state of Sith'ari, you didn't really need large numbers and that they in fact were a handicap. He instituted the Rule of Two, and it was large and by respected by his successors ever since. But make no mistake: the Sith Empire had large numbers of Sith. Quite a few of them were actual Sith (the race, not the philosophy) and many carried actual Sith blood in their veins. In fact, HK-47 determined that 98% of the Empire's population had at least one Sith in their family trees, turning the returning Revan's plans to exterminate the Sith race (a very small portion of which remained full-blooded) into a genocide numbering in the trillions. Of these, the Force wielders all followed the Sith code. And some of them, to the dismay of many of the leading Sith, even avoided the temptations of the Dark Side. (It sounds weird, but it is true. The Sith were no more immune to the blandishments of the Light than the Jedi were immune to the temptations of the Dark. I personally suspect that another reason Darth Bane wanted the Rule of Two was to put an end to this Light nonsense upsetting their plots. Easier to control if it was only master and apprentice. And even that failed in the end when Sidious couldn't keep his apprentice from the Light...)

Actually it was because of the sheer terror effect that would invariably occur when an entire line of soldiers fired simultaneously. It would result in a massive rolling thunder of powder and all the bullets striking at the same time. The physical effect would be much the same as if every soldier fired in their own time but the effect on enemy morale was much more severe. Or in some cases, on your own side's morale. In one particular war the morale of the Spanish musketeers was so bad that the ONE time they managed to get a line to fire all at the same time, the massive sound of the volley was so terrifying that the firing line ITSELF broke, fleeing in blind panic from the sound of their own muskets. Not that the Spanish cavalry was much better. For one thing, it lacked usable mounts. There are definite limits to how effective an unmounted cavalry charge can be. In fact, during that entire war the only successful cavalry charge they managed to complete was against a cluster of limbered artillery.

Duh. Harrison Ford, of course. Meh. I still think the horses would like these odds better than running straight into the machinegun meat grinder.

You mean that Michael Bundesen from Shu-Bi-Dua didn't actually rob banks, fight in heroic Viking battle a thousand years ago and that he wasn't a superhero? I have been fibbed to

Mph. I am unconvinced that sword versus bat'leth would be that big of a difference. Range is important and part of human war history has always been trying to find better ways to kill at longer and longer range. But range is not all-important, in older times mobility and armouring could and often did trump range. A sword trumps a bat'leth in reach but only by a foot or so at most. While significant, this in no way means automatic victory for the swordsman any more than a spearman will automatically kill a swordsman. As to lining up troops on the field, you did that for matters of combat efficiency, not 'honour'. Massing your troops gave them added shock effect and a mass of troops would slaughter a mob or a skirmish line. Arm your mass with long pointy things and suddenly it also became much more resistant to, say, being overrun by cavalry. The downside of massing your troops was of course that it became all but impossible to miss them when firing ranged weapons at them. But it took many centuries before ranged weapons improved to the point where compact formations and lines in battle became completely obsolete. As late as in the American Civil War, troops still fought in compact formations; artillery and rifles notwithstanding, the risk of being shredded by a cavalry charge was just too great if soldiers deployed in a skirmish formation. Only a couple of decades later this was no longer true. The invention of repeating rifles and the Maxim gun killed cavalry as the deciding arm on the battlefield. Of course, not everybody realised this at once and cavalry stayed as an important arm in many armies. And at least for reasons of mobility, it retained usefulness for a while. It was just that it turned into mounted infantry instead -- you ride to reach your position fast, then dismount and fight with your horse left outside the line of fire, hopefully. I am sure the horses at least considered this a vast improvement.

Or, you could click here. o.o (Link rather too violent and loud to be safe for work.)

I know it would really catch my attention if they in any way rode bareback on horses with saddles. That must be really uncomfortable, not to mention annoying for the poor horses.

Everything will be up in the air. Which was really my point, we have no idea what the new rules will be like if the system changes.