Generic Table top gaming.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

4 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Traveller has always been math heavy, but not during play.  The math takes place during design phases.

I am not sure I agree. I played original Traveller as a teen, and while it did employ a good deal of math I would not call it math _heavy_. At the time my math was mostly grade school level and I had no trouble. This... sounds like it is way past that level.

Of course 'heavy' is relative and others might disagree. YMMV. But at least back then I did not consider the required math burdensome.

[mlooney 3,417]

The only not during design phase math formula that classic traveller has is the in system time of flight formula.  It's no so much math as it is accounting for design phase stuff.
 

[The Old Hack 2,448]

15 hours ago, mlooney said:

The only not during design phase math formula that classic traveller has is the in system time of flight formula.  It's no so much math as it is accounting for design phase stuff.

Errr, to clarify, I was not disagreeing about the math being during design phases but about it being heavy. I feel very early Traveler tended to rely on the more accessible forms of math and rarely went above grade school level. At least I never had much trouble with it and I am hardly a math genius.

[mlooney 3,417]

6 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Errr, to clarify, I was not disagreeing about the math being during design phases but about it being heavy. I feel very early Traveler tended to rely on the more accessible forms of math and rarely went above grade school level. At least I never had much trouble with it and I am hardly a math genius.

True, the worse that Classic Traveller had was square roots, which are easy enough to do by hand, if some what tedious.

[ijuin 572]

Really, anything beyond basic algebra should be optional in a game, unless the math is the point of playing (e.g. manually plotting firing solutions for artillery in a naval battle where the ships are moving)

[mlooney 3,417]

1 hour ago, ijuin said:

Really, anything beyond basic algebra should be optional in a game, unless the math is the point of playing (e.g. manually plotting firing solutions for artillery in a naval battle where the ships are moving)

Classic Traveller used vector movement for space battles.  Granted it did it with 3 counters plus some string and no actual vector math was needed, but you could, if you wanted, plot out movement using vector math.

[Darth Fluffy 302]

17 hours ago, mlooney said:

Classic Traveller used vector movement for space battles.  Granted it did it with 3 counters plus some string and no actual vector math was needed, but you could, if you wanted, plot out movement using vector math.

I had a board game from the same folks that was a race in space based on the same mechanics. I don't recall the name. The publisher would have been Game Designer's Workshop. But the mechanics worked very well, it was a good simulation of having momentum and altering it incrementally. Passing close to planets also had a path altering effect due to gravity.

Ah, here it is, Triplanetary. I do not recall combat being involved, might be based on the scenario we played. Ah, yes, 'Grand Tour'.

I believe their Mayday was similar. It was more of a Traveller tie-in, but did not rate as well as Triplanetary. Triplanitary came out a few years earlier, and Mayday may have been viewed as a rehash. It also incorporated the ships computer, which limited options depending on the computer model, this may have been too much of a nerf. (Realistically, computers are cheap, small and light. They do not limit what can be done. But Mayday was created in the 1970s. Small computers were still largely ineffectual.)

 

[ijuin 572]

1 hour ago, Darth Fluffy said:

(Realistically, computers are cheap, small and light. They do not limit what can be done. But Mayday was created in the 1970s. Small computers were still largely ineffectual.)

 

Yes. The computer (or smartphone) that you are reading this message on is almost certainly more powerful than the greatest supercomputer in the world forty years ago. A current high-end consumer-grade desktop probably matches the world’s best supercomputer in 1990.

[mlooney 3,417]

1 hour ago, Darth Fluffy said:

I believe their Mayday was similar. It was more of a Traveller tie-in, but did not rate as well as Triplanetary. Triplanitary came out a few years earlier, and Mayday may have been viewed as a rehash. It also incorporated the ships computer, which limited options depending on the computer model, this may have been too much of a nerf. (Realistically, computers are cheap, small and light. They do not limit what can be done. But Mayday was created in the 1970s. Small computers were still largely ineffectual.)

Yeah, Mayday is a game of starship combat based on Traveller, just like Snapshot is a game of personal scale combat based on Traveller.  As far as computer go, back in the Classic Traveller day, they took up multiple dTons displacement.  A dTon is about 13.5 cubic meters.  Current Mongoose publishing rules has them taking up no space and are assumed to be part of the bridge's displacement.

[Darth Fluffy 302]

1 hour ago, mlooney said:

Yeah, Mayday is a game of starship combat based on Traveller, just like Snapshot is a game of personal scale combat based on Traveller.  As far as computer go, back in the Classic Traveller day, they took up multiple dTons displacement.  A dTon is about 13.5 cubic meters.  Current Mongoose publishing rules has them taking up no space and are assumed to be part of the bridge's displacement.

The Mongoose rules are more realistic. By the time we are that sophisticated in spaceflight, the electronics should be trivial. Heinlein foresaw this long before the 70s, he called it sub-molar electronics, a mole being a chemical term, and a fairly small amount. I think we're well under that now.

I had Snapshot, never got to play it. It got moldy in storage and I ad to toss it.

I though the level of detail of those would be a plus to an RPG, but years later, I think it would bog down the play.

[Darth Fluffy 302]

1 hour ago, ijuin said:

Yes. The computer (or smartphone) that you are reading this message on is almost certainly more powerful than the greatest supercomputer in the world forty years ago. A current high-end consumer-grade desktop probably matches the world’s best supercomputer in 1990.

Not quite so much. You phone has more computing power than the Apollo Space program, but it also wastes a lot of that power on stupid $#!# you don't care about. Each tiny piece of computing power in the Apollo program was focused on task.

Corollary: I had control in CP/M 80 and in DOS. Windows hides $#!# from me. The higher the version, the more it hides.

I saw a Cray in the early 80s. I'm pretty sure that archaic Cray could outperform your phone, but maybe just because it is dedicated to a specific task.

The Connection Machine was a theoretical model for a new approach to supercomputing in the early 80s, the first prototypes were being built. One of the scariest things I've seen was at the NSA museum outside Ft. Meade, MD on one of the Baltimore - Washington Expressways in the early 1990s. They had already retired one, ten years after 'can this be done'. "What the devil did you replace that with?" I had similar feelings about the SR-71 being retired.

The NSA museum is (or was) open to the public.

 

[mlooney 3,417]

3 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Corollary: I had control in CP/M 80 and in DOS. Windows hides $#!# from me. The higher the version, the more it hides.

For windows get Cygwin, for Android get Termux.  BASH command line and a full set of *nix development tools.

[Darth Fluffy 302]

27 minutes ago, mlooney said:

For windows get Cygwin, for Android get Termux.  BASH command line and a full set of *nix development tools.

I've used Cygwin. It is helpful, but it does not unmake Windows. For that you need an actual defenestration tool, like a Linux install.

Windows will continue to spend a good portion of your computers horsepower tracking your activities and selling you $#!$ until you do.

[mlooney 3,417]

Cygwin is the 2nd thing I install on a Windows machine, right after Firefox.

[Darth Fluffy 302]

12 hours ago, mlooney said:

Cygwin is the 2nd thing I install on a Windows machine, right after Firefox.

I run Firefox, and set DuckDuckGo as my browser. Also add AdBlockPlus, Ghostery, FaceBook Container, Flash Block Plus, and HTTPS Everywhere. Plus, of course, an AV; using BitDefenser now.

I ran Kaspersky for years, it seemed to be a reliable product. I had no issues, but given the situation with Russia, I would no longer trust it.

[mlooney 3,417]

3 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Flash Block Plus

Given that flash isn't supported by any current browser, not sure that is needed.  Otherwise pretty close to my load up.

[Darth Fluffy 302]

Some of my websites I visit that should know better are still using Flash. So I never turned it off. It still works, so I block it unless I am at a website I know and trust.

[mlooney 3,417]

Are you sure they are using flash, not HTML 5 video options?  I thought that once flash went unsupported you couldn't get it to play.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

On 7/6/2023 at 7:38 PM, Darth Fluffy said:

The Connection Machine was a theoretical model for a new approach to supercomputing in the early 80s, the first prototypes were being built. One of the scariest things I've seen was at the NSA museum outside Ft. Meade, MD on one of the Baltimore - Washington Expressways in the early 1990s. They had already retired one, ten years after 'can this be done'. "What the devil did you replace that with?" I had similar feelings about the SR-71 being retired.

The CompSci Department in the University of Copenhagen still uses a PDP-9 for protection of their main server.

Admittedly they use it to block a window previously employed as an access route for hardware thieves, but it still counts.

[mlooney 3,417]

A PDP 9 is a massive beast.

[Darth Fluffy 302]

On 7/8/2023 at 5:02 AM, mlooney said:

A PDP 9 is a massive beast.

I've never seen one. I've worked with several PDP-11s; they weren't that big, but each extra feature was typically as separate box, so a system was generally a full rack.

The biggest I've seen in use were IBM 360s; late 60's design, big but not sprawling huge. Oh, and an early Cray in around 1979/1980.

The oldest was an IBM 1170 in my school district. The processor was not huge (I think it was anemic), but the system was a good sized desk with bulky peripherals everywhere. It has one of the high speed band printers that sounded like a machine gun.

[Darth Fluffy 302]

Bwah Haw Haw Haw, Traveller

Take down opponent by resurrection

[mlooney 3,417]

3 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Bwah Haw Haw Haw, Traveller

Just for the record, character death in the current playable versions of Traveller is a very optional rule.  And even in Classic Traveller there was an optional rule that made failing a survival check just mean that you aged 2 years instead of 4 and started play at that point. 

[Darth Fluffy 302]

3 hours ago, mlooney said:

Just for the record, character death in the current playable versions of Traveller is a very optional rule.  And even in Classic Traveller there was an optional rule that made failing a survival check just mean that you aged 2 years instead of 4 and started play at that point. 

I had a character die in creation in Traveller. Just went on to start another, really not that big a deal. But it's funny as hell, "I died before we even started playing."

[Darth Fluffy 302]

This reminds me of a game I've played 'recently' - within the last five years - at our local game store. It was an intro session, and I don't remember the name of the game, it was D&D-like. The big difference was that instead of starting a player character, you start a handful of glorified NPCs with farm implements as weapons, no real skills, and so on. It is expected that most of them will die. They obliged. Several of us ran through our starting characters, and the dm just handed us more. By the end of the game, survivors have some XP to spend on skills and abilities. I was an interesting system. In a sense it was like kicking the Traveller potentially lethal character creation up a notch. The kill rate was much higher.