Goldengirl

I'm... not entirely sure what you mean? There are going to be different groups of people with different goals, but characters themselves aren't going to control factions. This is a character-based RP. It starts now. The IC (in-character) thread is here. There aren't classes in the same sense that there are in Geneforge. For one thing, no one will start off with any Shaping abilities. That said, characters will probably fit in with standard role-playing classes like rogue, mage, warrior, etc. because those are logical sets to specialize in. As for general tips, think of this like a cooperative storytelling event rather than a competition. We are collectively exploring the mystery and discovering the plot, rather than trying to "win." Your posts should read, in a loose sense, like sections of a novel. At the same time, you don't control the story, so it would be unfair for you to take over other people's characters or even try to hijack the story to make it about what you want (such as suddenly having a revived Ghaldring come into the story for no reason). Yes. That said, for the purposes of the game, the playable races are drayks, serviles, and humans. There are even sapient thahds and battle alphas, but I don't want to get into that either.

Depending on where the plot goes, there may be canisters or something that let you do that. For now, I don't really see the need. I'm going for more of a mystery-adventure than a straight up hack-n-slash style RP. And yes... Gazers being sentient is correct... technically. The best kind of correct?

It has been two hundred years since the Great Shaping War ended and the land settled into an uneasy peace between the old Shaping order of Terrestia and the victorious rebels of Sucia. The peace has been unstable, and often in name only. Cooperation between the two great powers was high at first, as uncontrolled Shaping was reined in and wild rogues hunted down jointly. The bitter process of rebuilding, though, and the constant demands by both sides for reparations have left relations tense. The occasional mad Lifecrafter vying for power has left the Shapers bitterly suspicious of Sucia; the violent suppression of the Serviles of Terrestia, who remain enslaved with little improvement in rights, has been used to portray the Shapers as barbarians. Both countries fear war, and few things keep them connected. Trade is taxed heavily to fund new buildups. The shipyards of both Lethia and Burwood are experiencing a boom, the forts along the Drypeak Mountains and the Okavano Fen are a-buzz with soldiers, and embassies are being sent out to call in old favors. In the deep recesses of the Foundry and the Grayghost Mountains, secret experiments are being conducted. The Shaper Council and the Assembly of Sucia watch these developments with concern, and they have responded with a last ditch effort to shore up relations. A recently returned expedition to a newly discovered island to the far north of the Okavano Fen provided the perfect opportunity. Both sides selected their brightest children and sent them to a new academy on the island, to be supplied by a small colony populated by citizens of both countries. There, the children studied the art of Shaping under the tutelage of some of the best magicians from both countries. With baited breath, the world waited. And they were succeeding. Until one day, both the students and the teachers had vanished without a trace. The workers sent to supply the school returned saying that the gates were barred and no one responded to their calls. Something suspicious happened. To make matters worse, a delegation of dignitaries from both nations will soon arrive to assess the progress of the school and negotiate. The need for secrecy is paramount. As such, a small band of adventurers was gathered from the colony to investigate the situation and restore the situation before the delegation arrives...

Howdy! After the discussion about having a play-by-post RP, I'm proud to announce that it's now happening! A few words on the setting for the uninitiated. Geneforge is actually a fairly low magic universe. There's no portals, no massive weapons of death, no mind control. The big exception is Shaping, in which Shapers (or Lifecrafters) magically create new life, mostly obedient. There are four sentient species. Humans, Serviles (humanoids made to be slaves), Drayks (small, sentient dragons that act like a stereotypical dragon), and Drakons (larger, two-legged walking dragons, typically arrogant). The three sentient creations and some humans led a rebellion to try to seize freedom and be able to take the power of Shaping for themselves. This led to about 15 years of war, after which the former Shaper Empire was divided between the old empire (called Terrestia) under the Shapers and the new nation (Sucia) led by the former rebel leaders. If there are any other aspects of the game that need explaining, please don't hesitate to ask. The actual location of the RP isn't anywhere in the games, but rather a mysterious island far to the north. Thus, having a lot of in-depth lore won't be the make-or-break for this game. For the Geneforge players, this is set 200 years after the endgame of Geneforge 5. The game assumes the Astoria ending. So, a few ground rules: 1. No godmodding. This typically includes things like killing other people's characters, claiming you have rare and exceptional skills/powers, etc. I'll make a few specific examples here. Don't incorporate anything into your post that you know from reading the thread, that your character themself wouldn't know. For example, if you know from reading that someone is going to betray everyone, don't have your character suddenly assassinate them to save the group. In addition, don't be a Drakon or a self-Shaped, mad magician. 2. NO SHAPING. I've thought about this a lot, and I just don't think that there's a good way to have characters be able to Shape without the game being unbalanced. This includes healing crafts - no clerics, sorry. The in-game reason for this is that all of the Shapers and Lifecrafters have vanished. That said, all other magic from the games is fine. For those who haven't played, this means blessings, mental magic spells like daze, and battle spells. Healing through pods and spores is fine. 3. Don't post too often or too much. Posting novels is a great way to kill an RP. It creates a huge barrier to entry. Posting too much is bad for a few reasons. First, it makes it so that people tend to post a lot of smaller, blippy actions. Second, it's selfish. This is a shared game, a cooperative role play, not a one-person narrative. 4. My role - I'll be acting as "the world" (NPCs, outside influences, etc.) and describing the general ebb of the events. This game has a rough time-limit (the arrival of the delegation) and I have some rough ideas about the plot, but I'm leaving most of this wide open. 5. Your role - this is an individual character RP, so each player controls one main character. People can have side characters (a lackey?) and deal with minor NPC's, but for the large part just keep it to one. If there's a compelling reason, I think that characters can have a pet creation, but nothing sentient and nothing too powerful. Beyond that, the players each control a mid-level adventurer investigating the mystery of the academy. I'm sure there are rules I'm forgetting, but Spiderwebbers tend to be pretty good at this. Be reasonable, and if anything comes up, I'll be the final judge.

I don't particularly think that it's useful to talk about ideal politics when there are very real materialistic problems that are very divorced from political ideals and deal far more with realistic situations that foil the implementation of models, such as ethnic difficulties, being poor, and strong extralegal entities. If you want to talk about an ideal nation, I suggest you play NationStates. That said, I'll be a total hypocrite and go back and answer the prompt later when I think about this more.

Here's my summation of thoughts. There will be a play-by-post RP. The voters were fairly mixed as to the setting, but Geneforge seems to be favored a bit, and it being a character RP seems almost universally favored. So, I'm going to think about the specifics a bit more, but it will be set in the Geneforge-verse. It won't be in the direct plotline of the Geneforge RPs (it'll be either really far in the past/future or in a really separate area) but the general gist will be the same. To keep it fair for the non-Geneforge people, I'll post the basic lore for the universe in the first post of the thread. I'll be the GM, with this following stipulation, My intention is to be pretty hands-off, though. I'll post some handy rules of thumb in the OOC thread to help in that regard.

Chinese 102 - return of the characters Tibet in Fact and Fiction - a fancy title for "Tibetan history in the 20th century" The English Language - 1 part grammar, 1 part history of the English language, 1 part contemporary issues (gendered pronouns, etc.) British literature in the 19th century - woo?

You're not the only one wanting to know when the Crystal Souls will be released. The Vahnatai have been waiting anxiously for the return of their elders.

Usually in these threads, I look back on the year and I'm surprised at how many movies I've watched. This was not one of those years. The Lego Movie: Awful. The "meta" plot was disgustingly sappy and completely unnecessary in my opinion. The romance was rushed and made no sense. The jokes were lousy, with a very small amount of exceptions. Amazing Spiderman 2: Very good. If you like superhero movies, watch it. If you don't, watch it anyways and understand it as exemplar of the genre.

Too many cooks may spoil the RP, Slarty, but they have basically every setting... My image of the GM is someone who is used sparingly. Basically, having a preset authority figure that everyone defers to for questions of fairness. In my experience, godmodders have almost always been able to argue some way that they're fair, to the point where everyone else just gets frustrated and quits. That, I think, is undesirable. Not saying that that extreme solution would crop up, but minor issues inevitably will.

I can see the point you're making, Nalyd (and by extension, Alo). I'm not sure than a committee in an OOC thread would be any faster, though. The ultimate solution may just be to have very clear parameters on what can be done and what can't. That's what a GM would do anyway. I just worry that that takes some of the creativity (which is the fun of RP'ing) out of it.

I've been itching to play a roleplaying game with Spiderwebbers for a long time. And, Spiderwebbers have been playing them for a long time. RP's with cool names like, "The Bloodstained Sky," have proliferated to good success, from what I've seen. My problem is that I have no real interest in those games. They're a logistical nightmare for me (and I suspect others) who can't make time windows open up at the right moments. Moreover, as a more personal problem, I'm very inexperienced with D&D type roleplaying at all, which would be an added barrier. So, I'm asking about community interest to play a play-by-post RP. This has a lot of precedence in Spiderweb history, for instance with the Mountain of Shadows RP, the World of Avernum RPs, and more. They've worked before, they've fizzled before. One trick that I think could work would be to have a central player (me) act as a kind of GM. One thing that I know has gotten into contention in past RP's, specifically in RP's based on fantasy settings, is the role of research. In a Geneforge based RP, players kept revealing stronger and stronger creations that could overcome everyone's defenses. This got into a rather ridiculous arms race. I remember in an Avernum based RP there was some contention when one character started using cannons, justifying it by saying that technological development had occurred. Godmodding in general is a problem, especially when players are adversaries of each other. I think having a GM to arbitrate disputes and decide certain key elements would work well, without having to get into all of the technicalities and mechanics of dice-based AIMHacks. I think this could help a play-by-post RP work where predecessors haven't before. I also think that having the convenience to post at your own pace is a lot less of logistical nightmare than getting everyone together for an AIM session. The flipside, of course, is that people might become inactive, but that's something I'm hoping 1) won't happen, and 2) can be dealt with by the GM. Thoughts?

I briefly mixed up your member ID with your post count and thought you were just pulling a trick on us, counting on no one actually checking. That sounds like a Nalyd thing to do. Congratulations.

I don't know, I've heard that gazers are very "biological." (thanks for that weird tidbit of information from G4, Jeff)

I don't have much to add that hasn't been neatly and succinctly said by Slarty, Nalyd, and Kel. I will say this, though. The "Starbucks and Slavery" thread, from which you pulled your quote and which I believe is responsible in large part for this discussion, started from a different locus than you seem to understand. The problem I was seeking input on can be easily summed up, "Our money from consumer behavior and taxes is going to do Bad Things. What do we do about that? The issue here is one of reconciling the dissonance between political ideals and pragmatic consumer behavior, not a call to violence against anyone who has ever bought hummus. If I were to be blunt about it and really apply a radical political lens, I'd start with a more foundational understanding: "There is no outside to global capitalism." Everyone that we know, aside from isolated natives in the Amazon rain forest, is enmeshed in the capitalist system through production and consumption. Therefore, we are all complicit in the machinery. If anyone who "supports" immoral behavior with their money is an enemy, then there are literally no allies, only enemies. It's from this logic that the principle I posed earlier arose, that, "There is no ethical consumption under late capitalism." I'm still confused as to the adjective "late" in that maxim, but the analysis still stands. The most we can do is try to choose the lesser of (millions) of evils, which isn't much at all.

That's a pretty bold claim, Synergy. Why is the dollar a powerful vote? And what makes you think that it's the only vote we have left?

I guess sometimes we freely choose to do things we don't want to do. I guess that's being an adult.

There are all sorts of reasons to be vegetarian. I'll summarize a few of them. 1. Environmental. The agricultural industry produces more tons of greenhouse gases than all transportation, globally. It takes one gallon of gasoline to produce one pound of beef. Not eating meat for a year saves 300,000 gallons of water. Etc. http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/environment.html 2. Calories. Just strictly speaking, we get less calories the further distant our food is from the initial life-giving rays of the sun. Plants photosynthesize and we get energy when we eat them. Cows eat plants, and burn some of that energy by breathing and other wasteful acts like that. Therefore, we are losing energy by eating cows instead of eating the grain that we feed the cows. 3. Morals. Lots of people have moral objections to how we treat animals. Generally speaking, I'm not one of them, and there are far too many philosophical objects for me to summarize them.

Since I'm a vegan, I'm at least not very involved in the market processes that contribute to animal captivity.

Do you enjoy discussing controversial topic? I debate on a competitive circuit professionally, so you'd think so. Generally not though, as I find most everyday conversations horribly uninformed and prone to ad hominem attacks. Ideally yes, though. What is your stance on LGBT? I don't like the oppression that I suffer as a result of my queer identity, but that said I have certain theoretical objections to the lumping together of identities that is the alphabet soup acronym (LGBTQQIIAADP2...) in that it groups together forms of oppression that are only tangentially related. The "community" coalition doesn't make sense to me as its political aims are often radically divergent and prone to in-fighting. Do you believe extraterrestrials? Yes, but more importantly I don't care. What is your stance on globalization? I answered this in the context of economic free trade; that's a huge issue separate from other issues of "globalization" such as cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and pluralism. They are only related in the weakest of senses, and you don't need one to have the other whatsoever. Economically, it works best. The math is there when we look at things like comparative advantages. Therefore, free trade is the most efficient. I don't want to go through the mathematics of it, but it can easily be found and is intuitively obvious. Where it doesn't function is that capitalism in general, and globalized neoliberalism in specific, is unable to create a comprehensive price. There are too many factors that aren't included in the actual final price, externalities such as insufficient labor pay, massive environmental damages, harm to the public political structures, etc. It needs to be changed drastically. What is your stance on animal captivity? I don't care. And I don't have to be bothered to care, because I'm a vegan. What is your stance on feminism? If you aren't a feminist, get away from me and my rights. What is your stance on gun laws? Guns are a privilege that should be regulated. I don't really see a reason why they are needed, so maybe they should be eliminated entirely, though I understand that's difficult and that there are benefits to having them. As such, I'll fall mildly on the left, saying that they should be restricted rather than eliminated. Putting more guns in schools is an awful idea. Do you believe in a god? No. Do you believe the extinction of mankind will come in the short-term or long-term as compared to the geological timescale. I think civilization will continue, even if humanity doesn't transition away from global capitalism to something more sustainable before the system comes collapsing down on us. That said, civilization may look a lot more like society in 2000 BC than anything we are familiar with. Hopefully in the reboot we won't reinvent the patriarchy.

I suppose the question I'm trying to get at here most clearly, is this, Is it worth caring about what corporations do with my money after I buy a product from them? Specifically from an ethical and moral point of view. And yeah, smash the patriarchy and all that.

Salmon gets at a deeper issue here that I've been grappling with a lot lately, namely the relationship between the consumer and the producer. Do costumers have a moral obligation to the people they buy from? I've seen this concept a lot lately. The Ferguson protesters have called for boycotts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday to send a political message about the importance of their cause. Starbucks coffee, as well as many other corporations (eg. Toms Shoes) allows you to buy charity at the same time as you buy their product. Philosophy rock star Slavoj Zizek, in his characteristic manner, deconstructs that issue better than I can . People call light to the worker's rights abuses of various companies and assign them ethical boycotts; I know a lot of my fellow women refuse to buy things at Hobby Lobby following the controversial Supreme Court decision they forwarded. I personally never would have bought anything from Hobby Lobby anyway. I've gotten beaten over the head with the phrase, "There is no ethical consumption in late capitalism," by my friends; I run in odd social circles. I wonder, though. Sure, charities are abusive, and the system of capitalism as it now stands doesn't do well by a lot of people, but is there really no ethics? When I buy my morning coffee, am I complicit in a system of slavery? I hope that I can get some insight from my fellow Spiderwebbers.

It could happen; I'm not sure how the general category (leadership/mechanics/luck) would be dealt with. The real problem, though, is I just don't see those categories as big enough to support skill trees in their current iteration. There's no more nuance than "fire shaping," for instnace, which makes for three branches in the Shaping category that are each just one node long. Also, I'd like to see the healing category separated from Shaping and put somewhere neutral. It makes a modicum of sense to have them together, since they are both concerning life in a broad sense, but it doesn't make sense that an Agent shouldn't be able to heal effectively because that's in the Shaping category. I feel like it should be neutral of class choice. Aside from gameplay reasons, there's also plot basis for this, as there are healers who are not Shapers. The Shapers guard their skills jealously, so it wouldn't make sense for them to tolerate healers outside of their sect.

Please don't implement the Avadon-style skill tree. I just don't see how that can reasonably be applied to Shaping, and I really don't want to see things like leadership/mechanics become class-dependent. Having the option to play as a Shaper lookalike in G4 would be cool, with similar justifications as were given to G5. It wouldn't make as much sense in context, though. Earlier expansion of the types of creations that can be made. Specifically in G2, they've been experimenting a lot, and I would like to see the results of that. It would be interesting to have creations that are only available in certain games because they were later abandoned or forgotten. G2 with special Barzite creations, G1 with ancient creations that were later deemed unstable, etc. Please don't hire body guards or set up fortresses. That makes no sense in the game.

So, I've been reading books about pirates. Specifically, the book Pirates of the South China Sea, by Dian Murray. It's about the rise and demise of a pirate confederation in the early nineteenth century. By the numbers, it was the most powerful group of pirates in history. Hundreds of junks, thousands of pirates, an unwavering monopoly over the coasts of southern China extending into the inland rivers. Both the European trade companies (Spanish, Portuguese, and British) and the Qing navy tried (and failed) multiple times to beat the pirates, before their leader voluntarily arranged for peace negotiations with the governor of Guangdong province. It was also very queer. There were prostitutes that were for the use of the whole ship, but they were rarely used; one British captive reported that instead that the male pirates engaged in 'group public acts against nature.' Their leader was a woman, which is perhaps the most badass part of the story. Cheng I Sao, a former prostitute, was a master politician who used sexual politics and shrewd negotiating to maintain an iron fist control over her dominion. She had her own set of laws that she enforced over her fleet, which contained protections for female prisoners. She arranged for most villages along the coast and rivers to pay tribute to her fleet, she eliminated her rivals, and at the height of their power, she successfully bought all of the pirates legal sanction by returning to legal status in the empire. She walked to the governor's mansion with forty women and children, unarmed, and successfully negotiated a favorable deal.