Re: (TFT) what Dark city modules have you played? Im thinking of getting

[Jay Carlisle <maou.tsaou@gmail.com>]

Interesting stuff guys.

I like to deal with populations as a whole.
It sets some simple but important limits and provides interesting fodder
for play.
As I'm fond of noting it wasn't until the green revolution that agriculture
and its related industry didn't take up the occupation of the vast majority
of the population as a whole.
Your problem as a monarch is rarely too many people but rather too few.
Typically you've got less than 10% of the population available to do
everything else you want to do apart from feed the people.
When military force and experts aren't springing outta thin air they start
to mean a lot more as components of play.
I prefer these sorts of limiting ideas as opposed to stuff just popping out
of nowhere for all practical purposes.
What was the Oswalt joke?

" If you hit a midget on the head with a stick, he turns into 40 gold
coins."

It's a "fairer" approach to the campaign style game IMO to have the larger
scale material required for a good campaign pretty well "fleshed out" ahead
of time.
A lot of this involves how one defines a campaign and what a given
individual expects from a RPG but I personally am of the opinion that if
you give players an interesting enough "sandbox" the stories make
themselves.
I like the game-world to be objectively described well enough to allow me
to play my own Figures during active play.
This implies that I should be able to setup the game-world in ways that
would even provide interesting situations for solo play.
Traveler could work like that as I recall.
TFT does a good job here too.
Of course, those guys didn't have access to the computing power I've got
personally which ain't much these days.
It'd be interesting to see Cidri as a Civ map.
4x games make pretty good world creators and are a very useful campaign
management tool.
You get stuff like geography, cultural boundaries, and a general idea of
the economy along with other cultures to compete against to name a few.
Oh yeah you also get populations and those cities I sweat about.
And Civ turns are few and far between compared to even 5 second turns.
Civ even helps with the drop in scale I commonly use into SimCity concepts
for individual cities with its building improvements.
Buildings are a really key concept for tying together smaller scales with
larger scales.
At the Figures pov in RPG scales the vast majority of activities that draw
individuals into groups require structural support of some kind.
Having a Job on the List in a given city implies the buildings and
equipment necessary to support it.
Without player Figures in an area it's enough to list the most important
structures in a city abstractly but once players start mucking about just
where in the city these structures are located becomes important.
Players create detail just by being.
A reason for crawling in that dungeon in the first place might be to obtain
the funds to setup that business back in town.
High risk (aka death) for high reward... though the treasure method is a
big problem for players unless they think like Bilbo.
Assuming a precious metal currency as an economic tool there's only so much
of the stuff moving around and treasure is not part of it.
Popping back into town with a chunk of dragon horde is usually not as
pleasant for players as they expect when I've run scenarios like this.
Not only is inflation a real bugbear once a bit of coin is dropped but as
quick as the grape vine tells the Business Sense folks that players have
big bucks the fees adjust accordingly.
And depending on what players try to do with the money the competition can
prove a lot more dangerous than the dungeon ever was.
NPC's are by far the deadliest normal critters in the game.
I agree with Mr. B that a theoretical 100pt human Figure is pretty
improbable,

HOLLY MOLEY MISS MOSES!!! I"LL HAVE ANOTHER!!!

Wow! sorry...

Bodie keeps trying to go wire to wire... my goodness.
Pretty stuff.

Uhhhh where was I?
Oh yeah, Yahtzee.
So to put 30 on a bell five d6 will do.
It implies the minimum attribute for a human is 5 to 30 rather than 8 to 30
but this is more back of the envelope here.
Something like 1 in 7500 throws is a yahtzee 6.
Three in a row is well over 400 billion I think.
We're at what now 7+ billion?
I'd read awhile back that there are roughly as many people around now as
have ever lived and died.
A rough guess might be a 1 in 25-ish chance of a max attribute Joe ever
walking around with a 50/50 shot of being around today.
Of course there's been a heck of an upswing on the population graph
compared to the early renaissance and odds are still going to be that such
a poly-? would be Asian with an Earth example.

I don't know about Bolt-like cavemen, my understanding is its more about
endurance than burst speed (ergo all the sweating), but I find it
interesting to contemplate speculation that the neolithic revolution
actually resulted in a pretty significant drop in overall life expectancy
from hunter gatherers.
It's like the Diamond stuff that I find more interesting as material for
campaign dynamics rather than factual history, I like the "what if"
implications from a design perspective.
Connecting the dots with all the blonde haired blue eyed injuns rumors over
here in the new world was a blast to get my hypothetical Vikings in a spot
to put longboats on Rapa Nui at it's height.
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