Re: (TFT) Poison

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

On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 7:04 AM, Denis DesHarnais wrote:

> Yes!  Exactly!   I think?  Are you saying that you would allow poison, but
> make the means of procuring it, and the impact of using it to be realistic,
> both on an individual and societal level?  If so, then we are of like
> mind!  I think?
>
>

Yes that's where I'm at.
I've come to be a big fan of actually building a game-world.
I'm also lazy so I'm constantly looking to incorporate stuff I already like
in it that's simple and easy to use like TFT.
For a WW II campaign I'd start with TFT for the RPG aspects.
If the players really start "living" at this level of the campaign then
it'll evolve into GURPS.
For the squad/RTS/SimCity layer I use the old Goblin mini-game (like the
2nd Air Eaters... step up from micro-games but not a full blown war-game...
seems to have mostly been a printing format thing... you can only fit so
much on a coffee table).
A RPG Figure w/Leadership can move Units on this scale and if we spend lots
of real-time at this scale of things then it evolves into Squad Leader with
LOADS of niffty detail w/o Jay trying to out expert experts all by his poor
lonesome self.
At the command level it's Axis and Allies.
I have a copy of Rise and Decline of the Third Reich that I use to scare
off posers, maybe I can trick someone into actually playing it for a change
by using this for detailed theater commands.
And of course each nation has its ongoing game of Junta that never stops,
even for "world" war.
Throwing a computer into the mix allows for some interesting tools as well.
The planet Earth is the implied "sandbox" and barring some more wide open
stuff (like getting involved in the war as a part of a space opera sci-fi
campaign (R.A.H. did it with the Great War) or a Mnoren campaign which is
likely to focus on some interest of the Mnoren player in question ergo my
interest in being able to transpose to a more detailed system for each
scale I'm using.

Once you have a frame (WW II) and scales (RPG, Tactical, Strategy,
Geo-Political) it's pretty much just a matter of how to build up or break
down Combat Results Tables to scale and what's "universal" across the
scales, like material resources, and how that's defined in the game.

I use Earth for all my stuff right now.
I have done quite a bit of messing around with world creators like the Civ
stuff ("digging" Dwarf Fortress... soooo much "fun") but that's still very
abstract compared to using the Earth and it's flora, fauna, geological
makeup and history and yada yada yada.
It still gets pretty speculative pretty quick (a campaign set on Pangea,
what was that like?) but generally that approach gives me a boatload of
basic information about something like poison just by googleing it.
It's kindda pre-written in a whole lot of specifics and if I'm using the
"rules to make rules" concept then fitting it into the game-world shouldn't
be much of an issue.
The other approach is to add a fantasy element but I'd still look at the
Wikipedia stuff and whatnot as a model of the kind of info and details
you'd want to include in the definitions of the fantasy poison so it holds
up a bit under "questioning".
When people mess up real-world quantum stuff imagine what they do to
game-world junk...

Oh yeah, speaking of google, I never liked Scholar (3).
It's not the Scholar so much as it is the (3).
Pretty steep cost it seems depending on the latitude granted the Talent in
a given campaign (like 'how good is 32 pts?').
Is allowing a player to use Wikipedia on their smartphone during play
enough to justify the cost?
Editing Wikipedia from a smartphone during play is Mnoren stuff... best not
to go there yet.
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