Jeff Zeitlin, Tim Collinson, the Regiment O' Toms, other list members,
et al,
Pvt. Tom reporting for duty in the Regiment. Long live Queen! (and Rush too!)
;)
As per the subject line, the PA verse is not buggered. Nor is it
resting. And definitely not pining for anything, fjords or otherwise.
We all know that whole project was a boondoggle and that the entire mathematical basis for the experiment was flawed, so the lack thereof is non-problematic. But the advice to cart a towel with you seems credible.
The limiting reagent has been me finding a) enough time, b) a chapter
name, and c) enough brainwidth to write up the latest series of
misadventures overlapping the outbreak of Interstellar War 2: Electric
Boogaloo, since this mob broke the timeline away from canon in Parental
Advisory: Vector Thrust.
Player feedback has been fairly consistent in the game being a) fun, b)
different and c) sweating stuff not ordinarily sweated in our gaming
sessions.
It's good to pull people into new experiences as long as you can still give them some of the familiar to keep them feeling not totally adrift. That's called growth. Or maybe that's what we call it after the recovery from the biological excreta hitting the rotary atmo impeller at c-fractional velocity..... when the dust clears, it is growth. :)
Part of the fun for me has been deconstructing players' latent
assumptions (notoriously, Easy Frag) about what is _necessarily_ implied
by a sci-fi setting with FTL, even a comparatively near-future one as PA.
It's always fun to take the incredibly confident assumptions and tip some over... as in over a cliff...
Deconstructing the assumption of faster-than-travel comms (I can't
abbreviate this as FTTC - my brain backronyms that as fibre-to-the-curb)
was fairly lulzworthy - especially Easy Frag's blank look (over voice
comms) at me telling him Nikki, his PC, was aboard one of the fastest
communication devices seen in the Milky Way galaxy in the past 300,000
years.
* Lol * - Brilliant!
Universal Currency is another one, even if taking a few more attempts
than expected to mallet flat. Part of it has been people like Jordan
Weisman (Shadowrun), Mike Pondsmith (Cyberpunk 2020/203X/RED/etc),
Hilmar Petursson (EVE Online), to name a few, opting for a universal
currency in their works (nuyen, eurobucks and InterStellar Kredits,
respectively).
I have a fondness for the Imperial Credit. There are some practical reasons, but their is the obvious vanity project for every Duke, Archduke or Emperor to get their face on some cred notes everyone is using.
That said, it is the specie of trade within the Imperium, but there are thousands of other currencies and have varying exchange rates. (I used the article out of the wee-book version of TAS from way back in CT to establish planetary currency values although I add a bit of a random factor and a bit of a 'what's the local situation?' aspect in determining the final rates and they change daily).
I can't blame Hilmar et al as much - I've tried designing a
multiple-ingame-currency setup that addresses most of the known MMO
problems (I nicked liberally from GURPS Cyberworld) for a proposed MMO,
and the effort was significantly nontrivial.
It would be.
Having a big pile of Imperial credits and said pile being sod-all use in
the Terran Confederation has helped drive the point home, though.
Well, that is the problem if you didn't change your currency at the border.... unless of course you get back home and then you can spend it.
What you *really* should have done is turned it into some imperishable, high value, low volume cargo: zucchai crytals, lanthinum bars, original Vlandian art from 2000 years ago, etc. then you can use that to turn back into other currencies. I hear a smuggling hold full of guns is a good bet too.
The sheer amount of _damage_ the PCs have done to their own ship has had
me in tears, laughing.
Are you sure your pilot's early life background was not 'Demoliton Derby Driver'?
Especially now I've started applying the
"sustained damage" rules (MGT2 core, p 158 or so), wherein Das Boot cops
a severity 1 critical hit each time it loses 10% of its starting hull
points - I reroll the system affected each time, as it would seem to
default to hull hits otherwise.
Yes, stuff does pile up. One day, they'll have to acquire themselves a new ride.
I have yet to fully introduce the effects lack of faster-than-travel
comms has had on banking. That should be interesting.
The system has had hundreds if not thousands of years to sort out FTL issues. There must be some common inter-polity agreements (when not at war) and there must be some common ways to extend credit throughout nearby planets.
Things they've had to worry about:
- Temporary legal inability to lift due to lack of non-incapacitated
master's ticket holder while facing a cargo time limit.
Yes, but their must be some waiver you could get. There are exception provisions in most such rules regimes.
- Nusku Highport "forgetting" to pressurise the berth after Curly, the
new pilot, bounced Das Boot off the framework on the way in.
The place needed some redecorating!
- Aforementioned currency issues.
It's all about the credits.
- Bank drafts, letters of credit, and the differences between them.
I assume within the distance of a particular banking entity (and that will vary by entity), they can also do debit credit cards (well, more of a debit card). You go in, you lay out your money and they load you a card and the card is like public key encryption - you can use it at other branches of the company and the password (another key for use) includes genetic info from the user encoded in a complex key generator (biometrics).
Underneath, it assumes that Bank Entity A owns branches Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc. and that when someone gets a debit card at Alpha and takes it to Beta, Beta will allow you to cash it after verifying your bona fides.
Credit cards are a wee bit harder, but not much, but would be harder to get and would be for more restricted amounts. The possibilities of scams could exist, but genetic information would be required to be provided and banks have some *very bad* people to ruthlessly hunt those that skip on debt. They also have a long memory. And all the major banks charge surcharges enough to use insuring 3rd parties where all the banks aggregate fraud risks together. Risk is thus mitigated and one bank will keep out for cheats or scammers and put the word out for a fair distance if they encounter them... and other banks will have their back. They may be competitors, but everyone wants it known you don't screw with the bank.
If you had a well familiar milk run for a decade with a family in a local system, credit might be easy to come by. If you are new vagabonds from 3 sectors away... you might get a card for 500 Cr.
Now, a secured Line of Credit could put your ship or other major asset into lein status. It would yield more credits than an unsecured one.
The further out into the fringes or wilds, the smaller banking entities are (in terms of scope within a sector) and the more careful they are of strangers. They also tend to be far more horrible to those cheating them (not just arresting them... sometimes all the pieces are never located).
Least wise that's what I do.
- Disabling the ship's armour. (Nikki ended up stripping the entire
original, compromised, armour shell and is in the process of replacing it)
Why would law-abiding individuals need defenses?
- El Capitane taking the helm during skimming (after Curly leeroyed into
the Deeps, imposing a -2 turbulence mod), despite having a net Pilot
(spacecraft) mod of 0.
Repat after me: NEVER let the Captain take the helm. IF you think it might work okay, THINK AGAIN.
To avoid banks (registered or underworld), some people would use a shawallah model (A trusted courier is sent from A to B to deliver money but he does not carry it, but instead he stops at someone with money at B and provides some information to convince that someone that monies deposited at A in his name will cover the money the courier wants, who then takes it to the customer). This works in ethnic communities that are fairly insular but stretch across multiple systems.
TomB
Alex
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