Profile for Student of Trinity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Student of Trinity |
| Member number | 3431 |
| Title | Electric Sheep One |
| Postcount | 3335 |
| Homepage | |
| Registered | Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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| Avernum 5, April Update in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 23 2007 05:09
Profile
Realism is important, but that's why pen and paper games are nice, where you have a GM with the power to play God, instead of just a bunch of mindlessly applied rules. If the GM says the rock is inescapable, you get no saving throw. You die. Fun game. What a great GM. Otherwise, if the GM allows a saving throw to survive the rock, that means the rock isn't inescapable. There's a high ceiling, or something that could stop the rock, or whatever. If you make the save, the GM has to think up some explanation of how you survived. Explaining how characters survive is usually not hard to put over, but explaining an unfavorable die roll, when the players argue that their success should have been automatic, can take some fast thinking. If the GM isn't up to handling situations like this convincingly, the game loses a lot. For advanced players, a nice variant on having the GM think up excuses for survival is to make the players propose how they hope to survive, before rolling. The GM may then apply bonuses or penalties, or simply rule failure or success, based on how good the proposal is. In a CRPG, you just have to do the excuse part yourself. The games never specify the rock so precisely that this is impossible. [ Wednesday, May 23, 2007 05:16: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, May 22 2007 23:20
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Since I have to chair a PhD defense today, I feel like offering the hope that a PhD does require a relatively high level of intelligence — unless of course it is just bought from a degree mill. In private universities it's a real issue for a program, whether and how to eject students who may have paid a hundred grand in tuition, but just don't seem to be making the grade. Generally though they bite the bullet and do it, when the case is clear, because in the long run they'll get more students paying those high tuitions if the degree continues to be seen to mean something, than if they get the reputation as a place where you pay your money, do your time, and pick up your diploma. It certainly doesn't certify anyone as a genius, though. Having a PhD is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being brilliant. Having said all that, the winnowing out phase of graduate school happens well before the final defense of the thesis. If you get that far, it's pretty much impossible to fail. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, May 22 2007 23:08
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I'm not sure it actually is so unusual. It's just the anti-intellectual strand in American culture that makes it seem as though religion and reason are oil and water. Guys like Oral Roberts and Jerry Falwell are not really representative of religion in general, or even of evangelical protestant Christianity in general. The older Christian denominations, classical Islam, and I think also Buddhism have always been big on reason. There are always a certain number of premises that are simply assumed, but that's true for every viewpoint, religious or not. On really basic questions, reason offers limited help, because it gets hard to find any premises that don't beg the questions. I think that there is some property of 'reasonableness', though, other than strict logical inference, to which even basic discussions can aspire. Most religions seem to me to manage this; the ones that don't are a sometimes shrill minority. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, May 22 2007 13:41
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Wikipedia claims that Faust got his degree in 'divinity' — that is, theology — from Heidelberg, in 1509. (So much for Heidelberg, harumph.) Apparently the second degree in canon law, theology or medicine made one a Doctor in the late middle ages, whereas in other subjects one became a Master. Another source I found specifies that this Faust's Heidelberg degree was only a Bachelor's, however. Identifying this historical Faust with the legendary magician is of course conjectural. I expect anyone who could pretend to education could get away with styling themselves Doctor. Goethe's original has 'ach, Philosophie' and 'leider ... Theologie', so both translations seem to be reasonable. Our guy was down on both subjects. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, May 21 2007 22:25
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quote:Nicely put! Kelandon's right, and I think that's why. But really the two things go together: if you can quickly recognize a good argument, you can recognize a bad one too. And people who can't tell how bad their own arguments are probably have no idea what they're missing. But I don't think that it's really a matter of people not being sophisticated enough. In a way, it's being too sophisticated. Some people seem to me to think that making a good argument on a big topic somehow has different rules from ordinary common sense. I sometimes suspect that people have read specialized discussions that they didn't understand, and gotten the idea that meaningless mumbo-jumbo was the thing to do. Stating things baldly in plain terms, or with down-to-earth analogies, makes it a lot harder to kid yourself that what you've said makes sense. Ash: I'd be interested in a discussion with you sometime, but right now I'm very busy, and also a bit tired of evolution and design. Next time the topic comes up, which it eventually will, we can try something. I'm not sure one-on-one would really be best, though, simply because I have very little training in biology. But how to make a larger discussion work efficiently is another interesting problem. [ Monday, May 21, 2007 22:28: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, May 21 2007 22:02
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Faust is supposed to have studied lots of things. Marlowe's version also whips him through most of what passed then for knowlede in a short soliloquoy. But how precisely did he qualify for his title of Doctor? For that matter, how did anyone, in Faust's day? As to Alas, Theology, perhaps the English translator just needed another foot. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Monday, May 21 2007 11:53
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I believe he was referring to the good Dr. Faust. But what kind of doctorate did Faust actually have? Was it medicine, or canon law, or something? I forget. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Pen and Paper Anyone? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, May 20 2007 23:47
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Up to a point it's fun to play around with character generation systems. What my gang decided we wanted was a mixture of being able to choose your strengths and weaknesses, and having some random element whereby the dice decided for you what your character's aptitudes would be. After playing for years, we wanted a bit of surprise in rolling up a new character; but wanted something playable, too. So in the traditional AD&D scheme of six scores from 3 to 18, I had people roll two dice for each ability, giving a base score from 2 to 12. They also rolled a separate pool of 12 dice (plus a few more if their scores looked too bad). They then used these 12 'pool' scores to add to or replace the base scores, to make up their final set of six scores from 3 to 18. This meant that if you got a 12 for your base Strength, you were set up to be a good fighter, since you would only need a single six from your 12-roll pool to end up with 18 Strength. On the other hand if your base Strength rolls were lousy, you could still get an 18 Strength if you had three sixes in your pool. In the first case, you would probably have enough high rolls remaining in your pool to make one or two other abilities end up high, as well as strength; in the second case, you would have less flexibility left to modify your base scores for the other abilities. This system was nice in that the base rolls gave a bias towards particular builds, but the pool flexibility meant that a promising character would never be fatally weakened by one lousy score in an important ability, because you could generally always fix one lousy base score at the price of leaving a couple of other abilities mediocre instead of outstanding. If you really wanted to play a particular class, there was generally enough flexibility to ensure that you could; but you might end up playing a somewhat unusual build of that class -- a mage with only 17 Intelligence but unusually high Wisdom, for instance. And you could fairly often swing the high minimum scores for a Monk or a Paladin if you wanted, but generally only barely, so you didn't simply outshine all the other characters. This was all cool. It was interesting that a base score of 7 had quite different possibilities if it was a 1 and a 6 or if it was a 3 and a 4. I actually broke down each of the six abilities into three sub-abilities with scores from 1 to 6. In principle a character with 11 Intelligence might benefit occasionally from the fact that their average score included a 6 in Memory, but in practice this ended up mainly being just a guide for roleplaying. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, May 20 2007 10:11
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Dude, that was the short version. The original was 30 pages. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Regulations in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, May 20 2007 01:52
Profile
Over in the Geneforge 4 forum, a very long debate on intelligent design versus neo-Darwinian evolution seems finally to have petered out. It stayed in G4 rather than being moved here because it began as a debate on Shaper policy (hence its title of "Regulation"), and because the mods thought that moving it here would probably kill it. Safely isolated in G4, it was remarkable for how long the thread sustained civility. It succumbed to UBB around the 20 page mark, but continued for several pages more in successor threads. Of course it wasn't much better than most such debates in changing anyone's opinions. After 18 pages that didn't seem to be really getting anywhere, I started trying to regulate the discussion in ways I thought might make it more productive, and everyone else pretty much played along. I myself, at least, thought that the results were somewhat helpful, though at the level of 'some progress over 3 pages' rather than breakthroughs in every post. We had successfully focused down onto one particular issue, and it was clear to most of us that one side's argument was collapsing under close examination. Unfortunately we didn't continue for very many more pages before the debate's lone active proponent of ID stopped posting. I don't know whether he despaired of his collapsing argument, or became disgusted by the obtuseness with which the rest of us kept failing to see its validity, or just got worn out after fighting six-on-one for nearly 30 pages. This particular debate was not an ideal test of strategies for improving debates, because it was one-against-many, and because we didn't start trying to do anything differently until we were all tired out by 18 pages of wrangling. But for me, at least, it was refreshing just to be doing something a bit different, instead of watching the long posts sail past each other firing immense point-by-point broadsides, all missing, time after time after time. I learned one thing about science from this debate: preaching to the choir is really pernicious, and this holds for popular orthodox science as well as for pseudoscience. Pseudoscience could not itself stand up for a moment to the ingenuity and rigor with which it attacks orthodox science; it relies totally on never having to defend itself from a hostile crowd. But although actual science is much more ingenious and rigorous even than its pseudoscientific attackers, popular expositions of orthodox science are frequently not. Most popular expositions concentrate on merely conveying the conclusions of science, and give pitifully short shrift to explaining why we think those conclusions are true. And this constant preaching to the choir not only tempts too many smart people into wasting their time with pseudoscience. It also gives lay scientific believers a fundamentally distorted view of what the science they duly accept is really about. About debates I think what I learned tended to confirm my prior theories, though as I mentioned the data is ambiguous. It is very much harder to manage a fruitful discussion than most people realize. We rarely ourselves understand anything we believe as well as we think we do. We often make many more leaps of faith in our own thinking than we want to acknowledge. So most of our own arguments are actually bad, and we accept them because we do not probe them vigorously, preaching to the choir again. Naturally our bad arguments are ineffective in convincing others. But making a really good argument is really hard, even when you are right. It is possible for humans to grapple with truth, just as we can run ultramarathons or fly space shuttles: but it's a stretch far beyond our instinctive range. Usually we settle for our own bad arguments, because they are so much easier to make. To properly thresh out even one significant point could easily take a dozen pages of thoughtful posting, clarifying what is meant and what is not meant, which propositions are assumed as premises and which are inferred, which steps are considered trivial and which are emphasized as profound. So there's no hope of getting anywhere if one tries to address too many points. It's a pleasant illusion to think that a long post full of points is so many good rocks flung at the enemy, but usually they are dragon's teeth (or for the classically challenged, cans of worms), because (once again) most of our arguments are bad. So to me the one essential, for a debate to stand a chance of actually going anywhere, is tight focus onto at most a couple of major issues. Something else that might be worth trying would be to run a sidebar thread for each side to simply explain what it is trying to say, and in which the other side would just try to understand the other's argument, without attempting to oppose it. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Melee Combat Question in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Sunday, May 20 2007 00:04
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The only thing you can't do after attacking is to just move — to move to an empty square. So you can't attack, move, then shoot, or cast a spell, or do anything that would require a separate command after completing the move. But actions for which one click produces a move and something else, like opening a chest or making a melee attack, are fine. This is a very good and reasonable feature, actually, because it lets melee attacks share the basic advantage of ranged attacks, that with enough AP they can engage multiple targets in one round. We all agree that melee needs all the help it can get. Everyone recognizes that in principle a well-placed cupboard could now allow the sort of shoot-and-run tactics that were the bane of the old AP system. But no-one has reported actually exploiting this. Obviously there are not too many openable items placed conveniently around a corner from a battle. And that one extra AP just to open or close something makes it significantly tougher to do the exploit. Plus it just makes it a bit more obvious that what you're doing is an engine exploit, rather than reasonable tactics. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| What have you been reading lately? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, May 19 2007 14:37
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One of the oddest bits of characterization I know is in Treasure Island, in which it is revealed, among other things, that Long John Silver likes puns. The odd thing about it is that the reader is in no position to get the joke until so much later in the story that it is likely to have been forgotten, but the author never reminds the reader. I suspect that the author planned something clever about this and forgot to finish it off, but maybe it was deliberately left as it is. -------------------- Listen carefully because some of your options may have changed. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| GF5 Creation Wishlist in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, May 19 2007 07:21
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They bat you with their eyelashes. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| GF5 Creation Wishlist in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, May 19 2007 02:27
Profile
Allowing huge armies of weak creations doesn't seem worthwhile to me. The last thing I want is to have to micromanage a horde of worms; and if I leave them on AI, then this just makes combat long and boring to watch, with no active participation from me. In Warcraft and Starcraft, there are decisions to make about developing units, and so on. Geneforge is an RPG, not an RTS. But beefing up battle creations definitely needs doing. The AP system change in G4 made battle creations viable, but they are simply too weak. They need to do a lot more damage, and probably also have more health. They could also use more coolness. Rotghroths have their acid and high speed, which is nice, but War Tralls throwing rocks is just lame. It's fine that they can do it, but it shouldn't be their main attack. Maybe a simple system allowing some creations to carry items would do the trick. Then you could equip your Battle Alpha with excellent armor and a big sword, and it would become a serious ally. And I don't know that we need hugely many more creations, but one or two new ones would always be fun if they were good. I like the idea of having more than the three 'schools' of creation, and of making some schools more advanced than others, as in Nethergate magic. I think that the Artila, Clawbug, Glaahk, and maybe something else could be put into an entry-level 'arthropoid' line. Thahds, Alphas, Rotghroths and Tralls could be humanoids, which would also be an entry-level line. Fyoras, Drayks, Kyshakks and Drakons could be a fire lizard line. Roamers could fit in too if they were made to look a bit more lizardlike, and if their acid were described as a napalm-like 'searing heat' effect. Vlish, Wingbolts and Gazers could be made into a Magic line that was higher level, requiring some minimal level in all three other schools in order to begin. Then I kind of like the idea that instead of making enhanced creation variants just by getting higher levels in individual types, you might also have to learn some general techniques. For instance there could be a 'cryo shaping' that you could learn, and you might need a given level in it plus a given level in Drayk to make a Cryodrayk. Then in principle you could make even Cryodrakons -- why not? In addition to 'cryo' there could be 'shade', 'unstable', 'plated', etc. It might also be nice if the PC were sometimes required to use special equipment or lab facilities, found in the game, to make certain kinds of creation. Maybe in this way you could enlist a golem, for instance. Details could be different, but I'd like to see Shaping itself become more of a sophisticated art, more systematic and with a more complex decision tree. With battle disciplines probably imported from A5, melee combat should be richer in G5. And magic is already very powerful in these games. Shaping is the main distinctive feature of the Geneforge series, so I think that expanding and deepening Shaping itself would be a good step for the finale. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Regulation - Common Descent in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Saturday, May 19 2007 01:43
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The two creatures may have had a middle-sized common ancestor. Nobody is saying that Tyrannosaurs evolved into chickens. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Jeff Interview at IMG in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, May 18 2007 23:33
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G4 is something to be proud of, all right. And better to have the Geneforge series leave us at the top of its game, than drag on half a game too long. I guess the ultimate scenario for me would be to squeeze that last 1.5 games into a big G5 with a super-cool extended endgame, and leave out just enough possible stuff to lie in Jeff's brain as a dormant seed, so that in a few years it grows into something more -- either a G6, or a new game with some recognizable Geneforgy elements. As to keeping the old games alive, I'd like to see how well the BoE source code release works. It might turn out that Jeff could leave at least some of the maintenance task to his fan/customer community. I wonder a bit about the economics of this. There will always be people who want to play old games, but they may not be willing to pay much for the privilege. I can see a pattern where an upgrade cycle or two is followed by public release, and after that Spiderweb's financial interest in maintenance plummets. So the BoE experiment would be important for the long term future. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Moderators in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Friday, May 18 2007 03:14
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quote:It's always hard to tell when you cross the line from modding to augmentation, but the sickly green glow is usually a good indicator. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| To the moon in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, May 17 2007 22:58
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Though in the USA a certain amount of research funding gets directed by earmarked congressional appropriations instead of peer review. You know, tacked onto a bill to limit the amount of cyanide allowed in chicken feed will be an amendment to give the University of Broken Stump a hundred million dollars for a particle accelerator. And meanwhile Fermilab is holding bake sales. Well, something like that. It is kind of dumb. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, May 17 2007 22:34
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Drakefyre's not into quilts is he? What a scandal. We should get him into treatment, somehow. I mean, have you ever seen a man snort a quilt? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Regulation - Common Descent in Geneforge 4: Rebellion | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Thursday, May 17 2007 00:29
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Just as long as they don't leave any of it lying around near any parthenogenetic frog DNA. EDIT: Woops, I'm supposed to be all serious here. I hereby apologize to myself. I'll do penance by writing a long, pedantic, point-by-point rebuttal of something, and not posting it. [ Thursday, May 17, 2007 00:32: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| If Jeff went for a new RPG world.... in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 16 2007 23:27
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Hey, yeah. Steampunk could be cool. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| To the moon in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 16 2007 23:14
Profile
The kind of bending of space (and more to the point, time) that you get from massive objects is not helpful in travelling. To make wormholes and warp drives, you need negative energy density. The good news is that, as far as we can now see, general relativity does permit wormholes and warp drives; it just requires exotic matter to bend spacetime in the right ways. The bad news is that we currently don't see how the right kind of matter can really exist. Negative energy density can in principle occur through quantum effects (specifically, the Casimir effect), but the calculations that show this use quite idealized models, and making them more realistic seems to reduce or even eliminate the negative energy. The general relativistic warp drive was invented by a theoretician named Alcubierre. If you google 'Alcubierre metric' you find a number of pages that look reasonable enough. Note that he didn't invent anything about how to make such a device; he just showed that in principle, with the right kind of matter, GR admits FTL 'travel', by scrunching and unscrunching space instead of moving through it normally. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Pen and Paper Anyone? in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Wednesday, May 16 2007 08:13
Profile
I was a DM for years, using AD&D with a lot of house modifications. It was a lot of fun: I wish I still had time for that sort of thing. How important were the rules, really, anyway? There had to be some rules, so that people could decide what to do with some sort of confidence. After years of experience, I was mostly using the rules to tell my stories, not asking the rules to create the stories. I rarely consulted rulebooks, and a lot of my monsters were just made up, so the players could never really gauge how tough something would be by recognizing it from the manuals. But I had the same group of players for years, and I guess they got to know my style enough to have some idea of what was going on. They were generally pretty shrewd. In fact that was the main issue with the rules. The players would quickly exploit whatever opportunities they offered, so the trick was to make sure that the advantageous strategies were actually fun to play, and didn't let any one class or character hog the stage too much. We had a lot of debates, between games, over such eternally vexing questions as what the heck an illusion actually is. Is it a hologram or a hallucination? The challenge was to find a ruling that left the illusionist and the mage in the group different but balanced. And sometimes the rules did create stories. Somebody tried something reckless, got lucky, and performed a legendary feat. The really memorable moments, from all those years of marathon games, were the ones where my best plots got shifted by some cunning or lucky player tactic. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Avernum 5, April Update in Avernum 4 | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, May 15 2007 23:48
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[Dialog pane with headshot of Aldus, now wrinkled and bald] "In our day you had to slay a thousand worms just to reach first level! Kids these days start out with enough power to do cool stuff, and they don't even appreciate it. "Why, to get Demonslayer, I had to fight a cursed golem that resisted everything and split into seven indistinguishable mirror images of itself at every hit. Then I lost it somehow, I forget ... "But now you young whippersnappers come along with MY Demonslayer, and tell me you picked it up in the tutorial, after learning how to open a chest!" 1. Wow, Mr. Aldus. That's really cool. 2. Can I have your autograph? It's worth 50 coins in Blosk. 3. You old guys didn't have it so tough. I heard the guys before you had to carry arrows. 4. Hey, I needed this sword in the tutorial. It was the only way to kill Rentar-Ihrno! -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| A time for celebration in General | |
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Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
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written Tuesday, May 15 2007 22:50
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I pretty much despise the guy's position on a lot of things. I always liked that Voltairesque line, "the Moral Majority, which is neither". But celebrating his death seems perverse. He said what he thought, and he organized a free association of the like-minded. People are entitled to do that. Furthermore, in the long run he probably did his own cause more harm than good just by crystallizing it into an organized movement. An actual moral majority never has to think about whether it is one. Labelling yourself as such is a sign that in fact your day has passed; and I think it even helps to accelerate the trend, because the unthinking majority at least recognizes that it is not you. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |