FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Ronwayne posted:

YOU ARE A GENDERLESS SELF-REPLICATING NANOVIRUS CALLED DAVIS, YOU LIVE IN A COMMUNIST HABITAT AROUND URANUS. THE LAST HUMAN PART OF YOU IS THAT YOU STILL GIGGLE WHEN THAT'S MENTIONED.

I would like to roll Intelligence Intensification until I become the Old Testament God.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2019 04:39

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 14:03

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

PurpleXVI posted:

Part of the problem is that as presented, if you think about it for even five seconds, the "nice anarcho-socialist habs" are their own flavour of horrifyingly dystopian. In the inner-system habs you're useless to society if you're not commodifiable and don't fit into the machine, in the outer-system habs you get ostracized and rendered into rep-poverty if you don't like wacky random dance parties and everyone doing drugs and having public sex parties for ~art~. Choose your own flavour of choking on poo poo if you're even marginally introvert.

Well that's what the psychosurgery is for, isn't it? Of course, in time trends will change, so you'll have to do it again.

I'd say the analogy to Cthulhu makes sense, except that Sandy Petersen wasn't writing for an audience that was in significant portion warmly anticipating the rise of Great Cthulhu.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2019 10:37

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

I have Dragonraid sitting on my desk...it is God-stats free.

You ought to do a F&F of DragonRaid.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2019 00:18

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Jesus could have a half-brother, surely?

# ¿ Aug 14, 2019 06:59

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Communist Zombie posted:

The usually way that Jesus had a half brother was that it was Joseph's son from a previous marriage, but thats all I remember of it other than the fact that monks also vigorously debated whether or not Jesus had an older half brother. He might have been one interpretation of (the multiple?) Jame(s).

I'm guessing this is a Catholic thing

# ¿ Aug 14, 2019 08:32

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

Now why has John got the next highest combat level in heaven, second only to God, stronger than all the archangels...?

Every 3:16 gag is a prayer, and every prayer is 3d12 x 5 XP.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2019 11:59

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

StratGoatCom posted:

I could see a use for the setting in GURPS Infinite Worlds - some odd hosed up thing that both Homeline and Centrum or their analogs in some other universe jumping game - is there alternates to that? I'd love to see them, if there are - both came across that system - they call it Bostrom-1 or some shite like that - and had a mutual after finding out what happened and came to a mutual agreement that this place Was Not To Be Touched for fear of the Big E or possibly worse, the natives getting access to parachronic tech and spreading everywhere.

I think they both already act this way about Reich-5 (guess what that one is) and this weird bizarro one where there's like ubiquitous digital spying technology and some kind of neo-feudalism. They also get that way about Caliph but that's because Caliph is basically "the Islamic Golden Age never ended: it's 16XX and they have interstellar colonies. May Allah requite thee abundantly." One of those things that tells you what year the book was most decisively written before.

Also good lord save us from another round of "the real power to take is being super smart and using STEM skills to match/cancel/replace whatever the domestic superpower source is." That's up there with "what if gods, like, needed worship for magic points?" in terms of "remember the 90s?"

# ¿ Aug 15, 2019 00:27

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

When 90% of humanity is dead and most of the remainder have been enslaved, there's one man you can count on:

DRACULA. But he's GROWN over the years...

FAT DRACULA VS. ECLIPSE PHASE

Fake edit: Maybe he 3d printed too much blood and that's why he's a chonker now.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2019 11:23

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Midjack posted:

They�re natural and not man made so therefore they�re not science enough.

People are broadly aware that organisms are made of cells and have very likely even used a microscope to look at a slice of onion or something in school. That's not cool or awesome at all! Nor is it an existential threat that can only be defeated by giving me a large donation to live in San Francisco and go to rich nerd parties all day.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2019 21:50

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Night10194 posted:

May the gangster future time computer god bless us, each and every one.

* explicitly including clones, forks, dupes, copies, cross-time parallel doppelgangers, and simulated individuals

# ¿ Aug 18, 2019 22:03

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Night10194 posted:

But souls are for stupid people, of course. Only an idiot would believe there's an immutable self that exists beyond your body.

Let me tell you about how I can be downloaded into a new body and that will absolutely be me.

The extent to which futurism and all this junk reconstructs religious ideas, but with some technobabble thrown in so it isn't 'religious' and is instead 'rational', is legit fascinating.

In many cases the magical option would be the most intellectually parsimonious.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2019 22:27

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

StratGoatCom posted:

Speaking as a bio nerd (and one that will work with bio for a living, albeit NOT genetic engineering), the biotech side of transhumanism is equally loving stupid and abusive of the science; just to name one particularly annoying thing CRISPR is hideously overhyped, and is only accurate by comparison to the predecessors - that Chinese professor that genetically engineered those two baby girls deserved whatever gawdawful thing the Chinese government did to him, because I would be very surprised if they made 50, and totally unsurprised if they didn't make 20. loving idiot breakdanced through their loving genomes, and that's before that the genotype is associated with an increased rate of death from the flu.

I always figured the second big flaw with the fear of super designer babies replacing baseline free-birth humans - the first being the idea that it is possible to meaningfully increase intrinsic intelligence on a massive level through genetic adjustment - was that the first batch would end up tremendously hosed up and would lead to astonishing lawsuits, as the people who will purchase this service will also have money to buy lawyers.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2019 03:08

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Night10194 posted:

Also that a lot of transhuman thinking is again, along the same contours as eugenics. 'There is a superior state that exists, and has more value, based on its power/intelligence/strength of 5 gorillas robot body' isn't that different from 'If the right people and only the right people are allowed to have children there will be a better humanity' because they both proceed from the idea that an increase in power is desirable rather than focusing on the idea that personhood itself is the undiminished value of a human being.

That same sort of thinking is also how you get stuff like Hunter: The Reckoning telling you to use the 'sheeple' as props, because only the radical magicmen and their monster enemies have any real personhood or value through their superior power and coolness.

Yeah, to me the big thing is that most of it boils down to "but a gene-spliced superman will be able to do so much more! he'll be so powerful and smart!"

Well, there's a lot of really smart people who end up not "doing" much. Indeed I think they could get more done trying to figure out some genetic basis for focus or determination or stability and splicing up that, but most of these people think it's just a matter of finding the INT stat and slapping some positive modifiers on it.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2019 20:34

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

EthanSteele posted:

Well, big Railgun assault rifles and why are you not doing it with 750 people and doing it in a single shot each.

Because doing it with fewer guns and more bullets is more libertyer and means we get more libertarian rep.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2019 18:56

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Night10194 posted:

What boggles me is why even give a Scum Barge HP and Armor value? Any sane GM is going to nix the '4 guys empty bullets at this in EVA suits until it explodes or whatever' plan because it's a city-barge and its survival or not is likely to be an adventure objective. So why even give it HP or combat stats?

Are you telling me there is a problem I cannot overcome with traditional kinetic weapons fire, friend? That sounds unlibertythink to me. Perhaps we just need to Add More Gun.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2019 19:15

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

EthanSteele posted:

Yeah, more bullets hitting you = more damage doesn't seem worthy of ridicule. At least it isn't that weird edition of Shadowrun where you rolled damage individually for each bullet that hit the target.

I think the oddity here is that if you can ignore a few rounds completely, a damage boost from firing full auto does not necessarily make sense against an armored target, such as an enormous spaceship. This is not a problem new to EP, though.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2019 23:58

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I think casting the Elder Things (which are what the Primordial Ones are) as lawful evil is defensible, because they were slavers, at least towards the end. It seemed like early drafts of the shoggoths were more like biomechanical tools so I'd give early-period Things a pass, and of course any individual horrid fivefold symmetrical creature could adopt its chosen ethical path. Like Drizzt. In fact, make Drizzt an Elder Thing.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2019 01:30

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Yeah, that's bullshit. They had million year peace treaties with some other prehuman aliens on Earth.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2019 02:14

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Ratoslov posted:

Nanoflint(tm) does! Looks like flint, sparks like flint, doesn't give a poo poo about oxygen like a magnetic propulsion system.

Is it powered by the data of a forsaken childmorph?

# ¿ Aug 21, 2019 08:07

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Is the GP here meant to represent like supply/access more than literal cash money? I can see value in having something like a practical scarcity for a software-fluffed tool or asset even if in-setting such would not exist in any meaningful way.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2019 20:41

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

That fractal thing would be a great explanation for energy weapons but I'm not sure if energy weapons produce the same Liberty Field as a bullet-shooter.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2019 02:01

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

I don't know if this is exactly what the Transporter Problem is, but I know that they addressed it in a pragmatic way in Star Trek by having an episode where a character had an anomalously extended period of consciousness inside of the transporter beam, with the implicit statement that from the perspective of the user being in the transporter is like you take a seltzer water shower and then you're at the other end of the beam.

They do not explain the physics of this at all... wisely.

I can certainly understand from the perspective of "me" why I would be leery to get my brain scanned and uploaded, if it meant that "I" might go to sleep and "Nessus-2" wakes up, happy as a clam in his invincible killbot body, while "I" just do not wake up. I am sure it would be painless, but would "I" get the pleasure of being in an invincible killbot body? This is less of an issue with brain transplants and so forth, of course.

Ronwayne posted:

I mean semantically, from my position and tons of others in EP? Yes, unironically. "I was dead, and got better" isn't that scary or troublesome concept.

It would certainly be troubling if you saw your loved ones and much of society commit suicide (from your view) and then come back as revenants, especially since the evil robot-body revenants would probably also be your ruling caste.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2019 23:18

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Ronwayne posted:

Yeah, from my POV, its literally distinction without difference. Yeah, they're copies, but also, so what? You gonna tell the copy they're a ghost thinking they're a real person? They are almost certainly people that do that in EP, and outside of Jovian areas, they're probably universally considered assholes. The other issue is that people like Koch no longer die, but that's a issue.

It will certainly cause problems for the main competitors to my religion, so hey :v:

As a side note for folks at home: If you need a transporter device in your sci fi system, use a point induced wormhole gate! You completely avoid this problem and most of what is left can be dealt with by doubletalk!

# ¿ Aug 25, 2019 23:25

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

juggalo baby coffin posted:

you're misunderstanding the actual situation. The issue isn't whether the copies are real people, they are, and they are just as sentient as you and etc etc. the issue is literally only for the original you. If you enjoy thinking and experiencing things, you probably do not want to resleeve via farcaster. The you that goes into the farcaster dies, that's the end of you experiencing anything at all.

Yeah, the copy is a person by these lights, although it might be horrifying to consider your dearest friend, your spouse, your child who you raised ceasing to be and a perfect duplicate emerging on Mars.

If the duplicates are made but do not destroy or shut down the original then you have a very different situation, that being "Thunderdome for the checking account."

# ¿ Aug 25, 2019 23:30

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Joe Slowboat posted:

The point about sleep and continuity of consciousness really isn't a minor one btw. How do you know your consciousness is continuous when you wake up? We take it on faith because we're used to it. It might not be! Which would be existentially terrifying, in a sense, but... we assume that the light which goes out is the one that comes on again because to do otherwise is not very good for us.

Now apply that to resleeving.

I think this is a little facile because the concern here is a process that goes something like this:

1. Brain scanned
2. Data transferred to new point
2a. Brain at original point deactivated
3. Brain re-upped at destination point
4. Owner of said brain walks out of the brain factory and is institutionally recognized as being the same unique individual who entered the process at step 1.

It is not unreasonable to say that even if the duplication is perfect down to the last electrode, an individual dies at step 2a. even if the outcome of the process is one (1) individual with all the same interior qualities and information. This is particularly true if step 2a is not functionally necessary for the entire rigmarole to work and occurs in order to avoid the original brain and the copy brain fighting over the checking account and Bitcoin wallets.

By contrast even if I have no guarantee "I" will wake up from going to sleep, there is the persistence of location, there is no new duplication entering the process here. None of this invalidates the hypothetical personhood of the duplicate, but if you kill the original in the process, that's pretty lousy and would be a major disincentive towards starting the entire process in the first place!

# ¿ Aug 25, 2019 23:39

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Eclipse Phase 3: Turns out the Titans just put an illusion screen using Marcabian technology over the planet. Most people are fine. A cross-license with Phoenix Wright will allow your PCs to engage in litigation over assets.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2019 23:48

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Terrible Opinions posted:

This is what LessWrong posters tell themselves to justify why thinking they can upload their brains to computers isn't a religion.

The teleporting thing isn't even the issue! The issue is that they can make a copy and the original is still around. (One begins to suspect the real reason for icing Earth in the story is to avoid this issue, or at least shove it in a back closet.) Hell there's even a bunch of stuff about making smaller duplicates of your brain and later reunifying with them, like Multiple Man.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2019 00:10

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

The Lone Badger posted:

Shouldn't that be a good reflection? Who have been twisted into becoming self-sacrificing good guys?

It's like Ren, the choices are "evil" and "indifferent," that's what makes it a World of Darkness.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2019 08:38

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Like Mors said, it's a tool kit. It's not like all these things are necessarily happening at once. While widespread murder of elites would probably draw notice fairly quickly, you can get away with a lot: y'all read about that NXIVM thing?

# ¿ Aug 31, 2019 22:29

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Ithle01 posted:

I feel like they're falling back on the decadent rich people cult trope a bit too often, but maybe that's just me. I buy the locust and toad ones because they're not obviously malicious or openly murderous so that's easy to fly under the radar. I cannot imagine how hosed up the WoD YouTube conspiracy channels must be.

Chernobyl Peace Prize, good point on the current state of politics, but it should be noted that if these morons were actually involved in an occult conspiracy that poo poo would have been discovered because these idiots suck at keeping secrets. Even if they are monstrous in nature, they are not in fact, actual monsters wearing human flesh who exude an aura of brain-warping spirit magic.

They're probably going back to the decadent rich person cult well both for the same broad zeitgeist reasons why people are always bitching that every game doesn't have a "build communism and purge the kulaks" option, as well as to avoid the "cult = marginalized group" perspective a lot of fiction has.

Young Freud posted:

I don't know, it could be something like early '80s Miami, where they had a bunch of high-rises built on laundered cocaine money but no one living in them.

In Detroit it could be an abandoned building. In a lot of places there are high-value high-rise apartments which are essentially held as assets and aren't actually being lived in, too; it would actually be entirely plausible to frame a horror story as "someone is in the social-housing-cost unit in a 20-unit weirdo high-rise and is superficially the only person actually living there... and they find out... that isn't the case."

# ¿ Aug 31, 2019 23:16

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Night10194 posted:

Detroit isn't that dangerous, it's mostly just too big and heavily class divided and has no public transit and a small population due to a ton of factors.

I live in Detroit.

Yea it's mostly the "too big/small population" thing that makes me think you could more easily have a large abandoned building, possibly not even one in particular disrepair, into which horrid things can slink.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2019 00:41

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

juggalo baby coffin posted:

there doesn't seem to be any way to destroy it

Then why don't they build ~~the entire plane~~ the morph frames out of the ~~black box~~ slime egg pussy mouth compounds?

# ¿ Sep 2, 2019 05:48

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Yeah, the Killer Spambots are way more interesting and nuanced than you would think from the name. If nothing else the idea is fruitful.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2019 08:21

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Night10194 posted:

More things should be called Warbots, though. It's simple. It tells you this is a robot. Who is for war.

Between Warbots and the Killer Spambots, I'm thinking Ziv Zulander decided to stop loving around when the TITANs acted up.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2019 01:17

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 14:03

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Alien Rope Burn posted:

As a reminder, I'll be closing this thread and starting a fresh one in ~24 hours.

If you have any suggestions for the new OP, let me know in the meantime.

You don't need to finish or end your reviews; you can just continue them on in the new thread.

That's all!

Include something comical to the effect of "Yes, people are interested, yes, people would read, yes, people want you to post, yes, people are OK with you posting," etc.

Also, FATAL and Friends 2020: Featuring Dante From The Devil May Cr

# ¿ Sep 9, 2019 02:10

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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