Timewaster's Guide Archive

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I myself find many of them interesting, but am in the minority here I do believe

Actually, if I'm not too much mistaken, its SE that is technically in the minority, as he's the only one here who's voiced any strong feelings against weblogs.

Then again, SE's opinions are often overpoweringly strong, thus giving him a majority by default amongst most of the opinions that are voiced here, I think..

So perhaps your statement isn't entirely untrue.

Actually, I voted for TWERPS -- just because I wish life were that simple. I was surprised that I was the only one.

I feel this idea has tons of merit, and frankly I'd be itching to participate if you started one on this board. Too bad I've already hit my 2 game limit..

Seriously, it wouldn't be all that different from many other games, and almost any system would be sufficient to run such a game -- you'd just eliminate magic and fantasy from the material altogether, and the heroes would be ordinary people, perhaps with refined skills in one thing or another, though not necessarily so.

You mentioned Rome... I immediately thought of a Spartcus-like scenario, where you start out as a gladiator and have an opportunity to escape, etc. Or take the opposite approach -- the heroes are roman soldiers.

But really any historical conflict would work as a setting, and if presented well, with interesting characters and places and quality storytelling, it could have a lot of appeal to players like myself.

On the subject of Tage's PbP forum, I wanted to quickly comment on the format of Game templates for character sheets. (Er, that was kind of a funky run-on-ish sentence, but I'm too lazy to sort out what was wrong with it.)

I've been toying with a database design for the D&D 3rd Edition template, and I've realized that there's no acceptable way to fit all the necessary data in one table. We'll actually need multiple tables -- for instance, spells would all be in one table, feats in another table, skills in another, and so on, with one primary table holding the actual character data.

Thats probably going to be the case in all of the game systems that are prepared for the forum, depending on complexity (I suspect that a single table would be sufficient for TWERPS for instance).

I read that article on TechWeb, and while I'm sure its accurate, I think they didn't go into enough detail about the quality of these electronic reproductions, or how many people those copies actually fooled.

To produce a copy of a bill printed 10 years ago that would look and feel even remotely believable to the inexperienced eye, I suspect you'd need the right paper (which would be very difficult to come by, unless you know how to make it yourself) and a quality full color laser printer.

Even then, there have been methods in place for a long, long time that deter counterfeits. Serial numbers are of course one of those methods.. I suspect most banks can determine whether the serial number on the bill is real. If the serial number test fails, there is enough detail on a bill that unless you have the capability to print at very high resolutions, its going to be noticeable.

Like SE, I consider myself fairly proficient with technology and image manipulation, but even if I wanted to try to counterfeit a bill (not that I ever would ) I'm positive I couldn't do it convincingly.

The real threat in counterfeit money still comes from big time criminals with the funds to pull it off convincingly. And I doubt those guys use red-burning ink to print their bills. I'm all for our government taking as many steps as possible to deter counterfeiters -- and I'd rather they spend already-budgeted tax money to do it than that they ignore it and let our economy be affected by criminals.

By Entropy:
Oh, and your contention that it helps only big businesses (i bet you wanted to use the term "Fat cats") and is therefore bad is rather moronic.

By Spriggan:
Blah blah blah X-box

Can I change my forum title to "Whipping Boy?"

Edit: Never mind, took care of it.

I'm no economy expert, in fact I know very little.. but this whole idea of cutting taxes to stimulate the economy just doesn't make sense to me. The way I see it, it'll give big corporations and rich people a break, and make things a tad easier in the short term for families by giving them some temporary relief.

What I DON'T see it doing, is creating jobs or helping small businesses, which are the two things I consider to be the most significant reflections of a healthy economy.