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Post by Curufea on Dec 24, 2009 23:10:08 GMT
Good find. I've now ordered one too. Not sure what postal charges will be for Australia yet though.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 24, 2009 12:04:39 GMT
Good stuff! May I offer this style as an output format type for characters stored on the Matrix website?
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Post by Curufea on Dec 24, 2009 4:07:47 GMT
As an update on this, I've dropped the roster module as I couldn't access a node's fields. I'm going with additions to CCK, views and a good taxonomy. Characters, gadgets and traits can be entered now, but the form doesn't look too great yet. I'm also not using the XML character sheet yet - but that will likely be a link on the sheet similar to a "print this" button. Stuff will look better when I finish the basics and start working on the CSS. If anyone has suggestions on website design or art, let me know.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 23, 2009 22:35:13 GMT
Is this the Doctor Who equivalent of the recent Avatar movie?
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Post by Curufea on Dec 23, 2009 22:31:01 GMT
Time Lock I pretty much assume to be "lies to children" to use a Pratchett term - a simplification to cover things until you one day may or may not have time to explain to someone old enough to understand. Gallifrey is pretty much immune to time travel changes and is kept out of the regular flow of time. It's Grenwich MeanTime for the Web of Time.
1) Yep - pretty much. In fact this is covered slightly in the Miles book "Alien Bodies" where a war-time Time Lord meets up with the Doctor. It's pretty much covered in the Laws of Time as a very big "no".
2) The Time Lords actively maintained the Web of Time - in the TV series they occasionally interfered by sending the Doctor to do things. In the books they're more active in preventing time active races from screwing up the True History too much. It won't just be the Time War than unfixes things - with no policing force, any time active race will be able to screw up the timelines now.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 23, 2009 22:21:28 GMT
The Guardians wouldn't need statting out either, which is an added bonus
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Post by Curufea on Dec 23, 2009 10:59:06 GMT
UNIT is more likely to use convential or modified convential weapons and tactics (ie in Battlefield the Brigadier takes stock of gold bullets for Cybermen and wonders if they have any silver)
Torchwood is all about the alien gadgets. So it would be like a no-Doctor campaign, with all humans and lots of gadgets. There should be a setting/genre rule that all the gadgets have flaws or are not completely understood.
Possibly the season mechanic from Prime Time Adventures would be good as well - prioritising which character is spotlighted in which episode, with an increasing chance of death as the season gets towards the end.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 22, 2009 23:55:15 GMT
That works.
Currently I'm allowing users of the site to upload files, so they could upload from your site into the Matrix site itself (or from anywhere else) thus hosting files there.
I'm not sure of the htaccess for the images though - I'll need to check and see that if someone does put images in the Matrix, those images can be hot linked.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 22, 2009 23:31:17 GMT
There's been sounds that Big Finish uses for their plays that I've thought would be wonderful for a game. Primarily the background Dalek noise that pervades any scene with them - the hum of their machinery. It's very evokative.
I just haven't gone to the lengths of tracking down where they get their sound effects (the ones that aren't generated in house that is).
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Post by Curufea on Dec 22, 2009 23:28:44 GMT
Both. It is natural but you can train yourself to be more perceptive of the world around you. I'd go along with that. There are instincts from birth that evolution has provided for us for the reasons of survival. These include a tendency to anthropomorphise everything. From seeing human-shaped patterns in random shapes, to human-type motivations in non-human creatures and even random events. In this case, we naturally are very good at spotting humanoids. Hence most camouflage used by the military primarily deals with breaking up the humanoid shape. So perception is partly nature and partly nurture - you can train yourself to spot things others do not. Artists do this all the time, as does any profession involving eyesight.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 22, 2009 23:23:40 GMT
The whole "Time Agent" thing of the new series allows travel in time without a vehicle. However I think it probably has side effects and isn't as advanced in what it can do as a TARDIS. Probably similar to a Time Ring as show in the books (Eigth Doctor Adventures/ Bernice Summerfield). Daleks themselves are already in vehicles - they spend their entire lives in them
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Post by Curufea on Dec 22, 2009 22:45:47 GMT
Only if you want to have me host them mind. I don't want to appear to be grabbing other people's content just for the sake of making my site look good.
I'd prefer if you created an account so the images would keep attribution.
But there's no rush as there are a few kinks I need to work out with Drupal anyway it doesn't yet cross reference how I like, and I haven't worked out a taxonomy.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 22, 2009 22:12:53 GMT
Great stuff!
Also, once the Matrix is up and running I'd be happy to host images for folk - I've still got bandwidth (one eMagazine, one review website for Aussie SpecFic and several RPG wikis - and still my biggest bandwidth hog are my fan made music videos for Farscape)
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Post by Curufea on Dec 22, 2009 21:48:19 GMT
There's an argument that if there's something to be found that's important to the progression of the story, it should just be found. So if a secret door leads to the villain's lair, then the characters search for a few minutes and then one stumbles on the catch. Hiding away the door means you don't get to show off the lair, and where's the fun in that? That's like old text adventure or point&click games. Problems of that kind should not occur in well written adventures. You should not have on/off problems that halt plots. You should have variable ways of the plot proceeding, some easier, some harder, some fast, some slow. A failure at a critical task should result in a setback - not a crash&burn.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 22, 2009 19:25:17 GMT
Curufea, if you're after any assistance with Drupal, give me a shout - managing/developing a dozen Drupal sites at the moment and always keen to add more... Actually I am, I've used the roster module and modified it - but haven't yet converted the output to XML (I've not fiddled with PHP xml parsing much) I'd also like to modify the form so the traits field is a multiselect input populated by the content type of "trait". I've not entered any of the sheets from here or the xml versions in yet, but you can see the site here- matrix.curufea.com
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Post by Curufea on Dec 22, 2009 4:42:03 GMT
When talking to folk in another forum about how it might be possible for more than one sentient race to evolve on the same planet, I pointed out that on our planet, we lived alongside the Neanderthals for 135,000 years. We've shared a planet with another sentient race longer than we have been on it by ourselves.
This could be a good twist on the Kaled/Thall story if folk pop back in time about 15,000 years (when Neanderthals died out).
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Post by Curufea on Dec 22, 2009 4:34:56 GMT
Theoretically it's a good mechanic for any sequential series of skill resolutions.
It could be used for things ranging from parallel research, to eating contests.
Actually a good use would be - villains breaking through a barrer to get at the Doctor & crew versus the Doctor inventing a gizmo to escape/knock them out with. Happens fairly often in the series.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 22, 2009 4:08:03 GMT
Not sure I'd use coordination for all categories though. Maybe - Presence, Coordination, Ingenuity, Strength
Or possibly whatever the attribute is for the action you wish to perform.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 21, 2009 21:27:48 GMT
"Hanging a lamp" on it. Much like Reagan did as the American President. If age is likely to be noticed - then it's best if the subject uses all the jokes before the audience does. Otherwise the subject looses respect.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 21, 2009 19:05:21 GMT
That's not a trait - it's a personality
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Post by Curufea on Dec 21, 2009 7:38:27 GMT
Just an FYI - my game arrived today!
On a sad note, it appears to have been dropped on one corner. I've got weights on the manuals now to try to flatten the corner.
I'll see about getting a replacement box or I'll trying making my own out of wood or something.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 21, 2009 4:55:38 GMT
I must admit, before I saw the character sheet - I'd never heard of her.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 21, 2009 2:27:51 GMT
Is it just me, or is this line of reasoning actually scary? The Doctor, trapped by his own foreknowledge, is doomed to follow the railroad tracks of destiny until.... This is the basic idea behind the Dune sequel "Dune Messiah" - where Paul develops his prescience ability to such an extent, that it doesn't matter whether he is blind or not. There's a good short story on this subject too - in my favourite anthology of all time - "The Story of Your Life and Others" - in which the only way for human linguists to understand an alien language is to realise that the writing is 4th dimensional - and with that understanding they obtain the ability to realise that linear time is just a matter of perception. However - to be able to learn that, they must also be the kind of person that would never create a paradox or change their decisions based on foreknowledge.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 21, 2009 1:54:30 GMT
I've a PHP script somewhere that can convert things to PDF. Used to anyway. With enough time I should be able to automate it. All people will need to do is enter their characters in a form, and anyone can choose which characters to compile together into a PDF document for download.
Some of the images I've used are different from the ones used by the character authors - as I'm using wikimedia commons images where possible as they have the least rights issues currently )
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Post by Curufea on Dec 20, 2009 23:53:50 GMT
Most likely they only remember when they are together - so the 10th Doctor wouldn't remember encountering the 10th, until he actually met the 5th.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 20, 2009 23:52:30 GMT
I dunno - the 4th didn't suffer fools gladly when under stress. But otherwise was humble.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 20, 2009 23:14:17 GMT
I'm currently compiling them and converting them into XML files. These will probably be turned into PDFs in the near future if I get the time You can find the sheets so far that I've done here- www.curufea.com/Wikka/wikka.php?wakka=DWsheetsI was contemplating a wiki, but yesterday I started researching Drupal as a CMS and it may be more suitable. Because I can customise how people add to it (ie have a form for gadgets, one for traits and one for characters with all the right fields) and it generates updates and RSS in a more relevant manner than a wiki (ie it's easier to organise what appears on the front page etc)
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Post by Curufea on Dec 20, 2009 23:11:42 GMT
It's mainly these kinds of ideas that make the works of Lawrence and the other writers of the Faction Mythos so fascinating to me It ties together the rubber science of the series with the quasi-mystical (Block Transfer, Chameleon Circuit, Multiverses) in pretty much the same way that String Theory combines General Relativity and Quantum Theory All unprovable philosophy - but fun to fiddle with (not that I can fiddle with my real world metaphor - I know nothing of the theories other than what has been shown on TV or an odd wikipedia search). On a side note, Strings could be another interpretation of the Web of Time. If you assume Strings are organised.
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Post by Curufea on Dec 20, 2009 21:30:25 GMT
Even in the old series with or without reference to the novels - the continuity is inconsistent. This is pretty much where I see that Faction Paradox lives. Any lack of continuity, or any "canon" history you don't like, can be whisked away as an alternate timeline - the Faction has corrupted the Web of Time yet again
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Post by Curufea on Dec 20, 2009 21:26:37 GMT
I like that - "No History". It makes them a bit immune to biodata based attacks as well (as biodata is someone's connection to the web of time and is a bit like DNA mixed with fate), but does have the side effect that they are probably now on a path towards being Conceptual Beings (possibly further progress after losing a shadow could be losing a reflection).
It could have other interesting side effects too - the "Arcane" trait in the Mage RPG for a start - a lack of any kind of paper trail or records on the character. An inability to have predictions made about them or by them.
Possibly they could stand out in time scanning equipment - as unknown anomolies?
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