Slashdot Mirror

Why do you think that the term for unsolicited e-mail uses the "SPAM" name? BECAUSE NO ONE REALLY LIKES SPAM (both the canned meat product and the unsolicited e-mail) TO BEGIN WITH!!!!

BZZZT!!!!! And thank you for playing. Here's your lovely parting gift.

UBE is known as "spam" because of the Monty Python sketch, wherein a group of vikings kept singing the phrase "Spam", until it drowned out all other conversation, much as junk email does with your (unfiltered) inbox.

hahaha

hahaha

Did anyone else read that title and think: "Sweet. Steve Jackson is going to make a Halo game!"

The best resource for genuine pirate-style gaming I've found is GURPS Swashbucklers. It's full of interesting historical information about real pirates (for instance, did you know that "walking the plank" is fictional?). A glossary of genuine pirate-speak is included on one of the ubiquitous GURPS sidebars. I made good use of it and I play D&D, so most of it works with all games.

http://www.sjgames.com/gamerfinder/
http://findplay.anvilwerks.com/
http://roleplayers.meetup.com/

(For starters.)

Killer

That's the appeal of the Illuminatus! card game.

That would never survive a credit card game, as soon everyone would have an infinite amount of cash

Linky

This may be a big deal for D&D fans, but for people who play RPGs in general it's nothing new.

As a safe alternative for sober computer gamers, I recommend...

FRAG!

'Frag is a computer game without a computer. It's a "first-person shooter" on a tabletop. Move your fighter and frag your foes; draw cards for weapons, armor, and gadgets; move through the blood spatters to restore your own health! If you die, you respawn and come back shooting!'
http://www.sjgames.com/frag/

Taken down searched and returned... but how long does it take to search them... I'm sure they can drag it on for months.
I know it's not the same thing but remember what happen with SJgames?
http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

It'll be months before they get some of their gear back, if the cops don't find anything and if they do they'll never get the machines back ... even if it was on the personal machines of the arrested staff, who will more than likely have lots of pirated stuff on their home machines.

I'm guessing that ThePirateBay is down for good, it'll be months before they get there gear back even if they don't get charged and if they don't have some off site back ups of their website and server set up, then they won't be able to set it back up in a hurry should they be able to afford new machines.

Well that's my guess anyway.

Remember, they were talking to the marketing droid side, not the Will Wright side.

Hells yeah. I was watching the Spore E3 demo recording, and noticed that the game internals organizes the different creatures you encountered in "trading card" format (called the Sporepedia)...

Given the Sim City already made the jump a few years ago to collectable card game, I can see that Will may be positioning Spore to do the same from the start. Spore (the Card Game) is going to be better suited to compete with Pokemon and the other "battling creature" games. This kind of collectable card game spin-off is money in the bank.

SJ GAmes say something about this topic here. I have not done any massive conversions from 3e to 4e yet, but converting characters should be pretty straigthforward. The only drawback is that the point costs for 4e are normally significantly higher than for 3e (IQ and DX are now 20 pts/lvl). It would be harder with supers and psionics than with SF or Fantasy characters, I'd guess.

For some areas there are no 4e rules available yet (vehicles and martial arts come to mind), but I heard they are being worked on.

For Transhuman Space they also have an online product in the pipe that should provide more conversion rules.

That said, the core contents of the excellent sourcebooks still will be useful without any changes. I think many people buy those to use them with different systems anyhow.

It wasn't mythical, nor was it GURPS 'Hackers'. You are referring to the original release of GURPS Cyberpunk. The FBI raided his home and company offices and effective shut down his business for a couple days. Their pretext was that the sourcebook was going to be a 'manual for computer crime'. Steve Jackson Games promptly sued the federal government for damages and to make a long story short they won the case.

Steve Jackson Games' side of it can actually be found on their website at this address:
http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

Try this http://www.sjgames.com/gamerfinder/

I'll stick my head in here and mention that the 2nd Edition of the Ninja Burger RPG is now available at DriveThruRPG, RPGNow and SJGames' e23 as PDFs, with a Print-on-Demand option through Lulu.com at RPGNow.

The new edition is based on the PDQ system that's used in the cult hit Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot from Atomic Sock Monkey Press, which is obviously what inspired the current Slashdot Poll.

>> heads over to Google and types in 'gurps "doctor who"' and wonders what stat bonuses might be conveyed by a recorder, a bag of jelly babies and / or the Key to Time, and how much one might expect to pay per month for one of those call-through-time SIM cards

There have been threads discussing Doctor Who in GURPS on the SJGames forum. See:
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=14788
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=15351

>> heads over to Google and types in 'gurps "doctor who"' and wonders what stat bonuses might be conveyed by a recorder, a bag of jelly babies and / or the Key to Time, and how much one might expect to pay per month for one of those call-through-time SIM cards

There have been threads discussing Doctor Who in GURPS on the SJGames forum. See:
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=14788
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=15351

420-some-odd responses, and nobody has mentioned OGRE?

I've heard a GM or two claim a preference to Gurps Lite over GURPS basic. Free, (perhaps with registration), and lacking in minutiae. Haven't tried it myself.

The problem with lowering the cost of RPG books is the quantities and profit margins involved. If you compare RPG books with, say, coffee-table books or academic works like textbooks ($100+ for 2-400 pages!), you'll find a similar price to pagecount ratio. The reason for this is low-number print runs. Unless you're D&D, the 800-pound gorilla of RPGs, a large print run for RPG publishers is 1000-5000 copies. Once you consider paying the artists, writers, license holders (if any), shippers, distributors, and retailers, it's not really all that unreasonable to pay $40 for a glossy full color 3-400 page hardcover book.

Now, it's an entirely different argument whether full color artwork, hardcovers, and glossy paper are really necessary for enjoyment of RPGs. Some people have come to expect them, but some see them as unecessary window dressing. I think the relative success of the RPG PDF industry (http://www.rpgnow.com/ http://www.drivethrurpg.com/ http://e23.sjgames.com/ etc.) is an indicator of that. By cutting out the cost of printing and distributing hard copy, you can get a searchable, cut and pasteable copy for usually half the cost of a hardcopy (even from Amazon). This isn't a perfect model--there's a lot of complaints about piracy, and most people don't game with a computer at the table. And some of the larger publishers are intentionally sandbagging PDF sales by pricing them at nearly the same cost as the hard copy (Fantasy Flight Games, I'm looking at you).

But as far as the small-press hobby publishers are concerned, I think PDFs are going to be the wave of the future (Add in the rise of very low print run Print on Demand services, and you can get a decent hard copy (softcover, black and white, perfect bound) for much less than you used to).

Much like my friends in electronic music production, technology is seriously lowering the bar for entry into RPG production. There's no equivalent of GarageBand (I guess you could call MS Word an entry-level RPG production toolkit, but it's certainly not RPG-specific), but there's a lot of innovation out there.

From Steve Jackson Games, it's GURPS Bunnies and Burrows.

No, really!

Try GURPS Old West, by Steve Jackson Games.

Try GURPS Old West, by Steve Jackson Games.

Try GURPS Old West, by Steve Jackson Games.

I suppose it all depends on the MMORPG.

I could easily see a MMORPG system based around G.U.R.P.S. Yes, it could technically be multiple "play worlds" each devoted to a specific genre (magic and sorcery, cyberpunk, space fantasy), but the underlying mechanics could be set up so that a character COULD transfer between them (although it might be painful as prized skills might now be useless due to technology ... or lack there of).

Yes, it would require co-ordination (perhaps at an unprecedented level), but its not all that outrageous. Perhaps rules could be worked out regarding 'swapping out skills' ... perhaps for a modest 'handling' fee that allows you to transition between worlds?

Perhaps there is a central avatar and all other are merely 'local' partial identities (similar to Passport) where certain features are universal, and others are only local to a virtual environment, with certain things in any environment kicking back to the central avatar and therefore out to the other environments.

Yeah ... I don't expect it to happen tomorrow, but there are a fair amount of interesting ideas there.

(yeah, I did RTFA, I'm quite convinced the article itself is crap though :) )

As a kind of an online version of GURPS, but the problem is that it would be a complete rewrite of the existing MMORPG's we all know and love to fit a more universal playing system, and very unlikely to happen.

I think the closest we're going to get to a "pervasive avatar" is a unified website where everyone can see how Jim Bob is doing in WoW, Vendetta Online, and GTA, at least until quantum computing and AI creates a computer that is able to be the electronic equivalent of the Uber-GM - but maybe without the weight problem and slightly cheesy odour.

Speaking as an Evil Genius with standards, and one who's read the Warhol Worm paper, I'd say any "decent" botnet doesn't take orders from just any old Bill, Fred, or Otto who wanders by waving an executable at it. A "decent" bot wouldn't run code handed to it unless the executable was cryptographically signed with a private key matching the public key it knows belongs to its One True Beloved Master.

So, all of your plans should work just fine... once you determine how to recover a GPG private key of the 4096-bit keypair needed to sign the RUNME code, using the public key taken from the sample bot.

HANGE. (Have A Nice Geologic Epoch.)

(Note: I have better projects to occupy my Evil Genius than botnets.)

Since I can't e-mail you, I'll post a reply here.

I remember O.G.R.E., that was a great game. Had it for the Atari ST myself. I did a little searching after reading your post, and I've found the following links:

Commodore 64 version (is there a C64 emu for Linux?):
http://www.download-full-games.com/c64/games/ogre. html

A "lite" version of the original board game:
http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/resources/
http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/resources/ogrelite.pdf

A possible connection to the Atari ST version - this page has a list of disk images, each file appears to contain several games. I don't know what to do with this file to extract the games within, but the site mentions using the STEEM emulator, so maybe that will do it for you? Anyways, OGRE is almost halfway down the page, in file A_202:
http://steem.atari.st/automation.htm

Or direct to the file:
ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/atari/games/Automati on/A_202.ST

For possible help using the file, here's a blog entry from a few months ago - this guy has been running the game from this file under a different emu (SainT), so maybe you can pick his brain for assistance:
http://scottobear.livejournal.com/tag/atari

I'm sorry I couldn't actually find the DOS version, but I know from experience the ST version is great, and the C64 will probably be easy for you to run. Good luck!

Since I can't e-mail you, I'll post a reply here.

I remember O.G.R.E., that was a great game. Had it for the Atari ST myself. I did a little searching after reading your post, and I've found the following links:

Commodore 64 version (is there a C64 emu for Linux?):
http://www.download-full-games.com/c64/games/ogre. html

A "lite" version of the original board game:
http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/resources/
http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/resources/ogrelite.pdf

A possible connection to the Atari ST version - this page has a list of disk images, each file appears to contain several games. I don't know what to do with this file to extract the games within, but the site mentions using the STEEM emulator, so maybe that will do it for you? Anyways, OGRE is almost halfway down the page, in file A_202:
http://steem.atari.st/automation.htm

Or direct to the file:
ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/atari/games/Automati on/A_202.ST

For possible help using the file, here's a blog entry from a few months ago - this guy has been running the game from this file under a different emu (SainT), so maybe you can pick his brain for assistance:
http://scottobear.livejournal.com/tag/atari

I'm sorry I couldn't actually find the DOS version, but I know from experience the ST version is great, and the C64 will probably be easy for you to run. Good luck!

The GULLIVER supplement for GURPS by T.Bone has a simplified method to calculate terminal velocity. I haven't read it in a couple of years, but AFAIR it mainly covers TV for people and creatures. Hope this helps.

The polar circumfrence of the moon is ony about 3500 km

BZZZTT! And thank you for playing. Here's your lovely parting gift.

The moon has a diameter of roughly 2160 miles, giving it a diameter of 3500 km, and a circumference of roughly 21800 km. Equator to pole is therefore about 5450 km.

Apple has always been more about making a big splash in the media with some technology than about releasing something solid and fully tested. This is the sort of thing that should have been found in beta testing, but then Apple's never been too big on doing that because it might spoil their "one more thing" at the next Steve Jobs keynote. Better to fix it after it's in the wild than risk a leak to the media. I'm not the only one questioning their quality control. There are lots of others. Just look at the mess they've made of font management in OS X. It's causing graphic designers no end of problems. The really bad part of this is that the kind of people who'll be using this application will be less-technical users who won't know why violating these standards is a bad thing and wouldn't be able to fix it if they did know. For a company that once had the best quality control and the best operating system, they've sure gone downhill. Sadly, Apple isn't learning the right lesson because their sales (thanks largely due to the iPod) are doing well and the Mac Faithful seem willing to live with the flaws just because "it's a Mac".

23rd Strike Commando Black-Backhoe Unit of The Cabal (tinc).

I misspelled GURPS, shame on me! http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/lite/ If you download a character designer program, you and your wife can skip boring details about character creation too.

Steve Jackson Games

EFF's SJG Archive

SJG's Opinion of the whole thing

In short, the Secret Service knocks over a game publisher (micro-TSR-style games, such as Illuminati) and attempts to prove that D&D'ers taught David Lightman how to use a Shlitz pulltab to hack into the 911 system. Courts decide Secret Service was completely unjustified, award court fees to SJG. The legal team/computer activists that coalesced around the issue became the EFF.

SJG is so stealth that I am a long time fan (anyone remember The Fantasy Trip) and still missed until recently that GURPS had been reformatted into d20. Anyway, the e23 CarWars link was missing a question mark. I only came across e23 recently too. Does SJG have all the ADQ on one CDROM by any chance? The price is right, but I just can not bring myself to pay for downloads. I require a professionally pressed disc to ease my conscience. Old school, I know.

Car Wars and Ogre are great games. At the $2.95 price, it was perfect for a young geek to buy new games with only a portion of my paper route money. Thankfully they are available digitally online: http://e23.sjgames.com/search.htmlkeywords=&publis her=&author=&gsys=Car+Wars&genre=&type=&price_lo=0 &price_hi=&sortby=alphaAZ

Merry Christmas

Until countries decide that the central banks are evil nothing will change. This is something that has been a very big issue historically. Most great leaders were killed going against the Central Privately Held Banks. They have complete power and now want complete global control. Only a very, very, brave leader will fight the Central Bank. Here in the US, our late President Kennedy issues US Bank Notes in direct competition with the Federal Reserve. They day he was assasinated they revoked them.

And then, the Gnomes of Zurich, via the Multinational Oil Companies and the Fiendish Fluoridators, used Orbital Mind Control Lasers to destroy the Society for Creative Anarchism.

Illuminati is such a great game.

Incidentally, I don't think "practicing to get your skills up" is any less like work than, say, wandering around a field killing spiders to increase experience....

I guess it all goes back to the original discussion: some people like more realistic games, others want totally fantastic ones. But that's the purpose of something like the tools mentioned - ways to get people to be able to create things they like. The fact that things need "selling points", well, that's an entirely different discussion.

http://www.sjgames.com/toon/

Cheers
VikingBrad

Secret Service affair

You need 10 copies of GURPS Basic Set, volumes 1 & 2?

> But the RPG hobby has become seriously consumerrhoidic.

yeah, i think that transition occured around 1990 when TSR started to spew books for every stupid combination: the left-handed gnome handbook, etc.

The review above mentioned page after page of prestige classes. Same tactic: force everyone to buy hundreds of books.

> Playing the game should be the point of the hobby . . . not collecting books.

ideally, unless of course the books are just great reads. Like the GURPS worldbooks - even if you don't play gurps, they are often well-researched and useful on topics from steampunk to ancient egypt to voodoo to cliffhangers:
        http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/

Plus, the Goblins campaign book is one of the funniest things I've ever read in RPG. Just absolutely fabulous.

I used to play GURPS about 10 years ago. Also dabbled in GURPS Cyberpunk a little bit. Very cool stuff. I liked the flexibility much more than D&D

• Ars Magica 5th ed. winner of the Best Role-Playing Game for 2004 Origins award.
  
• Vampire, Mage another White Wolf "World of Darkness" games.
  
• GURPS, the generic role playing system, now in its 4th editon.
  
• Hero System, originally designed for superhero-oriented gaming, it is now a generic system with special focus on supers, fantasy, SF and martial arts.
  

Yeah?
well now it's a Laser-Laser-Dazer-Maser-Phaser-Raser-Shmaser Bobaser-Bananafanafofaser!

um just hope no one has the "Trap! Antimatter" card

Okay, I must be behind on the current lingo... because when I read "Yahoo raided 12 engineers", I get an image of them [...]

I got the picture of them sending in armed tac-squads... kind of like the intro movie to System Shock: Laser sights, rifles, scared hackers with their hands up, scary phrases on their computer screens like "REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE".

Less fictionally, to me raided still means what happened to Steve Jackson Games.

It's been a long time. Thanks for the memories. That'll give me something to do while waiting for... wait a sec...

/me removes gold pin with red eye, swaps it for a green pin with red eye

Ah, much better. That'll be a great way to pass the time waiting for the next bit of Paranoia XP, and between turns of Paranoia Live. (I'm happy! Are you happy?)