[Ar-list] Re: Ar-list digest, Vol 1 #5 - 4 msgs

[Ira]

hi, everybody.

> From: Carter Butts <ctb@andrew.cmu.edu>
>
> Karim, how much of the revised Takietei magic system is written up?
> This might be of some value as a reference....

yes, I'd like to look at it.  I haven't seen it on the website, though.

what I'm  intending to do is something more like the ars magica magic 
system.  except I don't have one of the old versions of the ars rules; 
just one of the later ones after it got changed a lot.  so, I'll work 
from that to some extent, make up things where necessary.

>
> Did you see the draft Vampires MRS?  It should be on the web site, with
> the "in progress" stuff.  It's not complete, but might serve as a useful
> starting point.

yes, I have a printout of it.  it's a big start towards what I'm aiming 
at doing.

>
> On that score, you've probably already seen Chameleon.  In addition to
> that, there is a mostly complete draft of a modern millenial horror RG
> called A New Religion, and there are various notes and sundries for
> several others.  (I'm not sure how complete the new Takietei is; Karim
> ran some very cool test sessions with it, but much of it may still be
> tacit knowledge.  :-))  What style were you thinking of?

the RG will come last and we haven't even got all the characters created 
yet--though we had two really cool mediated character creation sessions.

broadly what it'll be is a mystery/suspense oriented game involving the 
supernatural in a modern setting.  so far, we have one character who's a 
strong psychokinetic, one who's a vampire, and another one (not yet 
really worked on yet) who will probably be a mage.

I'm waiting to see what the characters are like before really working 
too hard on the game world, though I have some general ideas.  for one 
thing, it'll be very low-magic (as part of the reason why science hasn't 
discovered it yet and started in on magichnology) which will mean that 
those relying on magic will have sharp limits.  however, their magical 
powers will be very broad in the first place to compensate for this.  
also, only certain people will be able to channel magical energy in the 
first place.

the psychokinetic character has a cult-group as an enemy, which should 
be interesting since they have magical power backed up by some sort of 
supernatural creature.

the basic format is that each character was normal at one time and then 
had some kind of encounter with the supernatural...

>
> (BTW, I also wrote up some conversion rules for SLA Industries and Call
> of Cthulhu at some point, if you wanted to try using either of those
> settings with AR mechanics.)

that'd be cool to take a look at.  getting the right mentality for AR is 
still a little difficult for me sometimes, and those would probably help.

>
> Nice stuff.  Karim already mentioned his PalmOS utilities (which are
> really quite nice), but I think that the idea of a character sheet
> generator is a very good one.  What would be _really_ cool would be a
> set of LaTeX style files for AR RGs/MRSs/character sheets/etc.  I have
> begun converting the PRG into LaTeX, but had been stalled by this whole
> "dissertation" thing....

I'd love to help with the LaTeX conversion of all that; indeed, I'd like 
to be writing my stuff in LaTeX or Tex.  however, my TeX is poor and 
LaTeX nonexistent.  maybe in a while I can get into it again and make 
some progress.  I'd love to support anything working with TeX.

>
> <chuckle>  All too many, of course!  But go forth and have fun, and let
> us know what your group comes up with.

will do!

> From: W Isaac Carroll <icarroll@pobox.com>
>
> BTW, as far as file formats go, what should we standardize on? I have 
> MS Word
> 2000 as well as the usual complement of unix tools. I want to make sure 
> I'm
> not excluding potential collaborators by my choice of format.

I'd love to see TeX or LaTeX as our standard source format.  since it's 
easy enough to go from dvi to pdf we wouldn't really be excluding 
anyone...

for now, though, for the sake of expediency, I'm using word:mac v.X

I have to say I'm not happy with it: all the tools for asian languages 
that word 2000 has are totally missing.  it's pretty clear they just did 
a classic to carbon port of their old version of word, without adding 
anything.  grrr.


> From: W Isaac Carroll <icarroll@pobox.com>
>
> The next question is about basic AR mechanics. Is there a standard 
> mechanism
> for a situation where a character wants to engage in a continuous form 
> test
> until success is achieved? The continuous form test assumes that the 
> character
> already has decided how long he will be performing the action.
>

unless I'm wrong (which is easily possible), it should just be a matter 
of making the roll and working back to what the per minute bonus must 
be...  that is to say:
1. roll d100	(eg. 42)
2. add 1 to find the rolling target (eg. 43%)
3. apply the inverse DRF to the result of #2 (eg. -7)
4. find the rating of the attribute being tested, apply all modifiers 
EXCEPT the time bonus (eg. -20)
5. the result of #4 plus the time bonus should equal #3, so we subtract 
#4 from #3. (eg. 13 minutes)

does that look right to everyone?  the only numbers I made up for that 
are the result of the die roll and the rating being tested, which is how 
it should be.


Love,
Ira