MJ, I totally understand everything you said, but I don't think you understand me at all. Since you've repeatedly told me not to repeat myself, I'm simply going to ask you to go back over the thread and reread it more carefully.
And I'm not disputing the fact that the crash should have happened, what I am disputing is that if the rules had been followed more closely, the crash could have happened sooner or not happened at all.
And I'm not disputing the fact that the crash should have happened, what I am disputing is that if the rules had been followed more closely, the crash could have happened sooner or not happened at all.
John - let me direct you to the part of MJ's post where he answers this.
There are so many things that might be possible that we have to limit ourselves in what we roll to those we think are important enough to warrant rolling--or the game does not progress because of the rolls.
Adam followed the rules as closely as it is possible to follow the rules.
I still don't agree with you, but I am willing to agree to disagree with you. This is how I think it should have been handled, and that's all.
Roll pulse, success
Roll driver's agility check. Made barely, jeep swerves to the left and gets back on the road.
Roll intuition check for if I realize this is a bad idea. Failed, I continue.
Roll pulse, success
Roll agility check, again barely made, jeep again swerves
Roll intuition check, success, John stops pulsing the driver.
That's how I think it should have been handled, or however, based on how the rolls went and whatnot. From what I know of the rules, that would have been a By The Book approach to it. If nothing else, would that be an appropriate way to handle it?
If the result of a successful TK pulse in this context was: "driver may crash, roll agility check/driving skill to resist", then yeah, sure. I could see a referee doing it that way. I wouldn't, myself; instead, I would run the first pulse (you succeed, driver resists, swerve but no crash) and then ask you if you wanted to continue. No intuition check, because there's no hidden information. At that point, you would stop pulsing the driver, because you didn't know your skill could do that. No intuition check necessary.
Notice, however, that I started that paragraph with "if."
The fact is, a successful TK pulse in that situation is not enough, on its own, to make the driver crash. It's not even enough to require that the driver make a skill check, or an agility check, or any such thing. If MJ were giving you a ride to Ubercon and I was in the back seat, and I poked MJ in the back of the head, everyone would be terribly surprised if he were to subsequently fall unconscious and swerve off the road.
Okay. So, given that a TK pulse to the head would never normally put the driver in any danger of crashing, this is how the referee might run it:
Roll pulse (penalized by target's Resistance, bonused by RSV), success
Driver wonders what happened
Roll pulse, success
Driver looks over his shoulder to see if someone's poking him
Roll pulse, success
Driver gets annoyed
Roll pulse, success
Driver gets more annoyed
Roll pulse, botch
Draw up a botch table . . .
If the driver getting annoyed were unexpected, I would stop play to give you a chance to respond.
(It wasn't unexpected, so I go ahead with the rolls.)
If there were anything else resulting from your successes - anything unexpected - I would either tell you and give you a chance to respond, or (if it were hard to notice) roll an intuition check to see if you noticed.
(Nothing worth stopping play for; everything is going according to plan until the botch.)
Does that make sense? The way you suggest handling it would make sense, except that the TK pulse isn't that strong. There really was nothing to suggest that you were doing something that dangerous. You were distracting the driver a little, but you knew that when you started. The driver didn't crash because you were distracting him. He crashed because of the botch, of which you had no warning.
Scott, that makes absolutely 100% sense. I totally agree with you there.
However, the fact that it crashed at all opened up my eyes to it. I never even considered that a possibility. My Character, on the other hand, might have considered it possible. He is the one sitting in the jeep, after all. I'm going to have to agree to disagree with you on this.
Also, MJ recently said that a single TK pulse of mine just about knocked a guy off his feet. MJ rolled an agility check for the guy to stay on his feet. That is kind of what inspired this. I the player didn't realize a TK pulse was capable of knocking someone off their feet until then. My Character, on the other hand, might have been fully aware of it. I could easily imagine myself practicing that by hitting people in the head with it. I'm saying that it would have been more realistic from My Character's point of view. He and I have different information.
And Scott, if you can look me in the eye and tell me that a TK pulse capable of knocking someone off of their feet is not capable of causing a jeep to crash, I'll call the guys in the white coats, because you're CRAZY!!! (Said with the most serious humor possible)
Scott, I think the best way that I can put this is that I, the player told my character to do something that he might have known better than to do. He has different information than I do.
I guess this amounts to wanting my character to not do what he's told, doesn't it? I'm just trying to think about it from his point of view. I think that he might have been smart enough to disobey what I said if he could have. I know that's pretty much what it amounts to, but that's what the thing is with me.
Two posts, BTW
Three posts, and it's the last.
I could just imagine how this would have gone down as a conversation between me and my character.
Me. "I want you to TK pulse that cop's head over and over while he's driving."
My Character "ARE YOU INSANE???????? Do you have ANY idea what a TK pulse can do?"
Me. "Actually, no I don't. But I want you to do it anyway."
My Character "I don't wanna do it. I'll get killed."
Me. "Well, I have absolutely no regard for your safety, and since you have to do what I say, you're going to do it."
My Character. "I'd kick your ass from here to China if I could....."
Me. "Good thing you can't then, eh?"
As I recall, the specific circumstance was that you were specifically attempting to use the TK Pulse to repeat what you had done in the jeep, rendering the target unconscious. Thus I was giving you the benefit of the doubt on this--but you had a lot of rolls to get through, you just didn't see the others because you didn't get that far.Also, MJ recently said that a single TK pulse of mine just about knocked a guy off his feet. MJ rolled an agility check for the guy to stay on his feet. That is kind of what inspired this. I the player didn't realize a TK pulse was capable of knocking someone off their feet until then.
I'm trying to put it in context. Let's suppose you bump into someone when you're walking. You don't bump into the very hard at all. Yet sometimes from such a bump you, or the other, will fall, and sometimes neither of you will fall, and sometimes both of you will fall. What makes the difference? The difference is
- whether either of you was off balance at the moment of impact;
- whether the impact was in the direction needed to put you further off balance; and
- whether you were able to compensate before falling.
The difference between that circumstance and the driver of the jeep is evident: you were not looking to push the man out of the jeep or to knock him into something; you were looking to annoy him, and succeeding in doing so.
Besides, the driver of the jeep was sitting, a relatively stable stance, while the man you failed to deck was standing, a considerably less stable stance. Had you shifted the body weight of the standing man sufficiently that it was not centered over his feet, there was a chance that he would fall. The same was not true for a man who was both sitting and holding firmly to a solid object (the steering wheel).
Looked at from that direction, in the instance with trying to knock the man down, his agility check was necessary to determine whether you succeeded in your objective, because it was not sufficient in that case to say that you rolled a successful TK pulse skill check and so knocked the man down--we had to say that you rolled a successful TK pulse and now we were going to have to roll the dice to determine whether you may have achieved your real objective of knocking the man down hard enough that he blacks out. In the jeep, once you had annoyed the driver, you had accomplished what you intended to do. I might have rolled a GE roll for what happens because if it, but only if I were in a really foul mood and were hoping to get a really bad roll--er, I mean, only if I thought something really bad might happen. Otherwise (and particularly in a flatlined bias) I would just let you succeed in annoying the driver until you botched, and then figured out how bad it went.
And as to that conversation you imagined having with your character--you have to have those with yourself, and not with your referee. Once you tell your referee what your character is going to do, he is under no obligation to question or second-guess you. He might think that what you're going to do is likely to get you killed, but that's only his problem if he doesn't know what world he should use next. It's entirely possible that
- you've decided that your character cannot see the danger in what he's doing; or
- you've decided that your character can see the danger but doesn't care; or
- that you can't see the danger yourself because even though the referee (who knows many things neither you nor your character know) can see how dangerous that is, it really isn't that obvious.
--M. J. Young
MJ, Scott, everyone else, Adam included. Things get inside my head, and they don't get out. It's part of the psychosis. If I could let go of the past, I wouldn't be psychotic. Seriously. Thank you all for dealing with me on this. It's just something I needed to get straight inside my own head. You think it's annoying to you? You only have to hear about it on the board. I have to live inside my head 24 hours a day.
Anyway, this whole thing just seemed so strange to me. I had to get it straight. It's mostly straight now. Thanks for that. I will (literally) sleep a little easier at night.
And MJ, you said a while ago about multiple postings. I still do it, but now they're at least an hour apart, of completely different or at least otherly different topics, and I limit myself to three. (I am doing a celebration therapy right now. Three years, no psychotic episodes, YEAH!!!!!!) In a way, this board is a documentation of the effects of my psychosis therapy. That could be valueable to science. (Seriously!!)
About the closest thing I have had to a psychotic episode in the last 2 months culminated in two possible world designs, and an interesting rant on a way to beat a flatline world. It's been productive, to say the least.
At about this time of day, November 19, 2005, I was sitting in my apartment having a psychotic episode. I was doing my best to record it on my computer. I got a good deal of it (Almost an hour and a half's worth) and my doctor could study it. It was also the last episode that I had. The date stamp on the recordings say November 19, 2005, so I'm going with that. I actually have no idea of the actual date, except that it was about this time of year.
Who knows what could happen?
John, I know that you have psychotic episodes, and that to some degree they are different from what everyone else experiences. However, I think that you, having no connection to the baseline of "normal" against which you contrast yourself, exaggerate the difference.
You wrote:
MJ, Scott, everyone else, Adma included. Things get inside my head, and they don't get out. It's part of the psychosis. If I could let go of the past, I wouldn't be psychotic. Seriously. Thank you all for dealing with me on this. It's just something I needed to get straight inside my own head. You think it's annoying to you? You only have to hear about it on the board. I have to live inside my head 24 hours a day.This is a milder statement of your frequent "threat" that when we get to heaven we will have to spend a day in your head. (Somehow I don't think that's what any of us are expecting in heaven, but we'll let that slide.) However, this aspect, of things getting in your head and not getting out, is something that everyone experiences.
Seriously.
Just last night, John Mastick was trying to pull me out of my feeling that the band we had back in 1975 failed. He looks back on that as one of the great successes in his life, that we had a band that played in lots of venues and had a following that went from place to place, that at our final concert we packed one of the larger venues such that they had to set up video to the basement for the overflow crowd, that we showed up there with a Ryder truck full of equipment and got warm accolades from people who had never heard us before and were saddened that they would never hear us again.
I often go back to that as the end of a great hope in my life, after which I never really got anywhere near that recognition in music. I can't help wondering whether we could have gone on to record, but at the time I felt that we had come to the end, that we had no future as a band, and I let it go.
That's only one of many moments in my past to which my mind returns, wondering whether my life would be better had that moment been different.
Paul tells us, in I Corinthians 10:9 I think, that everything we go through is the same as what everyone else goes through--"common to man" is the phrase in many translations. We all go through the same kinds of things. We go through them in different contexts, in different intensities, in different ways, at different points in our lives--but nothing happens to any of us that is not, fundamentally, like things that happen to everyone else.
That includes you. You are not that different. What you have is more severe in its way than what the rest of us have in that area, but we have the same kind of thing. You have more trouble dealing with some of it for that reason, but we also struggle to deal with similar things. There will be details of what you experience that you can distinguish as making your problem more severe, but at the core you are like the rest of us, and we are like you.
I hope this encourages you. It should. You are not that different, and we do understand you. It requires us to imagine particular things being a lot worse than they have ever been for us, but they are not really different in kind--only in degree.
--M. J. Young
I hope this encourages you.
It does. Thanks MJ.
In a way, you guys have been witness to several psychotic episodes. Now you have some level of sympathy with my 2 next door neighbors. They had to listen to me screaming obcenities for hours on end. (One guy for about 3 years. He never said anything to the management or to me, but I wonder what he thought of it.)
It's nice to know that it is kind of the same way for everyone else.
And MJ, about your band, I'd call that "A successful failure." Kind of in line with the Apollo 13 moon mission.
Your divergent is in a band, you run Multiverser. It could be that you would have wound up a drunken, drug abusing "Rock and Roll Star" Who knows? I'm sure it could have happened even to you.
MJ, your band didn't fail, it successfully failed. You didn't wind up a drunken, drug abusing "Rock and Roll Star" I think he is the failure, don't you?
And an interesting idea for a divergent MJ too, I might add........
Oh yeah, and just to clarify something. When I said that I would give a difficult agility check for the driver to avoid being knocked out. He wasn't nonsensical until his head hit the wheel. He still could have recovered from that, which is why I said I would give a difficult agility check.
Not disputing it, just saying what I personally would have done, that's all.
Two posts, btw.
Three posts, and it's the last.
This is a milder statement of your frequent "threat" that when we get to heaven we will have to spend a day in your head. (Somehow I don't think that's what any of us are expecting in heaven, but we'll let that slide.)
The Bible clearly says "With God ALL THINGS are possible." Maybe I'm taking that out of context, but I'm also taking it at face value. If ALL THINGS are possible with God, then you spending time inside my head is possible.
And MJ, that verse you cited about things being common to man is 1 Corinthians 10-13. "No temptation has seized you except that which is common to man. God is faithful, He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you can bear. And He will provide a way out, so that you can stand up under it."
It was the first Bible verse I ever memorized.
Mistake, sorry.
MJ, I know I said I wouldn't post again, but I kind of wanted your thoughts on what I said about your band being a successful failure. (go up 3 or 4 posts) I know it's hard for you to imagine, but you could just as easily have gotten lost in the culture and become a junkie like Jim Morrison. You might not even have lived as long as you have if your band had taken off. In 1975, you would have been 20. You could very well have gotten caught up in the scene and died before you were 30. Yeah, you'd have a string of hit records and Mark Young would be a household name, but what's the point in that if you're dead from a drug overdose?
I know that a long time ago, Heroin was used to treat asthma. You might have decided that it was working better than your inhaler. Who knows? I'm just saying it would have been possible.
Something to think about, anyway.
John, I did not address your comment because it was completely lacking the context of the situation.
The Last Psalm was a Christian rock band. It played the Christian coffeehouse circuit. Several of its members were in Bible college at the time, and others went on to ministry. The hope was to follow in the direction of bands like Love Song (Chuck Girard the best known of the well-known names from that), Daniel Amos (a band), Randy Stonehill, Larry Norman, Honeytree, Second Chapter of Acts, Phil Keaggy, Keith Green, into the relatively new Christian contemporary music field.
Besides, I'm the guy who does not like the feeling alcohol gives you of being disconnected from reality. I can't imagine that I would ever have thought that heroin was a good choice. And I had no asthma until I was around thirty, and not much for a long time after that.
You are wrong to see the failure of the band in that light. It is extremely unlikey that the terrible things you envision would have flowed from any such success.
You are not wrong that there are good things about the band, some connected to success and some to failure.
John Mastick is right: The Last Psalm was a very popular local band. It had a following. We got compliments on what we did. I cannot say that I never played in a popular band; I ran one, for several years. John looks back on that as one of the high points in his life, and I do not know that others do not do so as well. When I play in other bands, to some degree I compare them to that; I have yet to surpass what we did then.
On the other hand, when I started The Last Psalm, and even when it was coming to its end, I honestly believed that the only talents and abilities I had were my musical genius. I did not know that I had an above average intelligence; it would not have occurred to me that I could write books, design games, teach theology, or do any of the many other things I have done in the years since. I was a superior musician who was just "middlin'" in everything else, in my own eyes. My teachers never suggested to me that I was smarter than I thought, except in that "you're smarter than that" way that meant they thought I should have done better on some assignment. I got exceptional PSAT/SAT scores, but I always knew I had a knack for multiple guess tests so I didn't pay any attention to that. My mother always told me I was smart--but she also told me I was handsome, so I knew she was lying. Mothers always think their sons are all that, so she didn't have much credibility in that area.
Thus had The Last Psalm been successful, I probably would still be working in the Christian music world. Maybe I'd have been happy there; it's impossible to say what I would be doing by now. What is fairly clear, though, is that I probably would never have discovered that I had anything else to offer the world besides the music. The failure of The Last Psalm, coupled with my subsequent failure to succeed with any other band or solo career, forced me to discover that I was more than just a good musician.
Now if you'll excuse me, my lead guitarist is here. It's time for me to go back to being a good musician.
--M. J. Young
MJ, you have the common problem of Selective Reading. You did not see the word "Could" in there. I said it "Could" happen. Not that it would, not that it was likely, but that it Could. Maybe I'm just labeling the grapes sour because they are out of reach, but better that than wallowing in self-pity for the rest of your life.
Yeah, sure. I could have been abducted by aliens. I could have been drafted by the Green Party and elected as their first successful President of the United States, and then assassinated by the Libertarian candidate I narrowly defeated. I could have been bitten by one of those vampires I don't believe exist. Had you suggested any of those possible futures for me, I would have been not more skeptical than I am of the one you did propose.MJ, you have the common problem of Selective Reading. You did not see the word "Could" in there. I said it "Could" happen. Not that it would, not that it was likely, but that it Could.
I did not read selectively. I clearly saw the word "Could". I assumed that it meant this was something that actually might happen, instead of some impossible fantasy horror story you created as the outcome of what might have been. I ignored it because you did not have the facts; when you pressed the point I gave you the facts. You then insisted that despite the impossibility of your suggestion I ought to have entertained it seriously. Fine. Let me also be disappointed that NASA didn't tap me for the last Apollo mission. It might have happened, and just as plausibly as what you suggested.
--M. J. Young
Let me also be disappointed that NASA didn't tap me for the last Apollo mission. It might have happened, and just as plausibly as what you suggested.
And 2 years ago, if you had asked me if I would have ever tried to stop the attack on Pearl Harbor, I would have adamantly said "NO!!!" We found out that was just wishful thinking.
Speaking of the Apollo moon missions, there was a story that I read. Don't know if it's true, probably not, but still interesting.
When Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon, after he gave his famous "One small step for man" speech, he supposedly said "Good luck Mr. Gorsky" Everyone assumed that it was a rival Russian astronaut. However, upon investigation, there was no Gorsky listed in the Russian space program. Neil Armstrong wouldn't tell anyone who Mr. Gorsky was. Thirty years later, a reporter at a press conference asked the question "Who is Mr. Gorsky?" Neil Armstrong finally decided to answer. Mr. Gorsky was dead, after all, and it didn't really matter. Mr. Gorsky was his next door neighbor when he was a kid. Neil Armstrong was playing baseball with some of his friends, and one of them hit the ball over the fence into Mr. Gorsky's yard. Neil Armstrong went over the fence to retrieve the ball. When he was in the yard, he heard Mr. and Mrs. Gorsky arguing. Mrs. Gorsky said "Sex? You want Sex? You'll get sex when that kid next door walks on the moon!!!!!"
In other words, don't say something is impossible. You're the one who is always saying that you're skeptical when someone says what they would do in a situation they have never faced.
Ya know, something occurred to me a few days ago. Scott and MJ have both said that an agility check would have been rolled for the driver if I had been trying to throw him out of the jeep with my TK pulse. That seems to imply that the TK pulse is stronger depending upon what the person is using it for. Is that the case, or is this just another case of John misunderstanding something? If you're going to roll the agility check for one use, you should roll it for every use, shouldn't you? As Scott said a few posts back, I'm just using the most salient example to explore confusion about the rules.
Let's look at it a different way.
Suppose you said you were going to throw rocks into the lake. I would tell you that they made splashes and plunking noises, and that would be the end of it. Depending on a few factors (like how far you were from the lake) I might roll for it.
Suppose you said you were going to throw rocks into the lake in order to distract the guard on the shore and cause him to look that direction. Well, now I need to roll something to determine whether the guard looks that direction. That's because the throwing rocks into the lake now has a purpose--it is not an end in itself. Note that had there been a guard before this I might or might not have rolled to see whether throwing rocks in the lake had any effect on him--but when you wanted a specific effect, I had to roll to see whether you got that specific effect.
Suppose you said you were going to skip a stone across the water. Now I have to roll to see whether you succeed in skipping the stone across the water, or whether it just sinks into the lake. Sure, it was possible for the stone you threw in the lake to skip across the water, but if you weren't trying to do it there would be no reason to bother noting whether that happened.
If you're TK pulsing the driver for no reason other than to push him around and annoy him (which seemed to me to be the situation), then what we need to determine is whether the TK pulse works and whether you're annoying him. Oh, and if it botches.
If you're TK pulsing the driver specifically to knock him out of the jeep, then you are going to time and aim your pulse very precisely, to attempt to get it to push him over when he was leaning that way already, or somehow to get him off balance. This is a planned intelligent use of the technique, not a haphazard pushing.
Now, if you are randomly pushing the driver around to annoy him, there is of course the chance that you might push him out of the jeep. That, though, is not your intention. It is thus a very slim chance that you would succeed in doing something that is, I think, completely outside your intentions or expectations, and probably contrary to what you want. In fact, this is so contrary to what you expect and intend that it would make a good entry on a botch list: if you push him the wrong way, he falls out of the jeep.
So the possibility that he might fall out of the jeep is covered not by the agility check but by the botch list. It doesn't have to be covered by the agility check because you're not making a conscious effort to knock him out of the jeep so he doesn't have to counter it. He doesn't get the agility check because the botch list says you botched and something bad happened, and so it's easier just to say that the bad thing that happened is that the driver got knocked out of the car.
- We could, I suppose, say that it might be that the bad thing that happened was that the driver got knocked out of the car, but see, he made his agility check, so that wasn't it, and then pick a different bad thing that might have happened. Had the driver been either a player character or a major non-player character, it might have been appropriate to allow him to resist the effect of the botched TK pulse--if you knocked your associate out, I would at least allow the associate the chance of landing unharmed. But remember, one point is to streamline play by minimizing rolls. In this case, if the botch comes up that you knocked the guy out of the jeep, we assume he failed his agility check. If he hadn't failed, it wouldn't have been a botch.
--M. J. Young
Yeah MJ, that is more clear. Thanks for the explanation.