Untrue, Jhiaxus. I can definitely say that people who live above the Mason-Dixon Line should pay more than those who live beneath it.
JTM, that's just silly. But, you can regard the money coming in that is loaned as coming into Washington, and my original statement still holds true.
The current crisis got kicked off when Barney Frank and Chris Dodd kept on pushing for people to own houses, who should not own houses. And W tried to stop them. Now, I know Dodd's been in office a long time, but I wasn't aware he was in office long enough to also kick off the Great Depression.
And yes, S=H was a major cause in the Great Depression. Not even controversial. That's one of my more mainstream statements.
And one suspects 90% of profit, because of gross would be somewhere in a very dark place beyond crazy. Think, JTM. I buy lemons and sugar for 20. I sell my lemonade for 30. Of my gross, the gov't takes 27 dollars. I then take the three dollars and get drunk because I don't have enough money to restock on lemons.
No, FDR was bad news, but not that bad. He would have taxed me for 9 which is economy recovery destroying, but not outright looting. So after taking the risk of rain, and of bullying kids stealing my drink, and of having to work all day....I have one shiny dollar for risking 30 dollars. Sounds like a terrible deal, and an excellent reason to go on a cruise ship to Europe, and spend the cash on myself.
Flat Income Tax for people is what it is, you make 10,000, you pay $1300. For businesses it's 13% of your net,....
Ah. I have failed to make myself clear on a critical point.
We could argue that there are actually four categories of "persons", that is, "taxable entities". You are distinguishing between individuals and businesses, but you're ignoring partnerships and sole proprietorships, which are in some sense both individuals and businesses. And really you, of all people, should know this, because you are a sole proprietorship.
Let's use Eric's Lemonade Stand example. I had twenty dollars; it was my money. I spent the twenty on the materials and sold the lemonade and made thirty. That's my income. It is, of course, my gross income; but it is also my personal income--that thirty dollars is my money, it is how much I made selling the lemonade. If you charge me 13% of that thirty dollars, that's $6.90 tax, and I quite reasonably could complain that I am being taxed unfairly. If I were a "business", that is, a corporation, I would be taxed only on my net profit, which means $1.30 on the ten dollars.
But because I am a sole proprietorship, the lines between what is business and what is personal are blurred. To make the lemonade I had to work in my kitchen, and I had to use my own cleaning supplies to clean the kitchen. Because the lemonade needed to be pasteurized, I had to use my stove, which means energy costs--which also go for my lights. It's also wear and tear on my pots and utensils, which will have to be replaced eventually. How much of all that comes off my income? If I were a corporation, all of that would be part of the cost of doing business, and it would all be "deductible" because "deductible" defines that part of gross receipts that is not net profit.
I am not seeing any suggestions for a fix, or an alternative system.
I made no claim that I had a solution to the tax problem. In fact, I think that the graduated income tax system with a system of deductions and tax credits is one of the best possible systems for a fair tax. It's just that it has to be tweaked and monitored and is easily abused by officials looking to curry favor with specific special interest groups. But if you want other alternatives, let me see what I can devise.
- No taxes are collected. Instead, everyone receives directly from the government vouchers for food, clothing, personal needs, and recreational wants, along with an appropriate housing assignment. Medical care is paid directly by the government. Everyone is assigned to work where the government believes they will be most effective. No one is paid, and there is no money, no independent businesses, and innovation happens in government research departments.
- Government is eliminated, and law ceases to exist. Inherent in this, there are no corporations. Everyone makes a living however he can. Money as we know it becomes as worthless as it really is, because it's just paper or cheap metal or electronic information. It is gradually replaced by a barter system in which certain durable objects become valuable as coinage. We devolve to a simpler, if perhaps harsher and more violent, time, and millions die of disease and starvation until the population stabilizes at a level that can be supported by such a culture.
- Everyone is required to work except those under fourteen years of age or ruled medically unfit to work by government doctors. If you work, you receive vouchers for food, clothing, and housing expenses. Medical care is free. You also are paid, but the government takes all of your income directly and immediately. If you make more than a hundred thousand you may file a tax credit document and have the overpayment returned to you. If you do not work and have not been excused by a medical excuse, you are of no interest to the government.
Are these bad solutions? Absolutely. Does that make your solutions good ones? Absolutely not.
I am not even talking about sales tax (which I think should replace the entire tax system completely, you get taxed based on what you consume).
Ah, but sales tax falls heavier on the poor, who are forced to spend a larger percentage of their income. Even if necessities are carefully defined and excluded (such that the poor can buy food and clothes untaxed but luxury clothes and food are taxed), the poor spend a larger proportion of their income on non-essentials. If I take my family to the movies, it costs me the same dollars as it does for Bill Gates to take his family to the movies, but even assuming we have the same size families the outing is a much larger percentage of my income than it is of his. There is only so much you can consume, no matter who you are, and unless you're going to have a complex graduated sales tax that targets some products as "luxury" and others as "necessity" the rich are going to pay proportionately less than the poor. Your flat 13% is more fair than that.
Even with a graduated sales tax you're going to run into trouble. A luxury yacht is clearly a luxury item, and ought to be taxed at the luxury rate. A fishing boat might or might not be--after all, if the purchaser makes his living as a fisherman, the boat is a necessity, essential to his livelihood, and should be taxed at the lower rate. But this just invites boat salesmen to outfit fishing boats with all the comforts of luxury yachts and sell them to people who want yachts without paying the higher taxes. The same is true of cars: how do you define the difference between basic transportation and luxury vehicle, particularly given that many of the features which distinguished a vehicle as a luxury car when I was young (power windows, air conditioning, tinted glass, FM radio) are standard or easily available in the cheapest of cars today?
The reason tax systems are complex is that equity in financial matters is difficult to achieve. In fact, it's even difficult to define. You may have seen the example of the group of guys who go out for drinks together every week and pay on a graduated level based on their income, and then one day the proprietor discounts their drinks and they fight about who gets the the refund. The upshot is that they wind up putting the richest guy in the hospital, and the next time they come for drinks they don't have enough money between them to cover the tab. Saying that everyone has to pay the same percentage is not more fair than saying everyone has to pay the same amount. Eric somewhat tongue-in-cheek says that people above the Mason-Dixon Line should pay more than people below it, but it raises the issue of whether cost of living ought to be included in the formula--you can make a lot of money working on the pipeline in Alaska, but you're going to spend a lot of money trying to survive while you're up there, and that's not really cost of doing business, but it is part of the price for having the job.
Simple solutions to the tax system problem sound good to people who don't understand why it works the way it does, but it works the way it does precisely because simple solutions do not work.
--M. J. Young
I like your option 2, which is the most likely to happen with any major collapse. :P
Curious. What GE roll would mean "Went terrible, but could have gone a whole lot worse"? I think that's the roll I rolled for my life. Thanks.
(Doing SERIOUS Therapy)
Two
If you had a player who actually was a 2@5 blacksmith, and he used that talent in a world, what referee would question what he said about blacksmithing? Unless the referee actually knows something of blacksmithing, he would never dream of telling the player he was wrong. So, why is it that a player with 2@5 knowledge in a fictional topic (Like, oh, I don't know, Terminator mythology) be completely ignored? What's the difference? You can go to the same websites and learn the same information. Yet, you could do that with the blacksmith, but still don't argue? They're still facts, even though one set is of a fictions universe.
(Doing SERIOUS Therapy)
But saying everyone has to pay the same percentage does the following goods...
1. It greatly simplifies things so that we can know what 'the only native American criminal class' is up to.
2. It provides more economic certainty (and since much of our problems right now are due to economic uncertainty aka 'what's that crazy man going to do next?') which reduces risk and encourages economic growth.
3. It puts pressure to reduce the size of government which since ours is greatly oversized would be a good thing.
4. It would mean we would have to fire thousands of IRS employees, thus saving America cash. Also, there would be less of a market for tax professionals who could then get a job more useful to the economy. Again, more economic growth would result.
5. Arguably it is the fairest means to do things.
6. Such a tax system would benefit the poor as the rest of the economy would boom. Of course the rich would benefit even more, but we are commanded not to be envious.
7. I'd tax the fishing boat and the yacht at the same higher rate. Only tax the neccessities at a lower rate (and by necessities I mean necessities) although I could be talked into just taxing everything the same on a KISS principle.
8. Less worrying about taxes would give people more reason and time to worry about how government is wasting mountains of cash.
9. WAAAAAAY less corruption in the Senate and the bueraucracies. That's worth it by itself. Dumb decisions get made daily because someone got a kickback. This flat tax makes doing such very hard.
Although that happened to an extent, it largely happened via the federally chartered lenders. The prime issue was that people assumed that a sufficiently diverse real estate portfolio would always be a safe bet because real estate downturns used to be mostly localized, and forgetting important steps like establishing that the person buying the house actually has a job. That second one most definately can't be blamed on the federal government, because the banks were actually unaware they shouldn't buy a house because they didn't bother to check.The current crisis got kicked off when Barney Frank and Chris Dodd kept on pushing for people to own houses, who should not own houses.
The Tariff was a negative influence, but the main cause was a massive stock bubble that crashed rather dramatically and instantly rendered a large number of people bankrupt.
The key flaw with the lemonade stand argument is that you either get taxed as an individual, and thus don't pay the corporate tax rate, or you earn precisely zero dollars regardless because you forgot to give yourself a salary.
Curious. What GE roll would mean "Went terrible, but could have gone a whole lot worse"?
John, you've got the book. Depending on how bad you mean by "terrible", that could be anything from a 21 Bad enough to 26 Worse than anticipated or maybe 27 Worst fears. If you check the table in Appendix 3: Basic Dicing Curves, you can do it by percentile--
- 0.1% roll 30
- 0.3% roll 29, so less than one half of one percent roll 29 or worse
- 0.6% roll 28, so 0.1+0.3+0.6=1.0% roll 28 or worse.
- 1% roll 27, so 1+1=2% roll 27 or worse, and that means only 2% roll worse than 26, putting you in the 97th percentile, as bad as or worse than 97% of everyone, but 2% of everyone worse off than you. Since it's a bell curve, that one in a thousand includes those whose lives are as bad as one in a million.
If you had a player who actually was a 2@5 blacksmith, and he used that talent in a world, what referee would question what he said about blacksmithing? Unless the referee actually knows something of blacksmithing, he would never dream of telling the player he was wrong.
Well, that depends. If he tells me that this is something blacksmiths today routinely do, I will accept that and consider whether it might or might not also be something they routinely do in my setting. For example, I know that in Paul Revere's time, silversmiths worked in silver and blacksmiths worked "black" or iron. We don't have silversmiths today, really, so if you told me that blacksmiths did some work in silver today, I would accept that, but not apply it to the late eighteenth century.
Similarly, if a blacksmith using his skill in a game told me that on a particular task he could not possibly get it wrong, I might give him a positive sit-mod for success on that task, but I would not make success automatic in critical situations. He might have shoed a hundred horses without mistake in his life, but that doesn't mean he's not going to make a mistake shoeing the horse of the Lord of Castle Quagmyre, and I'm not going to give it to him without a roll.
So, why is it that a player with 2@5 knowledge in a fictional topic (Like, oh, I don't know, Terminator mythology) be completely ignored?
Well, for one thing, you were not in the world of Terminator mythology. I stated up front that you were in the world of Terminator as I understood it from my knowledge of the four theatrically-released movies only. That means that anything that came from "parole evidence" sources, such as books, comics, director commentary, The Sarah Conner Chronicles, fan fiction, or any other source was excluded. I also reserved the right to adjust details as I felt necessary to fit my understanding of the temporal quirks and the limits of the game system. If you were to state that you had noticed something in one of the movies that I had overlooked, that would mean it was up to my discretion as to whether that was a correct understanding of the version of the universe you were in or not. If you were to tell me something about one of the machines which appear in the films, such as a T-600 or a Hydra, but that information is not in the movies themselves, that would be a waste of my time, and I don't have the time to waste.
It is also critically significant that you were the player in the scenario. If you were sitting at my table and I decided to run Big Bill in Terminator, your input would be considered. With you as the player in the scenario, it's a lot tougher. Remember, there is no fiction and every world that can be imagined exists; but that does not mean that you are in the world as you know it. It could easily be the case that much of what you read about Terminator is true in some other universe. That means if you tell me "the Hydra has a vulnerable spot just below the head" and I did not see that in the movie, I have to roll the dice to determine whether the world is as you hope and expect it to be or whether it is different from that. It is easier for both of us if you do not put that limitation on me, because then I can decide whether the Hydra is vulnerable to a particular attack and don't have to go into the details.
Concerning the flat tax:
5. Arguably it is the fairest means to do things.
Arguably it is not. The reason we have a graduated income tax is precisely because arguably it is not. Also, even in Adam's argument for the "flat tax" he has a graduated income tax, and he also has a filing requirement. The two tax brackets are:
- Those making up to $9999.99, 0%.
- Those making at least $10000.00, 13%.
But we have a graduated tax because we think that the person who made 100K ought to pay not only more money but a larger percentage of his money. Someone who makes 10K in this country is barely scraping by on what he makes--he probably can't get so much as a room in most places for less than $400 a month, which means $4800 per year. If he can eat for $150 per month, that's another $1800 per year, which means $6600 goes to food and shelter. The remaining $3400 has to cover his transportation, medical expenses, and clothing at the very least (assuming that his utilities are included in the price of the room). If we take $1300 from that, it leaves him $2100, or about $175 per month. Bus fare to get to work will eat up most of that, and we can hardly blame this guy if he spends the rest on lottery tickets in a desperate dream to escape his poverty. Meanwhile, if we're taking $13K from the guy who made $100K, that leaves him $77K. That's a pretty comfortable life. Most people don't gross that much. And if we take $130K from the guy who made a million, we leave him with $770K, and the poor guy who hopes that his bus fare will get him to work for the rest of the month rather justly feels that that other guy could afford to shoulder a bit more of the burden.
Let's consider instead a graduated tax. We will assume that each individual will pay 1% of his income for each $2000 he makes, to maximum of 50%. That means that if I make $2000, I have to pay $20. If I'd made only $1999.99 I would owe nothing, but that's not really that big a deal, and unless we're going to tax the paperboy on his few dollars a week we're going to have to have these small inequities somewhere. Then if I make 3999.99 I'm paying $39.99, but if I make $4000 I pay $80.00. That means the penny cost me $40.01, but that's not as bad as our jump in the flat tax scenario. Jumping ahead, the guy making $9999.99 pays 4%, $399.99 and the guy who makes a penny more at 10K pays $500.00, which is $100.01 more but not as much of a disparity nor as heavy a tax bill. By the time we hit $50K we're at 25%, so he pays $12.5K but still has $37.5K of his own, and the guy making $100K pays the maximum 50%, or $50K, leaving him $50K. He can complain about how much of his money goes to taxes, certainly, but he's doing a lot better than the guy who made $10K and still has $9500 on which to live. If you think you're overtaxing the rich with this scenario, reduce the rate at which the tax rate increases, or put the cap lower, such as a 35% maximum.
But you still have not addressed the "deductions" problem, and it remains a problem because we have deductions precisely because we need a means by which to distinguish gross income from net income for those people who have legitimate expenses connected to earning their living. Let me give you some examples of such deductions.
- The independent grocer is a sole proprietor. His store grosses a fairly consistent $50K a month, which means he, as sole proprietor, has a gross income of $600K per year. However, his "markup" averages only 20% of retail price--more on some products, less on others, and he undoubtedly uses "loss leaders" in his marketing techniques (items which he advertises as for sale for less than they cost him, in the hope that those who enter the store to buy those will buy other more profitable items while they are there). That means that $40K per month pays for the groceries he sells, $480K per year, which leaves him $120K. Thus when he files his taxes, he reports that his gross income was $600K, but then he reports as a deduction the $480 he spent on the product he sold, and thus that leaves a net income of $120K. That's a big difference.
- This guy also has to pay something for his storefront. Let's say he owns it outright, so we don't have rent and we don't have a mortgage. However, we do have property taxes, to the tune of $6K per year, and he's got a thousand dollar a month electric bill for all the refrigeration units and lights. He can't be in business without that, so that's another $18K that are legitimate costs of doing business. Shouldn't we let him deduct that as well?
- If those loss leaders are going to work, he has to advertise them. Every week he pays for a full page spread in the local newspaper. The page itself costs him $300, which is $15600 per year for that. Also, he's not a layout man, so he pays another $50 a week to a company that designs the page for him, $2600 per year. Do we consider these costs of doing business, or do we say that he doesn't have to advertise to sell his product, even if he thinks that advertising increases his income?
- Afternoons are busy, so he pays someone part time to help. They only make about $10K a year working for him, but that's another 10K that he doesn't have because he spent it to make the business work efficiently and make money.
- Let's change our people. We've got registered nurse. She shares some things in common with doctors and dentists, but she's probably not an independent business, and there's a good chance that doctors and dentists are. To be a registered nurse, she has to be registered, and that means that she has to pay an annual licensing fee, probably between one hundred and two hundred dollars. She makes more than your average day laborer, but a lot less than your average doctor, and a hundred fifty dollars is a bite out of the month. If she doesn't pay it, she can't work. Should that be a cost of doing business?
- Her employer provides some of the necessities of the job, but not all of them. She probably needs to have her own stethoscope, and she wants a good one; and they get lost and stolen sometimes, and they break, so she might have to replace it each year, another hundred dollar cost of doing business.
- For a lot of good reasons, she's not allowed to wear street clothes on the job, not even good street clothes. She is expected to wear a uniform or scrub suit. If she happens to work as a surgical nurse, sterile wear for surgery will probably be provided by the hospital; but she'll still need special clothing for when she is not in the surgical suite itself. She could easily spend a thousand dollars or more a year on the right clothes and the right shoes, all of which are specifically for use on the job. She can't work without them, and she can't really use them other than at work. Are they legitimate costs of doing business?
- She can't work without being certified in CPR. In some jobs, she also has to be certified in a dozen other medical procedures, such as Advanced Cardiac Life Support for critical care situations, Intravenous Therapy procedures, and more. All of these certifications expire, most of them annually, and have to be renewed, usually by taking update courses. Sometimes your employer pays the cost of these and holds the sessions in-house, but most of the time it is incumbent upon the nurse to maintain her certifications at her own expense. Cost of doing business?
- Also, nurses are required in most states to maintain continuing education, to attend seminars or classes or programs of some sort that will continually update their knowledge of their field. (This is also true for doctors, incidentally.) That's another out-of-pocket expense.
- Being familiar with the costs involved in being a nurse, I could continue to mention such things as the fact that they usually have to supply their own specialty pens--almost always one of those four-color ball-points (because charting has to be done in specific colors for specific times of day and specific kinds of notes) plus a yellow highlighter (for marking specific kinds of notes). Scissors, hemostats, flashlights, are almost always individual equipment, but so too sometimes are blood pressure cuffs. This is apart from the fact that nurses might need the latest annually published drug handbooks to understand the side effects and potential problems of the medications they are administering, and access to other medical information. All of these things are out-of-pocket costs of having the job.
You say you want a flat 13% tax on income, but you have not defined "income". That is what deductions do: they define what part of the money that a person receives is actually "income" as in net, as opposed to money that passes through the hands of the person on the way to paying the costs of doing business. Our independent grocer and our nurse both have those problems in obvious ways. Others have similar problems--an independent taxi driver has to pay for gasoline and automotive maintenance and probably products to keep his cab clean inside and out; a chef usually provides and maintains his own knives; the expenses of an independent dairy farmer can becomes so complicated (what part of his property taxes and utility bills are his family's ordinary living expenses and what part are the cost of maintaining his business?) that special rules might well be in order to simplify them.
So, Flat Tax on what? Deductions exist to determine what is taxable, because there are far too many people in situations in which they gross a lot more money than they net, and if you hit a guy with a 13% tax on his gross when his net is only 6% of his gross, you've taken his entire real income more than twice over.
--M. J. Young
As to tax, you could have the same tax for everyone. A flat percentage tax. Or, a 'progressive' tax as we do now. You can make a decent case that each one is fair. That is 'arguably' each is fair.
The fact that most people nowadays MIGHT agree with the third as being fair is of little concern to this discussion. Otherwise, I'd have to suspect you of making an appeal to authority.
You're not addressing the virtues of simplicity, and economic growth that comes from a flat tax system.
I suspect that our 10k guy is going to do better in the flat tax world, partially because a flat tax is a signifier of a lot of other positive changes which will reduce his costs. The economy will boom, and he will likely get a better paying job, for one.
We can put in place the flat tax as a gathering mechanism without visiting the rules that define the difference between net and gross. I doubt anyone wants to change those.
No we haven't detailed every little bit, and for that you tax us. Heh.
We can put in place the flat tax as a gathering mechanism without visiting the rules that define the difference between net and gross. I doubt anyone wants to change those.
Ah, but those are exactly the reason for the "deductions" that flat tax advocates wish to eliminate. Either you have deductions or you do not. If you do not, then tax is charged on gross income. If you do, then the question becomes what deductions actually are needed to create a fair tax system and which are not.
It is obvious that not all deductions currently in the system are there to calculate net income. For example, there's dependency deductions. We seem to believe that a man working to support a wife and three children ought to be given a break as against a man living alone and spending all his money on himself. This prevents the situation in which children are forced to work for a living because their parents don't make enough money to feed and clothe them otherwise. That's why those deductions are there. We also feel that anyone over sixty-five years old ought to get a break, because they've already reached the age at which government programs are supporting them to some degree (social security and medicare) and it doesn't make a lot of sense to tax them on the money the government gives them. We also give a break to the blind, because of all the disabilities out there blindness is the most disabling.
We also have the filing status deduction for much the same reason: a married couple is taxed at a different rate than a single individual, because it is often the case that one of them does not work. It's not fair to treat them as one taxpayer, but it's not fair to treat them as two, either, so we create a separate category for them.
But there are also government policy deductions. A big one is the energy conservation improvements deduction: if you spend a lot of money making your home more energy efficient, whether installing insulation or adding solar or wind energy generators to the roof, you get a break on your taxes. That's not because it's a necessary expense, but because it's one the government wants you to make. We use tax policy to encourage individuals to spend money in ways that make the nation better, whether by subsidizing better cars and houses or by supporting educational and artistic and religious institutions or in any of many other ways. You can see it even with sales tax, to some degree. In New Jersey, there's no sales tax on food you buy to prepare at home, but there is on ready-made food you buy to eat out, even if you buy it in the same place. That's because we don't want to tax the food eaten by the poor, but we do want to tax the food eaten by the rich, and the rich are more likely to spend their money in restaurants while the poor are more likely to make their own meals and bring their lunches to work. We also have "enterprise zones" in New Jersey, areas hit hard by economic factors in which the sales tax is reduced for most items, but not for big ticket items like cars. The theory is that if you buy your clothes and such in those depressed areas you will create jobs within them, which will help the recovery there.
So there are good reasons to have deductions that have nothing to do with calculating net income, and the notion that we can fix tax policy by sweeping them all aside is rather narrow and shallow thinking. That is, if you understand tax policy, it becomes rather obvious that the simple fix is likely to be a disaster.
--M. J. Young
--
MJ, you say you can't abide by the smell, let alone taste of hot peppers. Let me tell you some facts I just read. Capsaicin, the "hot" ingredient, helps to cure allergies, arthritis, asthma, bleeding, colds and flues, constipation, diabetes, heart disease, hemorrhoids, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, poor circulation and stroke.
I know you have at least 2 of the things on that list. Perhaps you should actually try a pepper? I know from experience a good pepper clears your sinuses and makes breathing easier.
(Doing Therapy)
We got 4-6 inches of nice snow, and so the boys got another day at home, and a day to play outside. Happily, we got mail so I have my Netflix of 'Enemy at the Gates' (a sniper film with a Russian WW2 hero). I'm not sure my Ladyfaire is going to work tonight; I really think she ought to skip.
I'm mostly better, but I still have an occasional hacking cough. Feeling lazy or preoccupied though, so I haven't been posting much.
Mark,
I'm thinking of writng a 'Book of Verses' short story to enlighten on the issue of taxes.
JohnA1,
Would you prefer another GM take over?
Oak,
Don't know if you'll see this, but I suspect you'd prefer another world, which I can do.
Glad you are feeling better :P
Yup. That was one of the worst Christmas Vacations ever.
Just wrote a four thousand word 'enlighten Mark to Eric's wisdom' Multiverser story so I must be doing better.
Oak,
Don't know if you'll see this, but I suspect you'd prefer another world, which I can do.
Yay for my RSS-ed threads! :)
As for other world preferences, I've been in two minds on that...
On the one hand, it is an interesting and complex mystery scenario with interesting bias levels.
However, it has facets which for my own preferences are a bit suboptimal:
(*) An emphasis on arcane magic
(*) A temporal setting too similar to RL
(*) A mostly human culture, at least for non-arcane beings
(*) A mandate, central to the story, to practice deception
Admittedly, the first three of the above points are mostly just superficial "skins", and one could have a very similar scenario with arcane => psi, present day => +/- several hundred years, and human culture => multi-sentient being culture (multiple alien races/fantasy races/anthropomorphic animal races). So it might seem silly that those factors make such a difference to my enjoyment... but they do.
I have similar struggles with my other game, recently passed from MJ to Kyler. I do like many aspects of Sherwood, but I'd like it more if I could go out into the forest and find some interesting non-humans to hang out with for awhile, like fae (more legends that are true in this world?) or furries (a portal to Disney's Robin Hood?). One could argue that cross-cultural interactions are just as interesting with an all human cast, but I've had so many human worlds that I long for more change.
If we switched worlds, could we do some non-present-day scenario with lots of different nonhuman races to get to know? From Worldwalker, I suppose that Day's last world with the multi-being sci-fi alien testing, the "Oak's Seven Days" befriending the beings in that fantasy forest, the anthropomorphic Mary Piper world, and the anthropomorphic toon Paranoia-based Gather I ran would be the best example worlds for what is on my wish list... :)
JohnA1,
Would you prefer another GM take over?
I've not even replied to it in a while. When I do, you reply when you can.
Not getting off track, but point number 4 is pretty weak. I followed your story from the beginning, and not once did you say "I am not this Oak, I may look like him, I may sound like him, but I am not him, and this is not my life." Eric nudged you not to reveal who you were, but if honesty and deception were really that important, why when pressed, did you assume this identity? If deception really is not what you wanted, why not go the straight and narrow route the entire way?
With that said, with the new, kindlier, gentler Eric, I'm sure a change of scenery wouldn't be a bad thing :P
I prayed, and received Divine leading that I should not reveal my true identity.
I'm not certain if that would always be a showstopper for me or not. For example, in Worldwalker ("Oak Overseer", I think the title was) I had to assume the identity of someone. But at least in that scenario, I had the freedom to tell the wife the truth, and work together to do what was necessary.
But in this one, my impression (admittedly hazy by now) was that I shouldn't tell anyone...
I'll try to come up with something, Oak. Right now, I'm trying to do book worlds.
So for those wondering what world Oak was in, ta da....The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. The hero is Harry Dresden, Wizard and Private Eye in Chicago aka 'the only wizard listed in the telephone book'. I think 'Stormfront' is the first book in the series, and there are at least eight books.
Good fun. I reccomend these books. Lots of violence, and pretty interesting.
Hmmmm... So you are looking for suggestions for worlds based upon books? Do movie worlds also count if they have had books written in them, or are you only interested in suggestions based upon books?
"Startide Rising" by David Brin has lots of interesting aliens, but I don't suppose that too many of them would want to be friends with me... :/ Still, depending on where and when I ended up (on a ship in the Progenitor fleet? on the Episiarch home world?), that could be interesting.
"A Fire Upon The Deep" by Vernor Vinge also has lots of interesting aliens, and perhaps a greater variety of friendly ones...
And of course, the Star Wars universe has possibilities... :)
Not so much suggestions. I want to sneak up on my targ--err players.
I got most of the Dresden Files books with Christmas gift cards this year. Good series, although I'm excessively irritated by Dresden mysteriously not getting a sword at any point despite the fact that he logically should have gotten one with the stain-proof cloak.
Also, it has too many instances of people being really awesome offscreen, like The Fist Of God bailing out senior council members.
EDIT: I read Oak's thread here, and I'm interested in finding the continuation. The lack of Knights of The Cross seemed kind of strange to me, though, since it seems like Oak and Micheal would have gotten along rather well.
Well, he's not really done that much in teh game yet, so he's yet to run into them.
Second post...
JTM,
Have you read the story with the werewolves in it, yet?
Yup, actually read that a while before getting most of the series, along with Grave Peril (The one that focuses on the vampires)
Well, in the werewolf one, they had a wide variety of weres, and I decided to do something like that for Oak's game...except a wide variety of fire creatures.
I'm watching Earth vs The Flying Saucers. It's a 50s era UFO flick. The UFO lands on an army base, and of course, the first thing the humans do is start shooting at them. Really smart. Don't try to see if they're friendly or hostile, don't try to communicate, just start an interstellar war that we have no chance of winning. For all they knew, the aliens were about to give us the cure for death!!!!!! Nope, don't establish their intentions, just start shooting at them.
(Doing Therapy)
John, are you really the one criticizing others for shooting before thinking?
That seems odd... if the UFO's were galactic police officers you'd be complaining you weren't given enough chance to shoot them years down the line.
John, are you really the one criticizing others for shooting before thinking?
I challenge you to find a single instance in any of my games where I fired on someone without provocation. OK, so I did shoot at Nikolaj, but I purposely missed my target. It could also be argued that 80 grand is sufficient provocation. People that would stay dead have been killed over much, much less.
(Doing Therapy)
I think it is ironic, John is pining over a game thread from years back, while ignoring his current thread, and ignoring Eric's statement to him, asking if he wanted another GM to take over. I don't think John realizes this is most likely his last chance to get anyone to run a game for him. MJ might take pity on him and take him back, but it seems even his patience isn't eternal.
Oh, btw, I've written a short story a couple days ago from the viewpoint of a versing nurse, about taxes.
I'm thinking about writing another one.
John--Earth vs The Flying Saucers is a fictional story in which the writer presumed that if a flying saucer landed on a secure army base, the army would assume it was under attack and would respond with immediate force. Given that it is a 1956 story that probably is the most likely response the military would have had--we were in the height of the Cold War, and both sides suspected that the other had secret weapons to be unleashed when we were least prepared. Further, it also appears that in that case they were right--the blurb says that the aliens intended to enslave the human race--so our blundering overly paranoid military really did need to do something to try to stop them.
I certainly agree that it would be better to attempt to parlay with aliens, but anyone who has seen V knows that not all aliens are Starman, and vice versa. In a fictional story like that, the point of having the army attack might well be to say, "This is how we would probably react, and this is what would probably happen because of it."
I think it's just as dangerous to take the attitude that any alien who comes to earth is friendly.
Adam--I've already stated that John has left my game a second time and I have no intention of expectation of picking it up again.
Eric--the story was pretty decent, if a bit polemical, but it felt more like the beginning of a longer story and in places it felt like you rushed through some things to get to something else--understandable, because it was also rather longish for the web, but that's a medium problem and it was probably a good length for a short story.
--M. J. Young
MJ just stated in the other game that he has "no intention of reviving John's game now that he has jumped ship to another referee."
Well then. I was beginning to wonder if MJ has the patience of a saint.
EDIT: cross-posted with MJ.
Mark,
Well, I was trying to make a number of points in a more useful and enlightening format than a blog post arguement.
A lot of SF novels are somewhat 'polemical' I think. They describe a problem in society and the method to solve it. I'm thinking right now of a David Drake novel?? based on Byzantium. There were two crowd/gangs of looters intent on fighting each other and looting the more established residents on this colony planet. Drake's heroes got the gangs into a stadium, and then began shooting the gang leaders with sniper shots so as to deprive the crowds of their leaders, and thus to give the politicians time to settle things down.
I was beginning to wonder if MJ has the patience of a saint.
Well, Brock, I guess I do--I have the patience of Saint Mark of Hopewell. I don't have the patience of Saint Eric of Tennessee, but then, each of us has the patience for the task we are given.
But I understand you meant some kind of special capital-S Saint. I'm not sure that the capital-S Saints had that patience (I can see places where Paul was less than entirely patient, such as when he cast out the demon from the fortune-telling slave girl who was annoying him for days, and when he said of the Judaizers in his Galatians letter that he wishes they would castrate themselves). On the other hand, patience grows, and it grows in response to situations in which it is stressed, so if I am more patient than most it's probably because of John and others.
A lot of SF novels are somewhat 'polemical' I think.
Oh, I agree; but the good ones do so without sounding like it.
There were quite a few episodes of the original Star Trek that were trying to make a point about modern society, and sometimes it went smoothly and sometimes it didn't. They did that, too, sometimes in the later versions. One in particular strikes me, when they came to a planet in which the men were all subservient housekeepers to the strong women; and there was another in which gender identity was the issue on a planet on which sexuality was essentially erased. Both of those to me felt pedantic and obvious, like overblown Aesop's fables. Frankenstein is a polemic about the dangers of taking science too far and trying to create life, but it doesn't feel like a heavy moralistic tale. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a polemic about the dangers of releasing our uncontrolled inner selves, our "id" in Freudian terms, but it doesn't read pedantic. You can create wonderful science fiction stories which comment on our modern world very effectively without having them feel like school.
And the benefit is, when they don't feel like you're trying to make a point, the point is accepted much more readily by the readers. If I can clearly see what you're trying to prove and that you're trying to prove it, I argue with it. Animal Farm and 1984 both did a much better job of proving the failures of communism by sneaking up on the reader with the meaning. A hidden meaning is much more effective than an overt one in such efforts.
--M. J. Young
I thought Animal Farm and 1984 were fairly obvious, although I admit that AF probably did a bit of sneaking. Edit: OK, AF did. And yes, AF is better. But I need to learn how to infuse a point into my story. More passion, more viewpoint.
Think of what your customers want.
A lot of SF readers want to understand how the world works, or why its so messed up. Some others want ideas to chew on. And of course, there is a fair chunk who want to be preached too with their particular variant of religion.
I'm not sure where to draw the line, but if its interesting, people will read it. This is part of the reason I've said to you several times that you need to put those 'jewels' of yours in your stories.
I'm not sure you're wrong that it was too pedantic. I do know I'm trying to create New Mental Furniture to replace the Old Garbage. I want new metaphors, and new situations not dealt with in many other stories. I've seen a lot of new and interesting stuff, but I'm trying to break new ground as well. And oftentimes the artistic creator of the new is somewhat crude. It takes someone else's skills to take it and make it smooth and clever. I, of course, want to do both.
I also think that in the modern day, more polemicism is allowable. This is the Day of the Polemic, perhaps.
So I struggle away.
Another short story 'Hammering' is up in the Book of Verses. I'd meant to have an intro that then led into a blacksmith confrontation with a local lord who was a cowardly reactionary with too much status consciousness which is why he supported progressive taxes, but the Intro took over the story.
Having read Animal Farm first, 1984 stunned me with how different it was. I suppose there were "obvious" aspects about it, but when you consider that the point really was that no socialist state would ever be realized because those who have the power have the tools to keep it, it is less obvious. Orwell was a socialist in that he believed socialism was the ultimate best "government" system, but he was also a pessimist who believed it could never be achieved because of people. In that sense, he's probably not far from me--I don't advocate socialism because I think it impossible for ordinary people to become so altruistic and beneficent and hard working without some sort of selfish motivation behind it, and thus some sort of incentive program. Capitalism provides the incentive by assuming that everyone is fundamentally selfish. I don't quite believe that, either, but I think that while capitalism does penalize the beneficent relative to the selfish, it does not overly do so, and in any case there's little sense of talking about beneficence in the absence of sacrifice: if it's not going to cost you to be selfless, how is that really being selfless?
This is part of the reason I've said to you several times that you need to put those 'jewels' of yours in your stories.
I know that you have several times given me advice, some of it good, about my stories, but at the moment I can't connect "those 'jewels'" with anything in particular. My bad, but I welcome the advice if I can make sense of it.
And The Hammering was much better, and I liked it much more.
--M. J. Young
Oh--I note that neither of us linked the new article, which is The Hammering. I made some comments on it there, which I was going to mention, but I got interrupted at this end and forgot to say that.
--M. J. Young
I thought the point of 84 was that the benevolence of socialism is basically a lie. Socialist leaders are power-hungry thugs.
And there are more problems than that with socialism.
As to jewels, one time you discussed at the drop of a hat, phonemes and other elements of language. It was brief, authoritative, surprising...not something I would ordinarily learn. Well, a lot of folks read books to learn things mixed in with the story. Drop in some sort of explanation of an unusual topic, and tie it in to the story somehow.
You could describe a vamp hunting verser doing scientific and mystical experiments to determine just what variety of vampire he is facing.
You did that explanation why a ratbrain would have a soul in Starsong. Well, I just watched 'V' and the good guy V character was talking about whether he had a soul to the priest hero character. And the leader of the V is determined to track down the soul so she can destroy it.
Or you can describe something that happens a lot in stories, but put some more interesting detail to it. Like explain how the Sun has authority over the day, and it attacks a vampire. So instead of 'and the vamp burst into flame' you have a more detailed and unusual explanation.
I do not see them that often, but I've occasionally seen you describe things in a way that could be fairly described as awesome or brilliant. But I don't see that in your novels. YOu NEED to find an excuse to stick some of those jewels in your books. Don't keep your light under a bushel just because the topic of the book might require some plot shifting and unusual stories instead of the traditional story....I mean, I'm not sure how to work the phoneme lecture bit into a story, but it would be good if you could.