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Yoink
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Post Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 8:05 am      Reply with quote

A couple of things I have been pondering about the setting:

First, at present, with no contact/knowledge of other settlements, there isn't really any scope for roleplaying as a "newcomer"- I mean sure, no-one's going to be on first-name terms with everyone else in an overpopulated mess of slums and streets as Rust, but we're all born there, we all know of the market(most of us no doubt visiting it on a regular basis) and we all know at least the basics of the three families.
You can't really walk into the Boozer or whatever and act all like, "Oh hey, nice place," 'cuz you've probably been drinking yourself blind in there since you were old enough to walk- unless you're really poor or weird or something, and even then you'd still have probably visited the place.
Of course, your background could say "Yo, I'm from da slums, movin up in da world" and maybe you aren't too familiar with the ins-and-outs of the marketplace etc, but the slum areas aren't really fleshed-out enough to give a great deal to work with. (Well, I could be wrong- I've been through the slums a bit, but I haven't exactly explored them thoroughly. I just haven't encountered much lore about 'em)
Perhaps some different names of neighborhoods, even if they have little or no coded, in-game worth, could help give some options when deciding just which shithole your PC crawled out of, and why they don't know the name of such-and-such leading an expedition, or whatstheirname on the holoscreen.

The other thing, well, lemme start off by saying I love having PC clanleads, now. Very Happy That's great fun, having each of them actually pursuing their goals as a person, rather than as a useful tool to progress the story of the game as a whole.

But that's not the point I wanna make: We, the PCs, actually ARE (well, include!) the high-ranked, upper crust folk. Despite all starting off OOCly new to the game and with half-furnished Family bases and a general food shortage, we aren't all scuttling about with some mysterious NPC overlords looking down upon our efforts with amusement, we are the--

...Crap, I'm way off topic and rambling. I do that, sometimes.
Uhh, the point I was working towards could really be made in a sentence, and it isn't really even relevant to anything anyway: If PCs include the upper bounds of Rust's citizenry, and there aren't any mysterious, shadowy outside factions, just who is it who manages to outfit the wretched-and-desperate with pricey cybernetics, in exchange for the classic ol' "nasty favours"?

Could it be, turning this rambling load of squickshit towards something more positive as my train of thought rumbles on, well off the tracks and plowing through a built-up area, that such shady dealings with cybernetic implants actually become something carried out by/amongst the playerbase?
'Cuz that would be freaking AWESOME.

(Apologies in advance for this mess before I press submit. :-S)


Edit: Forgot to mention how much I'm loving the game. Derp. That's probably a more important point than whatever I was going on about above. Razz Just a couple of (what I think are) fun ideas that occured to me.


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malfunction
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Post Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 8:43 am      Reply with quote

I don't see why cybernetics would be 'shady'. They're expensive and dangerous (in a world that lacks experts and well-equipped surgery rooms) but they shouldn't be illegal.

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wilde
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Post Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 9:32 am      Reply with quote

Yoink wrote:
First, at present, with no contact/knowledge of other settlements, there isn't really any scope for roleplaying as a "newcomer"


By having everybody from roughly the same town to start with, it keeps the focus on Rust, the centre of our game. This doesn't mean that it'll stay like this forever.

Yoink wrote:
...the slum areas aren't really fleshed-out enough to give a great deal to work with.


They're a blank slate! People are free to make stuff up about the slums. Get creative, put things in your background, start sayings and legends and myths, make in character board posts...

Yoink wrote:
...that such shady dealings with cybernetic implants actually become something carried out by/amongst the playerbase?


Guess you'll have to wait and see on this one!

malfunction wrote:
I don't see why cybernetics would be 'shady'. They're expensive and dangerous (in a world that lacks experts and well-equipped surgery rooms) but they shouldn't be illegal.


Cybernetics aren't illegal. The were illegal in the Terran Planetary Federation and were one of the reasons people were sent to the penal colony on the moon.

They're shady because they're dangerous and because the expense of them means that desperate people are often forced into performing unsavoury tasks to fund them.


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Sphinx
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Post Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 10:50 am      Reply with quote

Out of curiosity, who runs the market guards and patrols? Are they a neutral indy group? A family coalition? Each family handles the gates nearest their territory?

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Nedinu
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Post Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 12:16 pm      Reply with quote

Excerpt from the 'Daily Life In Rust' on the wiki: The market is the lifeblood of the settlement. Always open, busy and loud, it is the center of almost all trade and recreation in Rust. Here is the bulk of the town's businesses as well as its most popular bar, and this is perhaps the one place where people can feel truly safe. It is managed and protected by an unofficial faction of armed guards known colloquially as the Market Watch, and they stay strictly neutral and distanced from the town's politics.

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Onasaki
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Post Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 1:26 pm      Reply with quote

How come the sub-races aren't interbreed-able? Arent't they all still essentially human? I don't think radiation and shit, would've screwed them up that badly, that they're an entirely different species.

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Matt
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Builder

Post Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 1:43 pm      Reply with quote

Genetic engineering made them the way they are and it's different enough to where they can't.

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Tepes
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Post Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 1:50 pm      Reply with quote

Word of God. Species no interbreedy.

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padweld999
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Post Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 2:04 pm      Reply with quote

oh, they can breed...it just won't produce anything!

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Bartleby
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Post Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2013 5:50 pm      Reply with quote

Edit: Apologies in advance for the length. I have thoughts. Embarassed

Onasaki wrote:
How come the sub-races aren't interbreed-able? Arent't they all still essentially human? I don't think radiation and shit, would've screwed them up that badly, that they're an entirely different species.


I don't know what the admins were thinking, but I had asked myself this question earlier when I realized that if they COULD interbreed, since there isn't any contact with the colonies, there eventually wouldn't be separate races at all. Everybody would potentially be more or less 74% Terran, 20% Martian, 5% Titan, 1% Calistan, or what have you. If a Terran were to breed with a Martian, the baby wouldn't be heads-its-a-Terran-tails-its-a-Martian, it would be 50% Terran and 50% Martian... and then what would its stats be? Cool

That said, it is a bit... uh... logically far-fetched. I'm with you there. It's easy for radiation/genetic alteration to have the effect of sterilizing an individual, it's vastly more complicated to change a collection of individuals in precisely the same way, to the exact degree necessary that they can breed successfully with one another but not with the stock they originally came from.

But I'm guessing it's a practical thing. If you want the races to continue to exist as discreet entities that are handled differently by the code, you can't really allow interbreeding among them, unless you're willing to code "half-Martian" and "half-Titan" but if you're wanting to also include things like "half-Martian-half-Titan" it becomes overcomplicated very quickly.

padweld999 wrote:
oh, they can breed...it just won't produce anything!


Not that it matters, and you're probably right about how this is going to work in game for practical reasons, but I would just mention as food for thought that if the union couldn't produce children at all, that would imply even further species remove -- and might very well be something that would rather go against the instincts of the species involved. After all, dogs don't try to breed with cats, even though many of them are about the same size, have a lot in common as predators, and roughly comparable intelligence and biological complexity.

Horses will breed with donkeys, and their unions do produce young (mules), but the offspring themselves can't produce children with anyone. That's actually one of the ways the boundaries of a species is defined, by whether or not it can produce fertile offspring. Very closely-related species -- essentially meaning species which derive, in the very recent (evolutionarily speaking) past, from a common ancestor, which I think covers the relationship between Terrans, Martians, etc -- can often interbreed, but produce infertile offspring.

The reason I mention this, I think, is because it goes to the question of whether or not a Martian (or Titan, Calistan, whatever) would realistically want to have sex with a Terran, or vice versa. Chances are if they can't produce a baby, they're less likely to be sexually interested in one another. Whereas, if they could produce a baby, even if that baby was not be able to produce any children itself, they might very well be attracted to one another as per usual. This also retains the effect of ensuring that future Martians are spawned only through Martian-Martian unions, future Titans from Titan-Titan unions, etc.

I have a feeling people are going to prefer to carry on however they want to carry on without considering these questions, but I think the idea of playing a Martian who is lonely because he doesn't know any other Martians is really intriguing, personally. If she can get laid by any Terran who crosses her path, on the other hand, it's not nearly as interesting, imo.

It's sort of a question of how alien the races really are from another. Personally I think the more alien, the more interesting, for RP purposes, and the necessity of separating them cleanly for practical gameplay purposes would seem to dovetail nicely with that. On the other hand, I know some people might just want the stat bonuses and don't really want to have to play "that weird guy" -- which is up to them, I guess, and I wouldn't want to tell them how they have to play their PC. It's just something to consider.

Also, I was wondering -- someone asked this question but I was hoping for a little more detail in the answer:

How did the resident non-Terrans come to be in Rust, since they can't have arrived recently (within their own lifetime)? Are they descendants of Martian/Titan/Calistan criminals who were imprisoned there, or...?


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I would prefer not to.
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Featured artwork used on Parallel RPI given permission for use by original artists macrebisz and merl1ncz.