beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I was just now thinking, it's got to be really difficult to design WCs for fantasy worlds.
I mean, even the standard Pathfinder dudes need loos ins Small and Medium sizes.
And Small will do for children of Medium, but Small still have children too, so really you need Tiny loos.
And what if a Large visits?
But you'd still need wheelchair access, because disability still exists even if wheelchairs aren't industrial standardised yet.
But the wheelchairs would be in all those sizes too?
And then there's like Locathah who are usually aquatic and you wonder what merperson loos are like but probably don't want to know.
And there's Tengu who are like birds, don't know what facilities they'd need.
Lots of different kinds of humanoid ish species.
And that's just for starters.

I mean I'm sure centaurs and driders need the loo too, somehow. I'm not sure they'd fit in a regular building. They should though, people is people is people.

And I was thinking all this because the Lavatory building is up to four squares, and they can be separate squares, five by five feet.

That is just not a lot of toilets.

There's no game advantage to buying extras but... that's really not a lot of room for all the humans you can fit in a building, let alone everyone else.

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Fantasy sewers are a whole problem of their very own.


I started out thinking about accessability across multiple races, I end up finding out the sewer ecosystem is suitable for level seven adventurers at least.

A building needs a Sewer Access room to connect to the town's sewers.

I now realise decent locks and so forth on that are essential.

Unless you want sewer based customers.




So okay. Fantasy world bathrooms. Way more complicated than you'd think.

I am not keen on the descriptions of half orcs and half elves in Pathfinder.

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The rules dont support the views of other races that are in the cultural write ups. Orcs learn fast, and have to because old age is catching up faster. Elves learn really really slow. 2d6 years to get Trained as a half orc and 10d6 for an elf. Why would humans see orcs as none too bright and elves as wise? Don't make sense.



Has to be a whole heap of prejudice and some weird cultural ha gups, plus seeing things like 'has really old cities' or 'driven into the wilderness' as reflecting their intelligence or ability to learn, which the rules dont agree with at all.




... I kind of reread Speaker For The Dead the other day looking for quotes and I have Thoughts about the Prime Directive and the idea that being smarter and being newer are in any way connected.


Also I bring too much Star Trek to these fantasy games to ever be satisfied with the rules.

So many pages of combat rules and mostly combat spells, so little room given to Diplomacy.

I want to get a federation going on Golarion, or any place else really. Just meet new people and figure out how to get along.




... in a system that insists being Undead means being evil (and being shadow means being evil)(but you dont have to be evil to use shadow magic) the insistence of the rules and setting is really against the make peace with everyone approach.
... even when the rules don't entirely support the attitudes.




One cool thing in the Pathfinder setting: there is an entire planet for the undead. It's got no air, but undead don't care.
I imagine this is used primarily as setting for horror games
but it ought to be a simple alternative to war
since the undead clearly don't need the same real estate at all.





The game mechanics leave maximum roleplay room to the player, so any playable race can choose any way to be. But they also insist on alignment and list it like it's intrinsic.

Annoying.




I realise I could just play a different game
but that
would involve getting out of bed.

so I keep poking this one.



ah well.

I was reading a setting book and got vaguely annoyed again about how the whole ecology screams 'north american who is not a biology student'.

I mean I know the only reason those sections are even in there are so rangers can get lost in the wilderness and have random encounters, it's just on a worldbuilding level it strikes me as sloppy.

You can get your entire world built up from assumptions about the ecosystem. What grows where and what people need it for is your whole trade pattern. And there's sections in GURPS Space for planning whole alien species worldviews based on their biology.

But mostly in fantasy the biology trundles along in the background looking kind of generic, plus dragons.

I saw some really cool plants on tumblr the other day and thought I should include their descriptions in a setting sometime to make it sound Different and then I realised over again that there's whole millions of people who think that's just how plants look, because they look like that round their way.

Like most settings I've seen don't have marsupials. Unless the biology is the point they just kind of assume no pouch mammals. And monotremes are there none.

But if the places are legit other worlds then islands are the closest we've got to seeing how varied life can get, and Australia being Like That ought to be really helpful to the imagination.

I don't know why I'm flapping about this today, it just means I ought to read more from places other than Britain and North America.

But then it bothers me in some games there's whole dungeons where there's just carnivores and blobs. Like maybe the blobs eat something more basic than meat, but they seem to eat everything they touch and die a puddle so as food chains go they're not exactly link shaped. Everything is so far down there's definitely no photosynthesis going on. Maybe some rule book mentioms mushrooms but you seldom find them. Possibly everything eats fish. I've got one game where you can always find fish in a pond, even if the pond us lava.

... maybe everything eats magic. I mean that would make sense, probably every form of energy gets ate by something, plants eat light, maybe entire dungoens eat magic. Then it's only weird things aren't more weird.



I started watching Stargate again and am therefore remembering that any hope of a peaceful resolution between species requires an exact understanding of each others needs. Human to human diplomacy can take so many shortcuts about air and water and food and so forth. Radiation level preference doesn't even need stating. But then you get entirely new species and what they need is not immediately obvious. Goa'uld behaviour might make perfect sense, if you want to write it to, if you just make a few assumptions about goa'uld buological needs and how weird they've become as individuals since starting to contact humans. Learning from humans without a clearly articulated understanding of how species differ could make grand messes.

I get annoyed at the idea undead need exterminating because surely they're just people with a very different set of needs? Grantes ones in a different position on the food chain, sometimes, but. People.




Now I sidetracked myself and am thinking about frogs. If inventing a world, would we ever invent as many frogs as there are actual frogs? Unlikely, because there are *so many* frogs, it's so great. But no story I can think of would need all those minute distinctions. So frogs are just frogs, but really, there are *so many* frogs.

That's orobably true about fantasy rabbits too. Sure you could invent a bunch of different words for them, but if it'll hop into a snare and make good stew, you don't really need them. Same function in the story.



... now I'm wondering what goa'uld words there are for humans. I mean they've got jaffa and hok'taur, what else have they got? Use distinctions?



This is a ramvle without much purpose.

I'll go away again.

If wizards were real the one thing you can guarantee would happen is
governments would figure out how to tax them.

Like, okay, maybe they have spells that can create gold from thin air
but
HMRC does not take kindly to sudden importation of large lumps of gold sans paperwork
and would not be entirely impressed with digging it up in your own backyard
especially if they could argue someone buried it on purpose, there's laws about handing that kind of thing in.

So anything wizards could do that could plausibly be considered economic activity as makes them an equivalent of money
the government would figure out a tax for that.




... aaaaand now I'm imagining being the tax office for that, both in the 'complex paperwork' sense and the 'trying to collect taxes from dragons'...

Today I got woke up, twice, by stupid scam phone call of the pay us now or get cut off variety. Rude humans, go do proper things instead.

So I was daydreaming castles, as you do.

A castle is an intentional community with a purpose and shared goal. ( Read more... )

So I like castles because they are a symbol of safety, representing an ideal that can be shared with others in an emergency. But I dislike castles because it's always some berk who thinks they're all that who ends up in charge of them. And then what do you do?



Castles are also not the actual practical safety these days anyway. You'd be better off guaranteeing good access for emergency services and designing things to be accessible and not flammable. Secure nowadays does not look like arrow slits, because arrows are not a current problem, you'd be better off with decent fire exits.

... castles look so cool though.



There's a bit in CJCherryh's books, Cyteen and sequels, where there's a tension between people who want to spread out into the universe and people who want to fort up where they already are. Like, it takes a lot of resources to do either, they both want to allocate that budget to their preferred method.

And people can be politically expansionist, big empty universe, let's send people into it
but then with their friends and family they'll be trying to build that one safe central place.

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The tendency to perceive resources as limited and outsiders as Threat is kind of embodied in castles too. That's not my favourite bit. I mean, sure, I'm scared of humans, but sort of generally, whereas many people are scared of them particular humans who are Not Like Us. I'm scared of people who think they're the boss because they have the biggest sharp thing. I'd rather have armour that can ignore the big sharp things. But that isn't really the current problem.

If you think of the European Union as ( Read more... )

But somehow the story still feels like Outsiders Take Our Stuff. Still feels like we need big strong walls to protect it.

... I'm a fan of big strong walls emotionally speaking, I like big stones and a general Keep Out approach to architecture, right up until I apply it to, you know, politics and actual factual people.

Because I'm reasonably certain that the point of walls is people. They look after people. Looking after people is the part that needs focusing on.

And I do not, personally, think that people stop being people if they're outside the walls.



... a historically unusual position, in castle times, I fear.



But you look at how much needs doing, all the agriculture work and care work and I don't know what all else, the proportion of the NHS that's from Outside and keeps needing to be, and you look at how many people want to come here and do things we need doing, and just... people. People are excellent even in a strictly usefulness based view. We need people, there are people, it's great.

But also, people need a place to be? That has water? And an ongoing lack of war?

And hey, we have a place.

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Castles are so much smaller than cities. I mean you get story cities like Atlantis where there's a theoretical 200 people and you only meet 20 of them, but, I daydream castles partly because I feel like it's a much more manageable scale than the tens of thousands of people I'd have to deal with in a market town, much less the hundreds of thousands in a city. And you can put a lot of smaller scale units together to make those cities, but humans have been moving from the small places to the big ones for a long time now, and for reasons. Castles might not address those reasons.


Like, okay, I've seen a castle that had its own pub. But one pub. What about the other dozen in a market town? What about the other few hundreds in a city? Not everyone wants the same things out of their pub! Scale things down again and you're back to like it or lump it.


... and of course when I'm daydreaming it I can design the perfectly perfect one, but, communities don't stay the same, you'd need to find a community who agrees with you in the first place and then you'd need to maintain it and the adjustment of environment to community and vice versa is a never ending task. So the idea of a centuries old castle that remains Just Right is a silly sort of daydream because what do you do when your kids want to redecorate? Or their wives do? You don't get to choose everyone who moves in, they choose each other. Then what?



I sit down (or curl up) to daydream a castle, because castles are cool, and I end up with all this psychological and political stuff coming up. Castles make me feel safe and like life is basically under control. But whose control? Safe from what?

And then when you're writing stories, so many unexamined assumptions filter through.

I don't want a castle to defend against the goblin hordes for centuries, I want a decent farming system guaranteeing subsistence level food for all my neighbours, the small shouty green ones included. It seems like that would work much better. Universal basic income or big thick walls? Well which one actually addresses the problem? Which one will remove the problem at source?


So now we have very few castles, and they're mostly museums or hotels.

Which, you know, yaaay.


But then I go back to daydreaming castles...


Because they seem like a nice safe place to start.

Since it is much easier to make friends and influence people when you are not, yourself, dead.




... actually in a suitable F&SF setting that's not necessarily true. Ooh, support your local necromancer, his food distribution methods are the fairest, since he don't need any himself...

I've been pondering some Highlander with the serial numbers filed off ideas.

That means thinking which are the good bits to my mind, and what mechanisms I could use to port them without keeping the whole world.

( Read more... )


But some of the interesting stuff is history, civilisations, if and how ethics change over time. If your guy generally does the right thing, how has he been judging that. Stuff like that.

To do that you could use time travel.

But some of it is person stuff, how environment shapes behaviour, shapes self. To what extent are we a unique self, not a product of our experiences? And then you'd get long lives with lots of changes to make contrasts, or reincarnation to see what they people have in common when they've forgotten everything. Or Dark Matter, with the mindwipes that still leave someone in place.

I haven't finished watching season two. I could go do that.


But, lots of different stories to possibly tell.


... would really help to pick one and tell it...

I have been playing with imaginary numbers and considering the social results again.

So, magic in Gurps, hours of study per spell learned, and the way extra magery makes you so much quicker.

Everyone they let in to magic college has magery 0. They can see magic and are technically a mage. Yaay.

But there's also people there studying up to 40% quicker (30 if you only have M3 in that universe, which was the assumption of my math.)

How do you schedule lessons so everyone can study?

At lower levels you'd have mixed Magery classes.

I did some maths and a M3 mage needs 17.5 days of 8 hour classes to learn a single spell. They are just that good. So to optimise use of teachers time, that's what you schedule. Do it across 28 days, four weeks of 5 days of lessons and some weekends and half days, and you leave enough time for M0 students to keep up. If they do the reading. For enough hours to round up to 12 hours a day studying. Every day.

So that means the most basic students, the ones who know there's an upper limit on what they'll ever be able to do, are having to study all the hours of all the days, while M3 gifted types can stroll it.

Resentment seems to naturally follow.

But on top of that there's all those hours the M3 can be pursuing their own studies. ( Read more... )

Going to effect how mages see themselves, each other, and the kinds of magic they do. How long someone had to study and if they needed a teacher? A hierarchy gets built in.

And if some colleges are simply not taught there, but make excellent prerequisites? There's another complex hierarchy to bump into.



Is fun.

So, I read a story where the Earth's entire colonisation effort was something like thirty women, and they were going to get implanted with preserved embryos on their first day there because they might be the whole hope of survival for the human race.

... which bothers me on several levels.

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Obviously if everyone is women you do what the computer tells you and grow whatever was frozen well enough. Er, whoever.

How long would they keep up the Ladies Only plan?

I mean if the plan is to get as much genetic diversity as possible out of the frozen embryo stores in the ship and there's some kind of time limit on that, you'd want to make sure there's plenty of wombs to go around. Would you get everyone out in a single generation?

If you're aiming for ten thousand colonists, even if you have multiple births routinely and soak the risk, that needs a really big first gen pool. So you'd want to keep up the embryos plan for multiple generations, without losing any of the earlier generations. You could do that with donor sperm and embryos. Or with a lot of social stuff to make sure your great grandchildren are still interested in decanting old world people.


also one of the mathier pieces says "the consequences of the increased medical risks of late childbirth have not yet been considered." It wanted to stretch the generations on a generation ship by having kids around 40, but, wow is that a biggie to leave out of your math. I mean, your chances change substantially over time.

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But only the first 200 would be volunteers who up front believe themselves willing to act that way. The future survival of the human race would depend on their reproductive behaviour. Their choices would be severely constrained.

And to get all the embryos out of storage in the shortest generations they'd need to get their daughters to act the same way. Which seems... unlikely.

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Hard science fiction that sets out a space colony as that baby focused without thinking through how they're actually going to feed the babies is just bad.

I mean, maybe they all get pregnant before they've got a crop going on the grounds that if they starve to death it's all one anyway, but... no.



Also the science problem in the novellette I read was far less interesting to me than the social consequences of the background setup. ( Read more... )


I think one big factor for viable colony size calculations is something like, if we send people who act pretty much like people of that cultural background do, how many do we need?

Like, we'd need to include murder rates from somewhere.

You do not get perfectly behaved people. No matter how you filter them at the start.



And the cultural changes would be massive even in the first generation kids. I mean how many immigrants feel like they don't really understand their children?

And if the future of the human race depends on women's reproductive choices, it's kind of more likely to work if you start with what those choices *actually* tend to be. First gen you could filter for people that want big families - though not for people that want big families once they start having them and are surrounded by them - but second gen will do as they will.

How do you design a colony socially so it does what you need genetically?



Clue: you do not stick thirty women on a one way trip and keep them pregnant from the first month they get there.




Hard science needs to at least glance at soft science or it requires the ridiculous.

Okay, so, in the fic I'm reading, it's actually really repetitive tell-not-show that's driving me nuts. I keep wanting to send them beta notes like 'pick three telling physical details and then get back to the plot' or 'you have mentioned they are evil, perhaps you wish to illustrate how?' or 'you said the exact same thing two paragraphs ago'. But that would be wrong, rude, and futile, so instead I rant to the internet.

So they've got a tiny world on the edge of the system that's borderline habitable and the corporations that rule the universe now are sending it food aid in quantities small enough two men can hand it out in an afternoon. Corporations are evil y'all. Eeeeevil. Evil. Just doing it for the PR and also did they mention evil?

Okay, but, this is a multi planetary solar system, not a... one stop sign town in a dried up ex mining valley. They've said the area was known for mining but this settlement wasn't. Okays. They've said there's a cutting wind on an otherwise hot planet, dust blowing and omnipresent dirt, and the ship has stopped to get parts from the junk yard. But they've also said they don't know why anyone settled there in the first place, and no one does know.

It's a terraformed planet with a breathable atmosphere. They're wandering around outside breathing air that can whip around the whole planet picking up dust. Those things aren't a dime a dozen, even in a populous galaxy. Is this a populous galaxy? Well they left Old Earth because it was all trashed and uninhabitable and now humanity is huddling on much less helpful planets. Great, stated that, now showing it, got the details all lined up, because now it isn't a planet nobody knows why they settled, it's a planet full of refugees who stopped somewhere they can breathe.

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The observable details can build a picture, but it can't build a coherent economy when compared with the (endless) inner monologue of the guilt ridden captain giving the food out.

So either he's very wrong or you need a whole different set of details.

( Read more... )
Presence of junk suggests a history, inner monologue stops people filling in the gaps about that history.



So, how does a marginally habitable planet demonstrate the evil of corporations? And the goodness of the crew visiting them?

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Poor on a planetary scale means something a whole lot different than poor just down the road. Planets with breatheable atmospheres imply a whole stack of resources that just aren't that easy to get. Unless travel is so immensely cheap and easy they really can just skip to the next nicer one.



SF worldbuilding, it is complex.