Just wanted to wish you all a safe and happy holiday season. Just finished moving, so I'm back up to what amounts to full speed for me.

WR1 - How many move actions would it take for Max to get up the stairs?

Slip - It will be about 20 meters just to get up the stairs. Approximately 10 or so to the stairs, and another 10 to get up the stairs. I don't have the map with me so I'm spitballing, but that's a fairly close estimate.

@Grendel
In case it was a little blurry, I had Ludmilla go to some random coffin motel to get online... so she could meet Oracle.

Mister Juan - Email Grendel to be sure he is aware of your post. His internet access is sketchy and sometimes the military servers block him from accessing Dumpshock.

Got it.

Um...that's only one Combat Turn if you set your movement rate to Running, and you'd still have 5 meters to spare. And that's without any kind of Running test.

If you levitated, assuming you rolled at least 2 hits you could levitate the 10 meters straight up, but it would still take you 1 Combat Turn to do so, and leave you exposed in the air with no place to go if (when) people inevitably start shooting at the mage.

You'd need 4 hits to make it up in half a Combat Turn (20 meters per turn but you'd only need 10), so if you think you can do that, then it might be a better option to levitate. Might .

Running it is.

Warehouse Group - I need initiative rolls from everyone. I have orders to control Alleycat if needed, so I think I'm just waiting on Slip and Scrap. I emailed you guys the updated map and a few other notes in the email.

Also Sedna, you took no damage from the Powerbolt spell, you just barely tied the caster's successes, and I updated the wiki accordingly.

Cedric - I emailed you an update from Grendel, any thoughts on our potential Plan B?

WR1

WR1-

Scrapheap - You're first this turn, go ahead and let me know what you want to do.

Everyone - If you have anything, anything at all that can be put on the wiki, go ahead and dump it there. Grendel will reformat it and make it look nice, but any material at all would be great.

Contacts, locations, blurbs about whatever, he's got the time to invest in our wiki so if you have anything that might be useful or interesting to put up please help Grendel out and just dump it there and he'll do the rest. Thanks!

Cthulhu: roll me some perception for Leo

If you don't have the link to the wiki, here it is:

LITS Wiki

I highly recommend you check it out, Grendel's done some great things with it lately!

Perception for Leo, ( 8 ): 1,5,4,4,1,5,5,5

Scrapheap - You're up.

Hey All -

I have to tell you, I just got the LITS volumes in the mail this weekend, and all I can say is this:

THEY ARE ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm not kidding, if you are in LITS, if you are a Shadowrun fan, you cannot afford to NOT have one of these things on your shelf.

I was expecting something along the lines of a fairly plain book with white pages and a couple pictures neatly bound together or something, instead, I got what is easily one of the most amazing books ever.

The art is awesome! Sedna and Neophyte Overlord did a great job with the pictures, using classic SR art, new stuff they found/created, and contributions from people to make a really great product. The pages are different colors at various points, representing Shadowland or Astral Quests, different colored font as appropriate, and the editing to make it flow into more of a novel and less of a play-by-post game is flawless. They have tables of contents, glossary, cast of characters, this thing is loaded to the nines and freaking sweet.

I am already so hyped for the next two novels I cannot wait to get my hands on them. The covers are really cool too, and in general, the whole thing just reeks of awesomeness.

There honestly isn't anything wrong with this book, and is easily the among the best 30 bucks you'll ever spend. Considering how these are one of a kind items you can't get anywhere else, I just don't see how anyone who's been a long time LITSer can do anything other than seriously consider finding the money for this.

Go on that diet you've always talked about, cut back on going out and stay in to spend time with the family, maybe forgo that latest computer upgrade you've been drooling over for a few weeks. Do what you have to do, but get your hands on this book. It will have a treasured place on your gaming shelf you will always cherish. I guarantee it.

And all that's before you get your hands on the next several volumes...

I forgot to mention this in the enthusiasm of posting my review, but a HUGE thank you to Sedna, without whom none of this would have been possible.

Thank you so much for something I will always cherish as one of the best parts of my gaming collection and the perfect momento for one of the greatest games I've ever been a part of.

Book one is Cosmo's story correct?

No, Book 1 is all the charaters involved with Salvation (from the beginning, not the later additions) and anyone who was around from the start of LITS.

I believe the next three volumes are: Cosmo, Scrapheap and Max, and D&D V3, although I'm not sure of the exact order. Excited for all of them though!

WR1-

Hey BC, you want me to post something right away, or is the perception going to be critical to my decision making process?

Sorry about that. You'll want to read this before you post.

[deadline surfacing for air]

Scrapheap –



Slipshade – Sedna is definitely looking for more artwork/submissions, here is the last thing I posted from her regarding picture requests:

By the way, I keep meaning to say this and forgetting, but welcome back (again) Morgannah!

Sedna - Draft of thought out reply is written but I don't know if I will finish revising it by tonight. If not, look for it tomorrow (unlikely) or Friday (much more likely).

Good to see you back.

Sedna -

No, the limiter still is whether or not an action was available.

If you said to B8 (one of the guys on the stairs) “Run downstairs and kill that mage!� I would have him run down the stairs (which would cost no actions, as I would simply set his movement rate to Run) then use his 2 Simple or 1 Complex action to attack the mage. No problem.

In the context of your particular command, Jumping is a Complex Action, attacking requires a Simple or Complex Action. They do not have enough actions to do both in a single IP, therefore I needed to go through some sort of interpretation process to determine which one they do, and the limit on what I could potentially have them do is the number of actions available to them.

Yes, you stressed two concepts (jumping and killing) and you stressed one over the other (killing having primacy over jumping). No argument from me here.

In the process of interpreting your command, my position has been the targets should exercise some degree of rational thought. I do not agree with your military examples and I find them lacking, because men do not stop exercising some level of thought, no matter how small, just because they are told to do something.

Yes, if the leader says ‘charge that machine gun nest’ the men charge the nest. But they still exercise judgment as to whether to run in a straight line, bob and weave, zigzag, run high for extra speed or lower for less exposure, whether to fire their gun or throw a grenade to suppress the enemy, and so on and so forth. The leader doesn’t say, ‘charge that machine gun nest in a zigzag pattern but stay high for extra speed and throw a grenade to keep their heads down’. Why? Because even within the context of military command there is some room, however slight, for (expected) individual judgment as to how to best carry out the command.

In this situation, you put the targets in a situation where they needed to exercise some judgment, because they were incapable of fulfilling both parts of your command. My response was to have them do exactly what you said in the order that you said it. First, they did things in the order you said them, then within the limit of actions available, they tried to honor the intent of the second part of the command (positioning themselves to act on the second part of the command). The problem is they ran out of actions before they could actually attempt the killing, thus the limiter is they ran out of actions they had available to them while under the power’s duration.

Your response is I chose to have them jump instead of kill here even though kill had priority, implying unfairness with respects to my interpretive process. Namely, that between the two commands, rather than acting on them in the order the commands were received, they should have acted in accordance with which had the greater priority. However, below you argue that the nature of Command is immediacy and they should act without thinking. You can’t argue both at the same time. We’ll get to that in a moment.

The only possible way to do both at once would be if they jumped right over the railing and started shooting on the way down, and you simply don’t have enough words to communicate that complex of a concept. So the wording of this particular command was always going to be an ‘either/or’ command since one of its two components was a Complex Action. Between the two, I went with the action that was stated first, under the premise of Commanding Voice being of an immediate nature. I would think you’d agree with this, because you argue for the nature of Command as being immediate, but if the nature of command is immediacy, then it follows the men would have obeyed your commands in the order given, regardless of your intended priority.

If you think they should have used their Complex Action to attack instead of jump, then you are arguing for rational thought (thus supporting my point from the previous post and above), because you’re expecting them to pick up on which part of the command you are emphasizing and thus the one they should choose, given that they could only do one or the other. Also keep in mind you said ‘jump down’, which leaves it wide open as to where to jump from and where to jump to. Combined with your second command, they did what made the most sense given the situation. If you tell me they shouldn’t have considered what makes the most sense given the situation, then you can’t tell me they should have attacked instead of jumped.

So on the one hand, you’re arguing they should have acted rationally in attacking instead of jumping, since they could only do one and it was obvious which of the two had greater priority. But then on the other hand you argue my having them act rationally by moving to a better firing position while simultaneously immediately obeying the first part of the command is unfair. That strikes me as an inconsistent argument.

Your argument that getting into a better position to kill the mage is the equivalent of saying they could never do more than that with this ability is flawed. You have no evidence for that. Under the rules as written, it was impossible for them to ever both jump and attack in the same turn. I stated how I worked through that issue above. The problem is you tried to do too much with Commanding Voice at once, and you don’t like how I interpreted a command that required interpretation because of how you phrased it.

You tried to sneak two commands into one use of Commanding Voice (jump to the ground floor and attack the enemy mage) and it didn’t work, but that’s not because I’m screwing you over, nerfing the power, or purposely misinterpreting your intent. They simply don’t have enough actions in a single initiative pass to do both so I had to interpret your command instead of taking it at face value. So my ruling was they obeyed the command in the order you said it because of the natural way of interpreting instructions, especially commands. Namely, the natural tendency is to do things in the order one is told, especially if one is supposed to be blindly obeying without question.

If you had said “Kill that mage then jump down!� they would have immediately attacked and not jumped down (because they would have lacked the Complex action to do so after attacking). Note that even if you had emphasized the jumping down I would have interpreted the command the exact same way as I did above, and had them attack at the expense of jumping.

If you had said, “Jump to the ground floor!� they would have immediately jumped to the ground floor.

If you had said “Kill that mage!� they would have immediately started shooting at the mage. I concur; they easily could have started shooting full-auto at the mage instead of jumping down into a better firing position as I had them do, since they had a perfectly clear line of sight. But you are ignoring the key point: That’s not what you said to do. You might have intended killing the mage as the most important thing, but that's not how the command came out.

You said a command with specific wording, and they followed your commands to the letter, in the order given, to the best of their ability until they ran out of actions, and after the pass ended the power’s duration ended, so they were no longer under any compunction to continue with your previously stated command.

In your second command, the guy was literally unable to ‘jump down on those men’ from where he was standing. So he did the next best thing and jumped to a position where he could jump down on them, but again, he ran out of actions.

In your third command (which has not yet been resolved) you said ‘toss me the gun friend’. For the sake of argument, I’ll tell you right now that you succeeded in your roll, and that is exactly what the goon will do. Use his simple action to toss you the gun. He will do exactly what you said, as soon as he has the actions available (i.e. his turn comes up in the Initiative Order) to do it. And it won’t be a crappy toss that forces you to reach over the railing; he’s going to toss it to you as best as he can.

You tried to do too much at once and thus make the command unclear and requiring interpretation, and that’s why the command didn’t work the way you wanted it to. You wanted them to jump to the ground floor (a complex action) and attack the mage (simple or complex, depending on how they attacked). As stated above, they can’t do both in a single pass. Because their available actions function as a limiter I had to interpret your command, and how the command is interpreted may not be the same as you intended.

I provided several examples above how you could have achieved various results with your command which I believe to be perfectly fair interpretations of said commands. By the third command, you issued a command and I believe the result is what you intend it to be. I have no problem with you trying to maximize the effect of every Commanding Voice, but realize that the more interpretation I have to do as a result of the command not being clear/specific, the more likely it will not work in precisely the way you might want or intend.

You could have asked me how I’d interpret the power, and I don’t recall you doing so (I didn’t look this up so I’m not stating this as a hard fact, just a recollection). Yes you would have given away the element of surprise, but I would have told you in more detail that with command X, this is what they are going to do.

You can see above how your second and third commands were/are being interpreted, and hopefully that helps you understand how future uses of this power will be interpreted as well.

In any event, we are now at a crossroads here. As I understand you, you’re arguing two contrary points at the same time. Either the men should have ignored ANY rational analysis and jumped right over the ledge and tried (but ran out of actions when attempting) to attack when they hit the ground OR they should have realized they could not both jump down and then attack, so they should have exercised rational analysis and gone with the higher priority command and attacked.

Which one are you going to argue? You can’t have it both ways so I’m not going to let you argue both at the same time. Pick one and we can continue if you like, but I still fail to see where your problem is with my interpretation, especially since by now I would think going forward you understand how I will interpret future commands (and if not, you could always ask).

Yes, Commanding Voice is powerful, but it is limited in its Duration and capacity to issue complex commands. As you stated, it is immediate in nature and thus the commands that can be given are similarly immediate and need to be lacking in complexity or you run the risk of my interpretation not agreeing with your intention. If you want something clear, specific, and unambiguous done with this power (e.g. having the goon toss you the gun) then most likely you’ll pull it off just fine.

Scrapheap

Everyone - Arsenal has been released as a PDF for those who haven't heard yet. As with Street Magic and Augmentation, you may modify your characters to better fit their SR 3 versions as appropriate. Consult with your GM for specific changes.

Oooo..lookee, now there are gauss cannons in SR.

You don't need to know that!!!

I'm more worried about him fielding an Otomo on an unsuspecting player. Like at an airport or something...

Hey BC, why don't you do me and Cedric a favor and have a nice warm glass of SHUT THE HELL UP!!!

Hey, at least they didn't put any upgrades on those. I'd hate to have a Jarhead of DOOM ™ scenerio. Oh wai....




Cthulhu: I'll have a post up for you by tomorrow late afternoon.

I hate you.

So...how're things going for Tony and Reign these days?

Oh great, now you got to go and stir that pot up. I'm half expecting Tony to wake up, hungover, and see her sitting in a chair across from him.

I think she is crazy like that.

He should. You hear that Grendel? He should.

Cause she is crazy like that. And I have to see how this love affair ends.

Right now, all signs are pointing to 'badly'.

Gah, still not finished -- and I absolutely have to prioritise there first. Roughly the equivalent of a 40-page heavy-research essay to go -- but 90% of it is now done!

I concur with your summarization of the categories of issues.

I am definitely in agreement with trying to preserve both our sanities.

I will agree with your corollary of trusting your summary on the nature of rationality and its role in decision making. I also want to add my own corollary that regardless of what the scientific literature says, I still reserve the traditional GM fiat here. Yes, science may say X about rationality and decision making, but we are still dealing with a magical effect here, and that automatically means we cannot draw an exact parallel between the research and our game situation. I say this with no idea of what the research actually says. To be clear, I am not saying I won’t change my stance, simply that I won’t change it solely because science says so, if other considerations lead me to rule otherwise.

I know you well enough to know you were most likely not arguing two contradictory points; it might be better to say your last post was arguing two opposing points of view at the same time. At least that’s how it came across. But yes, I concur that is also an issue on our summary.

I should add the ‘men do not stop exercising some level of thought’ line was absolutely not intended as a dig, although in hindsight, given our respective genders I certainly see how it can come across that way!

I used the male gender because the targets in question were male, and I was using the male pronoun throughout my post as a result. There was no intention of implying a distinction between men and women either in my post as a whole or in that particular comment.

I also want to add the corollary that regardless of what we end up deciding, I am not going back and retroactively changing any of my previous interpretations. It’s simply too inefficient to go back and redo everything that ‘might’ have happened had I interpreted differently. In accordance with our official policy and classic GMing tradition, I’m of course willing to discuss this issue and base future interpretations in light of what we end up deciding, but I will not reverse or redo calls that occurred in the past. Which is now quite distant, at least in RL terms and the RL time it would take to reverse the decision and update all subsequent actions accordingly.

I need rules help - How many people can counterspelling protect at once?

I seem to think a magician can protect a number of people up to their counterspelling rating, but I can't find a reference anywhere. A little help please?

EDIT: Never mind, apparently the limit, if any, is not specified.

Quick House Rule: Magicians can extend counterspelling to a number of people equal to their counterspelling skill. We can discuss the official limit for our game later.

Warehouse Group - Wiki has been updated if you want to see what happened so far OOC. IC post won't be up until Alleycat and Max's actions have been posted and resolved, so I can post all the IC results at once.

Sedna and Slipshade - You two are up, I need actions and rolls for CT 5, IP 1.

Scrapheap - Go ahead and post IC for your CT 5, IP 1 actions.

Let me know if there are any questions.

I shouldn't even be here, I am trying to push to get done for the end of the month (and you'll get my moves then). But mega-quickly: