Willpower. Just to be different.

Hehe. Is there really no Logic skill called 'Investigation'? I must be thinking of Eclipse Phase. If you really wanted this in your game, I'd say that's your most thematic option. Anything else is really Common Sense.

Using an open gate or a preexisting hole isn't common sense. There is a term... honey pot.

I do this often. I will discard a rather obvious detail because it is obvious and I don't expect the opposition to be so stupid as to leave something so obvious unmonitored. Though in reality, I would be more inclined (if our preparations allow for it) to circle ninety degrees clockwise or counter clockwise from the damaged fence or open gate and make an entrance there since the original breach would likely be under a bit of heavier surveillance. The question is one of whether the players are ignoring the obvious because it's not occurring to them or whether they're ignoring the obvious because they chose to do so.

Likewise, just because a GM is making sure to point out the open gate or broken fence doesn't mean that they're safe even if he basically says 'Yes it is safe.' I'm not saying the GM is lying, only that there may not be any way for the characters to know that it is safe. Metagame knowledge works both ways.

Or it could just be an open fence...

I think you overestimate the need for paranoia when it comes to humanity and security. I know its conceptual, but the idea that even with the most secure system hackers can get in is exactly correct... all it takes is one jackass admin to put an any-any rule on a firewall to do some "admin" work, and you're in.

My point is, in all probability it's because someone screwed up, not because they are out to get you. Mind-games are just mind-games.

HA, StealthSigma! That's not really the point of the example, but it's still a great *different* point! Love it. In fact, wouldn't their 'Obvious' effect actually say, 'Guys, security fences don't usually have holes in them, or open gates.'? Once you start going down this 'Obvious Things' rabbit-hole, who knows what'll happen.

But why take the risk? If it doesn't interfere with planning and you can do just as well coming in from the north instead of the west, why risk it? A broken fence can indicate multiple things, especially if the broken fence was not there during your last recon of the site. It could indicate someone else is already in the building. That could create a lot of problems and opportunity. It may mean that someone already broke into the site, in which case the broken fence would be watched a little more closely until repairs could be made. It could also mean that the reason you went there may have been compromised by the previous break in and you may need to try to figure out if your target is still on site.

Or it could be that at a warehouse the SOP (Standard operating procedure) is that workers walk in through the open fence gate. I know it doesn't always apply but the point I'm making is that if runners take everything as top shelf, sometimes they will look stupid when it isn't.

There is a wonderful comic that shows an assassin climbing up the walls of a high castle... He gets to the upper tiers then grabs hold only to find that the upper tiers are oiled/greased over to his surprise, he falls to his death. The guards not 10 feet up hear the fall and look down and laugh to themselves... "There goes another one, they never try the unlocked front door".

We can agree that such a situation hardly counts as 'good security', though, and would only exist as human error. If the place you're attacking should have good security, then this would be a suspicious anomaly.

And good recon would show if this is SOP, workers constantly going in and out of the gate, or if it's not frequently used.

Without spelling out a sample situation, I can think of dozens of reasons why a team would or could miss any number of common sence ideas. Depends on what your definition of good security is...

A standard warehouse on the docks:

Surrounded by a silent-alarmed electric fence (if you break the circuit or interfere with it in anyway besides the standard entrances it goes off)
Camera's on the surrounding parts of the building (hacker bait)
Electric locked doors on all sections besides the standard exit (also hacker or techy bait)
Guards patrolling at regular intervals outside (will spot a hole in the fence)

You're right though that it is an anomaly, but sometimes following an anomoly is easier than creating one (cutting the fence). The guards may know that someone frequently goes to a nearby shack off the compound to smoke or do their "thing". I think my point is there are things a standard recon or short-timeline job won't pick up... a players choice can easily shift the environment, and sometimes you have an instinct about it, I view common sence as a sort of "meta skill" much like danger sence in old school DnD, that "gut feeling", or asking the "stupid question".

In this case, you cut that fence, someone should ask themselves "Won't the guards notice on their patrol the giant gaping hole?", or "Is cutting the fence a good idea? what if it's alarmed?".

But the point was never 'is that open gate a good idea?', but 'hey, I didn't *see* that obviously open gate 5 feet away'. That's a very different issue.

It's both in my opinion. Again from a GM Stand-point let your players have fun and do what they want. If they are going to stick to the plan without changing it, someone should have a realization after the fact that what they did was "dumb". Otherwise how will they learn :3

The common sense is... why didn't we re-survey the situation when we got down to business... as opposed to just "stick to the plan chums".

You're in a corporate building running from security and you take the right path three times... Didn't you just make a circle?

You can never....ever...EVER overestimate the need for paranoia...Just ask Atticus O'Sullivan

That may be, Jeremiah, but it's Perception stuff we've been talking about the whole time, that's all.

True, but someone can be very perceptive and have no common sense. A rock smashes a nail into wood the same as a hammer.

That's not entirely true and I don't recommend you try it either.

I have.

Or at least, rocks + tent stakes.

Honestly, a good rock is better than a hammer 8 out of 10 times (the remaining two occurrences are: very hard ground or a very fragile rock).

I agree with this... rocks tend to have a wider surface, are more urgo in terms of the motion. I've nailed things into my apartment walls with a wonderful smooth hard-stone rock I use as a paper weight.

Also I don't see you ever accidentally hitting your thumb with a rock because their's no surface displacement from your hand.

But my point is... it may take a perception check with negatives to notice the gate, or the dumb bruiser might just ask the obvious question, "Me wonder if gate is open... maybe we use dat?"

At least you do not have to carry the rock with you... They are generally just lying around...

Exactly. The boy scout troop only had two hammers, but there were always 20 to 40 tents going up, and it wasn't feasible to pass the hammers around.

In all my outings, I think there were only four or five times where I had trouble putting the stakes in. Two of them were "there are no rocks," one was "the ground is so rocky, there's no place TO put a tent stake, hammer or not," and the last didn't require a hammer or a rock: the ground was so dry, sandy, and soft, the stakes weren't any use.

Gender - hermaphordite, for a game I ran on here several years back Dranem answered my resulting questions with fine background so I accepted it.

In D&D a player had Mobile Race in his equipment list and couldn't remember what he'd written from last week... I suggested a nomadic elven people. Turned out to be the Mobile Bracea large contraption for holding doors shut...

A what?

Seems a space (and perhaps a comma) got lost.



There, that should do it.

Anyways, some quick digging points towards a device from Races of Faerun.

I guess it is gnome made.

That does do it.

I've had GMs gloss over something obvious like a gate left open, and I hate that. Obvious things, per book, don't require a perception roll. I agree with Yamerayahu in that some peoples, and GMs uneducated views of how perception and common sense work are in need of a swift slap upside the head. Or kick in the ass.

While playing TORG, by West End Games, someone's character died and within about 10 seconds of this happening the pet parrot of the person who's home we were playing in landed on the table and took a crap on the character sheet of the character that had just died. So that's about the weirdest thing I've seen on a character sheet.

Thats funny stuff riight there.


My latest Shadowrunner had a Slinky on his character sheet (a metal one). Used it too, sent it down a flight of stairs to check for booby traps.

And it's so much more economical than a sheep! Even a summoned sheep! Not quite as economical as a corpse or a prisoner, though.

How many traps did they find? A Wile E. Coyote cartoon's worth, hopefully.

"Had hot monkey sex with a nosferatu - lost 3 Essence"





-k

Did that really come up?

I don't believe I missed this one before. What was that fine background, anyway?

Yes. Yes it did.

So the character has a 3 point Essence hole. Fortunatly he wasn't magically active.






-k

I'm interested as well.
I've got a hermaphrodite in a GURPS game, but background details were not required, as one can simply say "born that way" in GURPS and be done with it.
(The best part is that the character thinks of himself as "male" and is uncomfortable with the idea of sex with another male, the irony being that it will happened* and he's currently caring for his daughter--one of the other PCs--not knowing that he's the biological mother, hooray amnesia. Also, no one else in the game knows yet.)

*Usage of the past tense to indicate prior to the game session in which he is and active character, but future tense for a second game that occurs 10+ years earlier.

The hardest part about time travel is the grammatics and tenses . .
"I'll see you later. Or should i say earlier?"

Time travel was involved in Game 1 (er, that'd be the second one mentioned above--"game 1" and "game 2" are how the GM refers to them, game 1 having started first as well as it being in the "past"). But this is simply a temporal point of view issue.

From the one point of view (game 1) the event has yet to happen (technically the characters haven't been born yet*), from the other point of view (game 2), it's already happened (at least once).

*I'm going to be playing auntie in that game. The player for the daughter is playing the daughter's grandfather in the other game, and he's about to have kids. Everyone expects my character to end up with...my other character (this sounds incestuous and I can only begin to imagine trying to RP with myself) to produce the daughter.

Another hermaphrodite? In other news, you may want to refer to your character as an Intersex. Apparently that's the term now.

EDIT: I would like to refer to them as "das." It's the only term I can think of that is most appropriate. You can't really call a true intersex person a "she" or "he" now, since that would be inaccurate.

I had 1,135 nuyen left on my character sheet. Not knowing what to do I took 11,350 plastic wire ties. I since changed it so that I spent 1,100 but I still have 350 wire ties.

Dude, I can't express how useful wireties are... personally I'm surprised that I've never seen more "useful objects" on character sheets... There should never be a point where you don't have duct tape on your character sheet. From sealing wounds to fixing problems...

Actually one time I had a male duelist character, long long time ago who took sewing and thread as a skill (can't be looking shabby with torn up clothing for the ladies). The thread became relevant when we had to fix a tapistry and I was the only one with the skill to do it... the women in the group loved it, the males made fun of me.

GURPS rules haven't caught up yet. "Hermaphrodite" is the quality name, therefore, hermaphrodite.
(I'm still surprised at some of things GURPS has rules for).



English doesn't have a true gender-neutral pronoun, or a hermaphroditic one. However, the internet community has supplied.
Gender neutral (my preference): xe/xir/xirself
Hermaphroditic: shi/hir/hirself

Wikipedia has a whole list.

Although irrelevant to my character who is mentally male. Therefore, male pronouns.

Man, people are weird.

And?

Nothing wrong with 'they'/'them'/'theirself'. We've had this perfectly good gender-neutral system for centuries, without the need to (futilely) invent ugly new ones. I recognize that 'they' is actually neutral and agnostic (i.e., 'they' doesn't tell you the gender at all), while those weird inventions actually specify a positive fact about the gender (or sex, as the case may be). I view this as a *good* feature of 'they'.

That is all. People are weird.

Actually, the problem with "they" is that it's (typically) plural.

Compare:

"I was talking to him." (singular, male)
"I was talking to them." (number?, gender?)
"I was talking to xir." (singular, no gender specified*)

*this can either be because of a genderless individual (e.g. aliens lacking anything recognized as "male" or "female" by terrestrial biology), or an individual which has an unknown gender. Or even potentially a being which has a flexible gender (shapeshifters, for instance).

It's sometimes plural, yes. Most languages are full of such 'overloaded' or ambiguous items, it makes it more fun. (Gotta love the Spanish/French/etc. pattern of 'he/she/it/you' using the same conjugations.)

… 'xir'. *shudder* If you have to go that route, we should defer to Futurama.

Them is proper english for an unknown sexed person. The EP core book goes out of its way to point this out, and seeing as the game deals with males currently inhabiting female bodies, vice versa, and the truly poly-sexed and non-sexed, it's probably more important then in 'real life'. Without getting too many people's jimmies rustled, I find no difference in seriousness between a man who decides to become a woman and a man who decides to become batman.

"Shklee" and "Shklirr" are a little awkward.

+1 Returning Keg of Bottomlessness. The entirety of Lowbowrock's rigger sheet.

[highbrow jerk]Commonly used, even by respected authors, is not the same as proper, even when underwritten by such an authority as the EP core book.
"than" in real life.[/highbrow jerk]

My Fiancee' told me to do what pbangarth did. I resisted.