Wyrmhero

I'm currently planning on asking about how common tea is in the Cosmere, but if people have more important questions to ask...

I'm looking for over-ear ones, I would say. I don't know what you mean by cans though. Isolation isn't important, since I don't like to become too oblivious to the rest of the world around me. I'd give the headphones I used to have as an example, but I don't recognise the logo on the sides. It's a box with a slanted 'S' from one corner to the other, but that doesn't help as I don't know anything else about them >>. Yeah, a little bit more expensive than I'd like, I will admit... Though honestly I have no idea what £65 is meant to get you anyway.

So my headphones have literally just given up the ghost, after more three years of fairly decent service. Unfortunately, I've never bought a pair of headphones myself before (the previous set were hand-me-downs), and I have no idea what the market for headphones is like right now, which is a bit of a problem. Particularly when quality is impossible to judge online before purchase. I will probably go and have a look in the nearby shopping centre for a pair, but I'm expecting them to rip me off compared to online. For the most part, I only really want these headphones for playing music, audiobooks and games with. While not necessary, I would deem a decent microphone with it to be a very welcome bonus, and I don't mind whether it's wired or wireless - though again, the wireless aspect would be welcome. I am willing to spend a maximum of £20 on a new set, so I'm not expecting masses from it, just a serviceable pair of headphones. So those of you with a decent set of headphones out of there, what would you recommend, and what should I expect from my budget?

So I had a go at this, and the closest book to me currently has this as its first complete sentence on page 45: 'The Ga-Ga-Gauls!!!', translated from a Dutch edition of Asterix and Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book that my sister got me when she visited Amsterdam last year. Before you say 'that's not a book!', it's classified as one on Wikipedia. While I've put it down for quite some time, the book I'm technically currently reading is The Gunslinger, first book of The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. Page 45, first complete sentence: 'Children won't obey their parents, and a plague will be visited upon the multitudes'. I'm not sure what that means, though I was certainly somewhat disagreeable towards my parents when I was a child. However, in the spirit of the opening question, the actual closest book to me currently is Words of Radiance, but someone's done that, and picking a Sanderson novel would be rather obvious considering where we are. So the next nearest book would be New Scientist's Do Polar Bears Get Lonely?, which is a great start to describing myself in a book. It just gets better though, The first complete sentence is 'A defect like this is the most likely explanation'. Thanks, New Scientist.

The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter have many similarities - They are both widely popular, were turned into films, and are absolute doorstoppers, putting many people off reading them because the films exist. I also enjoyed them both when I was younger, and they brought me into the fantasy genre in full (though HP is more of an fantastic Earth than a straight fantasy) There's also another important similarity, and one which I absolutely despise: Science is verboten. Science in The Lord of the Rings is the province of Saruman, the White Wizard, the leader (such as they have one) of the Five Wizards in Middle-Earth. Famously, he betrays Gandalf the Grey and goes around allying with Sauron due to his lust for power and the One Ring. He develops gunpowder, a huge benefit to the world even if you ignore its military power. It can be used to study ballistics, or in the mining industry, for instance. Unfortunately, Sauron is evil, and therefore his science is a devilry which the main characters consider some kind of fell sorcery because they don't understand it. Tolkein designed Saruman and his war machine to mimic the pace of industrialisation, destroying nature in the name of progress. In Harry Potter, we see impressive technologies, such as the developments of flying broomsticks, a 'living' and changing castle in Hogwarts, and so on. However, all of this is done by magic. Not one whiff of science there, apparently because it doesn't work there due to ambient magical energies or whatever. They even had to steal the Hogwart's Express from the pathetic and worthless muggles (remember kids, stealing is fine if you do it from normals!). The magically inclined are so backwards that it's laughable. They don't understand - and can't even pronounce - electricity, or figure out muggle money: they find it easier to count in a combination of base 29 and 17 than in base 10, for goodness' sake. They even have to be told that 'A gun is kind of like a metal wand' - after 400 years of them existing! Even Arthur Weasley, their Misuse of Muggle Artefacts guy, has no idea what electricity is, which even in the mid-1990s you'd think would be pretty crucial to most Muggle Artefacts. This is all in despite of the fact that a good number of the characters have a non-magical lineage. About half a year ago on his blog, the head of Research and Development at the Magic: The Gathering branch of Wizards of the Coast said that they'd never do a sci-fi themed set because it wouldn't appeal to people because it wasn't fantasy. He even mentioned that they'd considered doing a Western/gunslingers-style set, but of course we'd have spellslingers instead of gunslingers. To this date, the only gunpowder-based weapons in MtG have been with fantasy-okay cannons (mostly on ships) and the Portal set, which had a very small print-run and is non-canon due to the fact that it is based on the Chinese Three Kingdoms period. Even the Dresden Files has this. Dresden works with technology daily, even going so far as to put his name in the telephone directory (now also an anachronism, thanks to the internet). In this alone, it's by far better than how Harry Potter deals with it. However, he also has to use old technology, because anything new is too vulnerable to magic. Now I can kind of justify this, due to new tech being more precise and therefore easier to wreck with small changes, but even so it seems a little excessive. These are just examples of series in which magic and science are felt to be opposing forces, or perhaps downright wrong to the main characters. The only time the two are allowed combine are in the areas of magic Steampunk (because electricity is apparently too good for some people) and Magitek (in which magic is a power source rather than electricity). The only real fantasy series I can think of which avoids this completely is The Discworld novels, particularly in later novels, with films, semaphore, High Energy Magic, steam power and so on. That may be however because they're much less based on combat, and are more about characters than epic fights for the sake of the world. The Amber Chronicles also slightly gets around this as well; Gunpowder is somehow inert on the titular land, so the character gets a different explosive compound instead. A rather clever solution, in my opinion. However, after this, it progresses rather similarly onwards and employs magitech. We can kind of make sense of why this is - People get cut by swords and hit by arrows, but a gunshot is a definite kill, after all. Older weaponry requires skill to use proficiently, whereas guns have a simple point 'n' click interface. Now obviously this is an exaggeration, but it seems to be the reason in fantasy for enforcing this technological stasis (something I will forever love Mistborn for justifying and then subverting). Overall, it's the idea of technological stability over large periods of time that I think is most abhorrent to me here. I can get that gunpowder takes a lot of the romance out of it, but it wasn't the be-all and end-all of scientific achievement. It didn't help us discover how to use electricity, for instance. It's rather annoying when they don't even justify it either. There's Willing Suspension of Disbelief, I know, but after several thousand years... Even worse is when even magic isn't studied. 'Any sufficiently studied magic is indistinguishable from technology', the corollary to Clarke's Third Law states, which might give the reason for magic being mysterious and unknown. The idea that no-one in that period of time was born who went 'Hey, you know that thing we rely on? Anyone know how it works at all? Or even if there's an alternative that doesn't put our lives in the hands of people born with all that power who we can't control?'. Scientists of any flavour are severely lacking in fantasy. So... After that long rant discussion, what are your thoughts about the use (or absence) of science in fantasy? What have you seen which does it really well or really poorly? Do you think that fantasy has to mean the medieval era? In your opinion, are urban fantasies are true examples of the fantasy genre? Or for that matter, what about the development and study of magic itself? Finally, do you think that the idea that science does not belong is at all damaging for the advancement of the fantasy genre?

As you already know Khas, I tend to just drink English Breakfast tea, with a small amount of milk and no sugar. I do sometimes have red bush tea, since it's a good fallback when there's no milk in the house. I'm not sure about mint tea, but I think I like it. Haven't had enough to say either way, really. Usually I'll bring a bottle of iced tea when I go to the Games Society at university (I'm partial to Liptons lemon-flavoured), but not all the time as it's somewhat expensive when not on offer. In a normal day, I'll drink several cups of tea (or at least the equivalent of that even if they're not in that many mugs due to the sheer size of mug I prefer) - When they said that you should drink eight cups of water throughout the day, I decided that I should have some ground up leaves in that water and have it warm. And, of course, three mugsworth is the only decent size to a cup of tea

I think that would depend on the world in question. There's a big difference between magic creeping into our 21st century lifestyles (such as the Shadowrun RPG system) and ever-present magic (Potter, Discworld, etc). In the first case, I don't think magic would really be good for anything immediately. We'd study it and study it and study it for ages, and then we'd apply it to making technology better. Of course, that depends on how it works within the laws physics as well, but if it can be used to circumvent the laws of thermodynamics, for instance, then we'd have infinite energy (though probably limited by other laws we weren't previously aware of). Essentially, magic wouldn't become obvious in our lives, but it'd be ever present behind the scenes, making things more efficient or generally better. In the second case, our technology would be defined ultimately by the integration of magic and technology. We wouldn't have smartphones running on electromagnetic waves - We'd have them running on telepathic abilities or something like that. We'd have HEX instead of computers as we know them right now. I would say though that this would probably limit the development of science - Though the study of magic would in itself be a part of the science, so it's more accurate to say that 'traditional' science would be arrested a little due to magic being studied as well. And if magic has its own limits and laws as normal science does, it wouldn't be magic. It'd just be another form of science with a particularly quirky set of rules. Personally though, I think the only 'new' technologies that'd spring up would be things we have no real-world comparison to. Thinking With Portals is a good example here. There are just so many applications for it - Putting aside the huge environmental benefits of not having to use vehicles to get everywhere (and thus saving money too), you'd also save masses of time this way as well. Not only is this useful for people, but anything which needs to be moved quickly (perishable food, for instance) no longer has that problem at all. Barriers between countries would dissipate overnight as everywhere becomes close and the world becomes so much smaller. You could even use portals to generate energy by utilising a waterwheel and water falling forever. Sadly, I think this tech would just become so regulated that it'd never get rolled out, because governments and the world's financial institutions would be so afraid of it.

What would I do with magic? Well, the answer's kind of not what you were expecting. I wouldn't use it - I would study it. As a physicist at university, the thing about Sanderson's books that I love the most is that they are written so scientifically - Magic A is Magic A, quantised perfectly with no exceptions. I despise this apparently popular idea nowadays that magic and science are opposing forces (and this extends to fantastic religions too. This trio has to stop being looked at in this way), and would dearly love to make people start thinking otherwise, but that can almost be another thread entirely. But regardless, even with the less rigorous magic systems, we do see laws happen, even if they're hidden - Harry Potter for instance needs people to say the spell incantation with perfect pronunciation. Every single system we see has laws in-built, just not shown. How else does a spell have the same effect twice? So yes, rather than abuse magic for fun and profit (though perfect teleportation would be really handy), I'd just try and understand it as much as possible: I would rather like to have a PhD in Magic

Steam's got Age of Empires 2 and Age of Mythology on it now too. AoE2 even has a new expansion there. Retro gaming seems to be taking off, thanks to GoG and Steam. It's rather nice

I think this should be a thread or PM. For now, a PM?

I agree that the new Gatherer appears to be a bit worse. You want to be able to really quickly check stuff, and it seems to be less easy to do that just due to the background. It's all very well that everything looks sleek and all, but I preferred the white background because it made things easier to read. The main website did need an update, and it looks alright. A bit difficult to navigate at first, but no worse than before. The deck stat stuff is rather interesting and useful, though not something I will be using much of personally. The sample hand feature is really nice, and should help people actually understand how a deck plays compared to others. Overall, I'd say it's an improvement, if a little cheesy with the amount of shiny black.

As has been said, if you mostly want older games, then you don't need something too powerful. However, as has been mentioned, if you want a decent gaming machine, you really need a desktop. The laptop is dying out, really, and is only now useful for work- or gaming-on-the-go (silly Panda, laptops aren't for social networking, that's phones or tablets). Since you said that battery life isn't too important as it's usually plugged in, I'm guessing that you don't really need that portability element for gaming. As such, I'd say go for a desktop PC rather than a laptop, since you'll get more for the same price (or the same for less price). Pretty much the big question for a laptop is whether you want a dedicated graphics card. Getting one will improve your performance quite a bit, but it'll push the price up as well. For a sort of comparison thing, my laptop, which I bought two years ago, cost a bit under £400/$600 (unfortunately, I was not able to look for a good deal at the time due to the fact it was an emergency due to the failing of my old laptop), and that runs most games well even without a dedicated graphics card. It struggles when it gets to high-end stuff, like Skyrim, but can run it on low settings. So if you want to run that sort of thing at high graphical power, it might be a bit out of your price range. A lot of older games, including the Heroes of Might and Magic games up to 4, can be found on GOG.com for download for cheap. In particular, since you mentioned RPGs, it also contains the Baldur's Gate series and Planescape: Torment, the latter of which has been said to be the best RPG game ever made (even if it does use 2nd edition D&D rules). I believe it has all the Ultima games as well. They also help by packaging the games with any emulator you might need to play it. It might be best to think about the most intensive games you want to run. In my experience, older games will still run or can be rigged to run on a new machine, either with emulators or 'run as Windows XP' or what have you. I often play Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital (via DOSbox, packaged from the aforementioned website), and slightly newer stuff like Pharaoh and Heroes of Might and Magics 3 and 4 on Windows 7. In fact, the only game I can think of which I never got to run on Win7 was Battle for Middle Earth 2 - a game which came out about a year or two before Win7 did. So to wrap up, consider the upper limits of the system you want, and look at the pricing from that perspective, since older games should be able to be emulated or rigged to play on a newer machine. A few examples of the newer games that you might want to play would be helpful, I think, so we know more about what you're looking for.

Ack, a Monday? Maybe. I certainly hope so, but it depends on whether or not I'll need to go in to where I'm doing my internship on that day or not. Certainly if I can, I will be there .

I can say that a lot of the votes for Claincy were theoretically from the Merchants (so a maximum of 13 over two days). They voted for you on Days 1 and 2, but the lynch obviously never got through. It was possible today that no-one died. As Kas has shown above, what would have needed to happen was for your to Worldsing Rengar's vote to Trahar (I'm not sure if that would've switched both of his votes or not), or at least cancel his and throw another. Then, if Lyla hadn't gone to the Nightwatcher, Magam couldn't have sacrificed her to kill someone. At that point, Artus could've killed someone with his action, or at least knocked a life off, and made the game a much closer race. Unfortunately, the true nature of the boons and their curses was a bit too difficult to figure out if you don't have the information ready to you. You couldn't have really known about how Slaughter worked, or that Rengar was lying about changing factions (well done on that, incidentally. Most impressed by how you managed to hide that). If that had been figured out, perhaps Rengar wouldn't have so easily gone to the Nightwatcher to ask for that... Though it seems to have worked out well for him. Seems the Shard has traded away two Scadrialians for a Rosharian. I find it amusing that the two Sharders who died were from the same planet. Just seems unlucky. Oh, and of course, I nominate Weiry for the The Weiry award, since his death can legitimately be said to be the first this game. His death was caused by Artus' Ghostblood ability. Unfortunately, Weiry was the Shamed Guard, who lynched Ace in response. Ace was also a Shamed Guard, and lynched Kas in return (along with the Shard encouraging people, and Jain stabbing him). So my second question, Rubix, is what boon did the Shamed Guards and the Voidbringers ask for to get killed so quickly? Seems that we couldn't vote for anyone without tripping over a Voidbringer, and two of the Shamed Guards died within the first real cycle. Though considering Mon and Kas did that so-called Nuclear Tweet to reveal us all, and none of the others discovered disloyal people while they were alive, it seems that the best Voidbringer is a dead Voidbringer.

Aonar definitely gets the Most Ironic Death one (Don't Worry, it's Not Loaded, Awesomeness has named it). I don't think Rengar qualifies for Can't Touch This as such, since he was attacked less than Khas and probably had less lynch votes on him than Clanal, but I'd say he probably qualifies for Biggest Game-Changing Move (Nailed It!).

If I had a half-decent microphone, I'd have probably whistled it instead and asked Rubix to accept it as the dead tweet as it would've been 140 characters long .

Well, we replied in the dead tweet in the same manner... You never mentioned that we could whistle back outside of it.

The last Dead Tweet should give you a clue there, Tulir Also, for that wonderful bit of damage-soaking on Cycles 2 and 3, totaling 4 different kill attempts and another lynch which never got through, I'd like to nominate Khas for the 'Aggro Magnet' award

I feel so proud Shame most of it's nonsense that should probably be stripped out for people wanting to read it in the future. >>

Ah, I wondered if that was what happened. I was making bets on Twei or Lyla dying, and then neither did that night, and I was very confused.

It was Aonar and I who listened to it and deciphered it. We got the second and third messages, but not the first one in its entirety. At first, since Rubix said 'for your viewing pleasure', we thought you'd had a discussion with him about whistling or something. The reason you didn't get a proper reply was because it was only Kas and I online today, for the most part, so we weren't exactly inclined to answer you. And I would've said you were probably killed by a lack of communication, yeah. Soon as your information was compromised to such a degree, you should've been making it public, I think. Though you would've had it in the end, probably, if Rengar hadn't applied for a transfer (and got put on the winning side, I note. Well played, Rengar, even if you didn't mean to do that ). There was almost no discussion on the threads other than near the end with Rengar claiming that he couldn't get on his doc anymore. I think the first group that would have suggested a lynch on here would've probably gotten it through, and that way you could've at least tried to stop the Shard from getting each faction to vote different ways and thus choose who to go for. So, so amused...

Thanks for such an awesome game, Rubix The S is silent... I can't believe I only just got that part of the curse. This game kind of neatly wound down to a fairly even state of play right at the end. The bit which changed everything was Rengar not actually being a Darkeye anymore (which I absolutely loved as a symmetrical curse), right at the end. A particularly large part of this end-state was Slaughter, and how it worked. Its boon and curse were pretty much perfect for S17, and worked well despite the fact that it was a two-kill boon. Indeed, it seems as though a two-kill item was necessary to get the game to this point. Had you already decided that this would be how a kill boon would have worked, and if not, how would you have changed it for one of the other factions asking for a kill boon? Also, a question of vital import. Did we get the longest Google doc award?

While I like the idea, Jaelre, I don't think it's quite as strong as it needs to be for a House Power. It used to be a part of the Tineye abilities in the previous games, and for the most part (aside from the awesome puzzles left there), it was just used to prove that you were a Tineye. So overall, it's not a massively useful ability in itself. I can see the value in leaving an anonymous message in a game of information like this, but it needs a little bit more, I think, before it becomes on par with the other abilities.

House Wars Update I now have eight House Powers (eight is a good number), and so I declare that my game is now playable. A lot of changes have been made to the informant stuff as well, buffing the truth-giving aspect a bit. However, small improvements can still be made: I am not sure whether the Obligation power is workable, since it's time-dependant. Is 24 hours a long enough time to respond? (oh, if only I could give a financial incentive instead...) At first, I thought that the original Lords of the Houses would have to be known to be innocent from a flavour perspective, but I've since realised that they could just as easily be hidden half-skaa or skaa rebellion sympathisers. As such, there will be no safe roles. I'm a little worried that the Seeker role is a bit weaker than it should be (and hence, so is the Smoker role), since the information it discovers can be found in other ways, and it can't discover the bad good guys. I will also be grateful for any other House powers people suggest. Possibly for games with a larger number of players - Split the Houses into Great Houses (with more players and a House Power) and Lesser Houses (with fewer players, but there are many more of them)? If there are a lot of players, I would probably have vanilla roles. The question there though is what they could do at night, since they have very little information to give to the Informant. Perhaps a single message a night, sent to a House of their choice? While character relationships are highly encouraged, I will automatically nix any direct relationships. This is because if one turns out to be skaa... Well, the other direct relation(s) would be sent to the Inquisition as a matter of course. As such, while it might be an interesting optional rule (with relations pre-set), it's a bit too complicated for the first run. Terrismen stewards are currently a House Power (used to be known as Economy), but for future games, it might be nice if there were optional rules for them similar to how I've suggested an extension for Kandra as players. If anyone can think of this, it might be a nice idea for future games. Thus the ultimate extension of this game is to have Allomancers, people with no powers, people playing Kandra, and people playing Terrismen stewards. That would be rather chaotic, with five different roles flying around - Allomancers, Powerless nobles, Kandra, Terrismen and Skaa (with the skaa group being made up of each of the other four categories). However, I think it would probably need more players than we're likely to get. Maybe a grand game of 50 players, with 10 Houses, with a roughly 20/10/10/10 split (or maybe 25/15/5/5). There would be around 10 skaa rebellion infiltrators. This has a few problems, most amusing of which is that the Seeker and Smoker roles become really weak after so many games as the necessary role for the good and bad guys respectively, as only ~20 people can actually be found this way. The next is then that it's a skaa per House, and I want to avoid that if possible. Also, with so many skaa, it would be somewhat awkward to find them, since only a single House power gives a definite answer to that. No definite spying roles can work, as we saw with Games 4 and 5, provided information is managed well, but I'm still hesitant. A late edit, I know, and I doubt people will see this, but hey, if anyone wants to re-run these rules and make them a bit more complex, maybe they'll have a look at this post and think about it. Another possible role for a player is for them to be an Inquisitor-in-training. In this case, it'd be similar to the Thief from Mailliw's game - Their goal is to get every power. They would have a special action, to kill a player with a spike. They would name their spike's metal, and their target when making the kill. Then, if that player has a power that can be stolen by that metal they get that power. Anyway, the base game I will run will be as shown on the original post. This is just me musing on this ruleset's final form .

Couple of ones to throw out there as well: Most Cowardly (player who uses a defensive ability on themselves the most) Most Unlucky (given to Weiry the first player to die) Least Killable (player who survived the most day cycles with at least two votes on them (before changes to votes are made)) Most Complacent (the player who used their role the least amongst active players) How could we forget this one? Honorary Eliminator (villager who helped the eliminators the most without realising)