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Unshared Interests thing
Baen Free Library - in which we discover that the easiest way to sell books is to give them away, or, Why the RIAA are Full of Shit.
Biouxbies - how do you pronounce "Siouxsie"?
Commander Jameson - the protagonist of "Elite", which remains one of the finest computer games ever written.
Daicon - is a kind of radish, but also the Japanese convention for which Studio GAINAX did their first work.
Fuck the BBC Micro - if you have to ask you probably don't want to know.
Patlabor TV - is very funny and not at all like the Oshii-infested first 2 films.
Minipato - is a superdeformed Patlabor spinoff.
pummelling sweaty punks - does exactly what it says on the tin.
sacred fluid - another name for Irn-Bru.
wizard of yendor - the adversary in NetHack.
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This joke has lost some of its fine subtlety over the last few weeks.
Yours,
David.
Re:
You are already dead?
Signed,
Mara
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Ahh, Jameson. Stolen from "Traveller" for your computer gaming pleasure (just like the commodities system).
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And how. About the only thing missing was hanging around in a bar in Startown waiting for the patron to turn up.
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I love Traveller for the way you could die during character generation, and the completely realistic way money was doled out at graduation (one guy would get a knife and 20c, the next guy would get a spaceship, 50000c, and the keys to the Imperium).
Last time I was in Ottakers, I saw a copy of T20, a new hardback edition of Traveller in the d20 style. I am intrigued to see whether there is a d20 way of dying while rolling your career, but I was not really in a buying mood, and I didn't have time to browse it there.
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They changed the character generation in later versions (from MegaTraveller - c.1987 - onwards) so that death during character generation could be taken as a medical discharge halfway through a term of service on the grounds of permanent disability. Benefits at mustering out were always a bit on the random side, as you point out, though they amended this at some point to say that receiving a ship actually meant you had a ship with ten years of its forty year mortgage paid off - a bit of a white elephant in many ways.
As for T20, don't get me started. If someone had told me in 1983 that one day Traveller would only be available in GURPS or D&D flavours, and that D&D would be owned by Hasbro, I'd have thought they were mad.
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[Actually D&D 3e is surprisingly good for what it does. If you want to go down a big hole in the ground, kill a bunch of beasties, and take their stuff; if you want to play a game that's midway between an RPG and a skirmish wargame - and I do - it is the best implementation of that concept I have seen.]