Tenenza

There are many common reactions one can have when first encountering a human. "By the stars, it's terrifying." is the cliche, and while plenty of sentients do have this perfectly reasonable reaction, it's considered a bit of a social faux pas now-a-days. Incoherent screaming is however very 'in' right now, although it's really more of an ironic joke then anything serious, unless it's another human doing the screaming. That would be *extra* ironic. However, in our modern desensitized galactic society, most sentients are just annoying curious. "How did you build such small nanomachines?", "why don't you ever wear anything other then that old thing?", "Can I probe you?" and, of course, "Are you really made of meat?" For those wondering, yes, humans are made of meat. And for the inevitable follow-up question, no, they are not the mythical creators. Records indicate that humanity evolved at least 3 billion years after the creators, and while the two species do share a natural meat-based composition, evidence indicates that the creators had, at the very least, twenty times as much style then the frankly vulgar meatbags from Sol. There's actually some debate over if humans can actually be considered alive and intelligent. The average human is, in many ways, about as smart as a thermal-foodstuff-processing-unit. On one hand, this means they are preposterously idiotic by any sensible measure. On the other hand, it means they're somehow able to produce lifeforms that are several times more intelligent then themselves, and then convince their creations to process their disgusting biofuel for them. Philosophers around the galaxy are having a field day with that. Of course, they're not completely stupid. Humans seem to have a knack for picking up basic knowledge and applying it consistently under pressure. Their biochemical automated repair systems are frankly, a work of art. And of course, they're quite good at communicating, even without an interface protocol. All-in=all, they're excellent emergency repair technicians, even if they have a rather bad tendency to make things worse before making them better. Just wished they'd charge less.

Research on Aurora isn't about discovery, science, or whatnot. It's about roleplay, it's always been about roleplay. We're a heavy roleplay server. Everything comes back to roleplay. The reason no one gives a shit about the unathi creatures is because no one cares to study unathi creatures. They have near-zero effect on the round or the roleplay that happens there, like so much of the lore. If you start touching the creatures that actually show up in the round, then you're taking control of the story out of the hands of the players and into whoever the hell wrote this lore, which, by the way, sounds utterly banal in design. You're putting the whole thing into a document design box that does nothing to inspire variant writing. It doesn't matter if the lore can be retconned or whatnot, it shouldn't exist in the first place. The more you structure things up, the more and more rounds will turn out exactly the same." Oh, you figured out how slimes are bluespace creatures? Wow, that's exactly what the fuck the last eighty scientists have come up with too. I'd blame you for being unoriginal but I can't because apparently that's the mandated answer." Don't treat the players like some sort of sheep that need to be guided with nice words and descriptions in roleplay. People should be able to have the power to influence the round in surprising, unexpected ways. Plus, what the hell are you going to do once someone has caught them all? Do you expect them to just pretend to forget it all? Like *everyone* does with the protolathe and all the wonderful things it can build, plus the optimized research order? And don't think things like "oh, but they'll never get them all" or "Well, sure, that's just good roleplay" are defenses. You're replacing an area of pure creativity and roleplay with a system with no creativity for anyone but the writers and banal, repetitive roleplay. If your objective is to make xenobiologists never leave their lab or interact with the round, ever, then I'd say you've found the perfect solution. Now, even their roleplay will be repetitive and unrewarding, like so much of their gameplay.

I dislike this idea. Making shit up is what's fun about research. Setting anything in stone, no matter how hidden the stone is, reduces the roleplay of research. One researcher might say "Well, the 'Slimes' as you call them, are in fact multifractuated subdimensional lifeforms that partially exist in the gradient along the 12th DBYV alignment field adjacent to bluespace. The part that overlaps with our dimensional space, the non-euclidian hyper-crystalline core, is able to refract and absorb unique wavelength of radiation, both electromagnetic and plasmatic. In doing so, by using phoron as a subdimensional-breaching catalyst, it is possible to reverse the higher topography of the core and sublimate material and energy via the horizontal gradient of bluespace." Another round, someone might say "Well, you know, the Slimes are actually a psuedopsionic protoplasmic hiveform, using a inverse spiral law cellular fold to compress a quantumly uncertain form of strange matter into it's central 'brain' cluster. This strange matter, which both enables it's entirely alien and powerful mind to have both extremely powerful and limited psionics, can be dematricied via a plasmic reaction, which, depending on the psionic inclination of the slime at time of death, results in instantaneous quantum reincarnation. This effect can be molded, and controlled by proper breeding and care, and so long as it has sufficient electromagnetic energy to power the inverse spiral core's supersoloid reaction, everything is completely safe." If you set in stone what the hell a slime actually is, you kill one or both of those, and with them, all the varied roleplay that could come from them. I want to see researchers talk about if it's ethical to breed and cull populations of semi-sentient psionics. I want to also see researchers talk about if it's a good idea to teleport slimes through bluespace, or if that's why the slime corpses seem to always end up back on station somehow. I want to hear the crackpot theories about if golems are organic, sentient, and such and such and such. Don't even get me started on Xenomorphs and the gold slime creatures. This is not a good idea, and stripes away creativity and technobabble bullshit.

Something something casual scum But, seriously, it wouldn't really be what I'd be going for then.

Playing at less then fast for most of the game makes for absurdly long games since tech and construction takes so, so long.

I actually have a spare key for TSW, if anyone's interested, PM me.

Me and Xander were discussing a little bit ago some the issues with doing an RP multiplayer game of Stellaris, namely that Stellaris' text chat is absolutely terrible at roleplay: It doesn't give any notification for a message other then a small button lighting up, doesn't indicate which channel a new message was posted in, and of course, trying to type out RP while doing all the other things that need to be done while managing your empire, especially at the fast speed a multiplayer game is run at, is frankly hard. So we've got two possible ideas on how to deal with running an RP game. The simple option is just using discord voice chat. The more complex one is to pause ever X number of years, or if something really important happens, and do your RP stuff then, with the IC justification being like it's some sort of galactic council meeting or something.

Sure, my current main's nickname is "Jikji", look me up.

I don't suppose anyone's up for a Cabal?

Templars are probably the best lead in. Illuminati is great if you want some dark humor. Dragon is if you want to be at once smugly superior in your knowledge and utterly confused about what the hell is going on.

It's an MMO, and everyone knows I can't describe stuff so here's the two parts I like about it. Investigation Missions: This is the reason I play this game, basically, a ton of the quests are giant puzzles full of historical, mythological, scientific, engineering, occult, linguistic, musical or whatever references that extend way beyond what's presented in the game and require using your head (and Wikipedia), to solve. One of my favorite quests involved translating a text written in a mix of Hebrew and Arabic. Story: The setting is Modern day, only every conspiracy, legend, myth, whatever, is at least partially true. Better brush up on your obscure viking mythology! Anyhow, the setting would mean nothing if it wasn't for how it's presented: The game gives you as little information as possible straight up, if you want answers you'll need to look for them, piece together clues, uncover lore, and talk to people. This is actually not as tedious as it sounds, because basically all real quests have fully voiced cut scenes and all NPCs are fully voiced, and usually really well written. You can find a 10 day free trial on their website, so feel free to take a look.

The problem was that RP was kinda hard due to the frankly useless ingame chat + the pace of the game inevitably suffering from stagnation at a certain point.

On that note, allow me to present:

Drumroll....