Singularity RPG Moderators (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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singularityooc2012-01-12 09:13 pm
singularitymods) wrote in singularityooc2012-01-12 09:13 pm
Entry tags:
MOD ANNOUNCEMENT -- THE HOUR APPROACHES, FYI, AND CREDITS
Hello, Singularity. In a few short hours (midnight US Eastern--because we've kept you waiting long enough) gameplay will open on DW. At this point, the LJ communities will switch to moderated posting, and all Singularity posts should be to DW only. The LJ comms will remain as archives, but the vast majority of content has been imported to DW already, including comments. You may continue backtagging on LJ through the end of February, at which point we'll do one last comment import. (You can keep tagging after that, but we don't guarantee we'll import your comments after February 29th.)
If you want to switch a thread from LJ to DW, your best bet is to find the imported post via the tags page for the comm, linked in the sidebar, and start tagging with your DW account. Unless your partner has verified their OpenID, they won't get email for it, so you'll likely have to let them know OOC.
Before gameplay on DW opens, we're going to take the opportunity to remind people of a few details about the game, in-universe and out:
The New Economy
In-character, Hypatia has noticed that distinct communities have formed among the inhabitants of Sacrosanct, and that few if any visitors seem to be from cultures that do not use a monetary system, so to make things easier on her guests (or to throw a golden apple in their midst--or a little of both; it's hard to tell with her) she is introducing a currency system, called chits.
Out-of-character, adding money to the mix makes smaller transactions possible. In the old system, a single credit was worth a lot in terms of "buying power," and if you're trying to pay someone for watching youridiot friendshypothetical children for a couple hours, giving them a whole credit is a bit much. With money in the mix, it's considerably less all-or-nothing.
How it works is this: Work credits are now a measure of your character's housing and monthly allowance. Housing is as the old system, and allowance is work credits x 100 chits, so someone with 1 credit gets 100 chits a month, someone with 10 credits gets 1000, someone with 47 gets 4700, and so on. Anything but housing is paid for out of a character's allowance.
There is no out-of-character listing of prices, because that sounds an awful lot like work, but a rule of thumb for determining what something might cost is that the allowance will permit a character to afford the same things they would have had access to under the old, credits-only system. Someone at the low end of the range will be just able to cover those expenses, and someone at the high end will have chits left over at the end of the month. This means characters can economize in one area to live "above their means" in another, depending what's important to them. Characters will always have housing as part of their allowance, because keeping track of who didn't make rent this month also seems to strongly resemble work, and worrying about getting evicted for falling short is a bit too uncomfortably slice-of-life for our pretendy fun times, especially given the state of the real world economy.
We don't plan to scrutinize people's bank accounts, and we're trusting you to keep a character's expenditures realistic. Characters are free to set prices for their services, whether that's gun-for-hire (someone is probably going to undercut you--seriously, take a look around), bartender (you will never want for customers), therapist (a largely untapped and almost certainly lucrative market), or anything else people might be willing to pay for.
Working Hard or Hardly Working?
We're also taking much of the specificity out of the jobs system. On an IC basis, the job listings are still available on the network, and are as detailed as ever, but from here on out, OOC information about jobs will be limited to whether it's general, skilled, dangerous, or skilled + dangerous. General jobs pay the lowest, and skilled and dangerous ones pay the most. There will only be a certain number available per month, and one they're signed up for, they're gone. There is a limit of one job per player per month, and please let everyone get a crack at the board. These jobs do not require approval or have to be logged. [This is probably the part of the system that's going to require the most tweaking, so bear with us.]
However! We will allow players to suggest additional jobs if they would generate CR when performed. This means something like hosting a mixer on Hypatia's behalf, or a chemist and an engineer teaming up to repair a piece of drug-making equipment in a hospital. While we don't strictly require this always be new CR, if people are only ever doing jobs with canonmates/existing CR, that is Not Cool and defeating the spirit of the law, so branch out! CR jobs must be logged.
For people who don't much care about the in-game economy, we've created a list of one-time jobs that anyone should be able to perform, assuming they're not completely paranoid and prefer to live in a cabin lined with tinfoil in the woods. Taking these jobs will give characters a handful of credits and a steady allowance, allowing the player to ignore the economy, assuming they don't suddenly want gourmet food all the time. These specific jobs can only be performed once apiece, and don't need approval or logging.
Quid Pro Quo
As part of her new interest in matters economic, Hypatia is taking a closer look at the sources of people's wealth. Not that she didn't know who was robbing her blind before, but now she's displaying an interest. Characters with hacked credits are going to start getting visits, whether from Hypatia or one of the other NPCs, with "requests" that the character ignores at their own peril. The unspoken offer is this: do the job, and Hypatia will legitimize a handful of the counterfeit credits, while continuing to "overlook" the rest. Refuse the job, and characters may be looking at finding new housing arrangements. In the future, all credit hacking requests come with this risk attached, though smaller amounts of theft are less likely to draw Hypatia's attention than large ones.
In Conclusion
One Last Thing, Placed Outside the Cut Where You Can't Miss It
Fill out the Taken form. This means you. [insert threatening emote here]
If you want to switch a thread from LJ to DW, your best bet is to find the imported post via the tags page for the comm, linked in the sidebar, and start tagging with your DW account. Unless your partner has verified their OpenID, they won't get email for it, so you'll likely have to let them know OOC.
Before gameplay on DW opens, we're going to take the opportunity to remind people of a few details about the game, in-universe and out:
- Sacrosanct is freakin' huge. A residential zone, on average, can support 17.5 million people, for a total carrying capacity in excess of 250 million. And this is comfortably, with plenty of green space and mixed-use districts, not "Manhattan living in each other's pockets"-style. Unless you know where they are, you get phenomenally lucky, or you have something like telepathy going for you, finding someone who doesn't want to be found is nearly impossible. "Meet me in R09" is like saying "meet me in Rhode Island."
- Zones are self-contained, and the only way to move between them is via teleporter.
- Teleporter respawn acts like a saved game--everything between stepping out of the teleporter and your respawn is lost. A respawned character will have no memory of their own death or any sensation of lost time, and will have to be filled in on what happened.
- Speaking of deaths, the Deaths page is now for keeping track of mutations caused by teleporter respawn. Die all you want (within reason), but if you're giving someone a teleporter mutation, then you need to report it there. Easing up the requirements on that is part of our ongoing "make things simpler, or at least easier to understand" plan.
- We have an AIM chat, thegravitywell. There have been tumbleweeds blowing through lately, but we'd like to try to get it in use again, since we direct people to it in our acceptance notices. It's certainly not mandatory, but some people prefer AIM to Plurk (and vice versa), so having a bunch of possible channels for OOC communication is a Good Thing.
- The long-
overdueawaited changes to the in-game economy (and thus the Job Board) are live! More detail below, but we've tried to add some flexibility to the system to account for various people's play styles and various characters' financial desires, from ranging "don't bother me" to "micromanager." This may require tweaking once we see it in action, because as any GM knows, no plan survives contact with the players. (We love you guys. ♥)
The New Economy
In-character, Hypatia has noticed that distinct communities have formed among the inhabitants of Sacrosanct, and that few if any visitors seem to be from cultures that do not use a monetary system, so to make things easier on her guests (or to throw a golden apple in their midst--or a little of both; it's hard to tell with her) she is introducing a currency system, called chits.
Out-of-character, adding money to the mix makes smaller transactions possible. In the old system, a single credit was worth a lot in terms of "buying power," and if you're trying to pay someone for watching your
How it works is this: Work credits are now a measure of your character's housing and monthly allowance. Housing is as the old system, and allowance is work credits x 100 chits, so someone with 1 credit gets 100 chits a month, someone with 10 credits gets 1000, someone with 47 gets 4700, and so on. Anything but housing is paid for out of a character's allowance.
There is no out-of-character listing of prices, because that sounds an awful lot like work, but a rule of thumb for determining what something might cost is that the allowance will permit a character to afford the same things they would have had access to under the old, credits-only system. Someone at the low end of the range will be just able to cover those expenses, and someone at the high end will have chits left over at the end of the month. This means characters can economize in one area to live "above their means" in another, depending what's important to them. Characters will always have housing as part of their allowance, because keeping track of who didn't make rent this month also seems to strongly resemble work, and worrying about getting evicted for falling short is a bit too uncomfortably slice-of-life for our pretendy fun times, especially given the state of the real world economy.
We don't plan to scrutinize people's bank accounts, and we're trusting you to keep a character's expenditures realistic. Characters are free to set prices for their services, whether that's gun-for-hire (someone is probably going to undercut you--seriously, take a look around), bartender (you will never want for customers), therapist (a largely untapped and almost certainly lucrative market), or anything else people might be willing to pay for.
Working Hard or Hardly Working?
We're also taking much of the specificity out of the jobs system. On an IC basis, the job listings are still available on the network, and are as detailed as ever, but from here on out, OOC information about jobs will be limited to whether it's general, skilled, dangerous, or skilled + dangerous. General jobs pay the lowest, and skilled and dangerous ones pay the most. There will only be a certain number available per month, and one they're signed up for, they're gone. There is a limit of one job per player per month, and please let everyone get a crack at the board. These jobs do not require approval or have to be logged. [This is probably the part of the system that's going to require the most tweaking, so bear with us.]
However! We will allow players to suggest additional jobs if they would generate CR when performed. This means something like hosting a mixer on Hypatia's behalf, or a chemist and an engineer teaming up to repair a piece of drug-making equipment in a hospital. While we don't strictly require this always be new CR, if people are only ever doing jobs with canonmates/existing CR, that is Not Cool and defeating the spirit of the law, so branch out! CR jobs must be logged.
For people who don't much care about the in-game economy, we've created a list of one-time jobs that anyone should be able to perform, assuming they're not completely paranoid and prefer to live in a cabin lined with tinfoil in the woods. Taking these jobs will give characters a handful of credits and a steady allowance, allowing the player to ignore the economy, assuming they don't suddenly want gourmet food all the time. These specific jobs can only be performed once apiece, and don't need approval or logging.
Quid Pro Quo
As part of her new interest in matters economic, Hypatia is taking a closer look at the sources of people's wealth. Not that she didn't know who was robbing her blind before, but now she's displaying an interest. Characters with hacked credits are going to start getting visits, whether from Hypatia or one of the other NPCs, with "requests" that the character ignores at their own peril. The unspoken offer is this: do the job, and Hypatia will legitimize a handful of the counterfeit credits, while continuing to "overlook" the rest. Refuse the job, and characters may be looking at finding new housing arrangements. In the future, all credit hacking requests come with this risk attached, though smaller amounts of theft are less likely to draw Hypatia's attention than large ones.
In Conclusion
- There's money now.
- You get money and housing based on your work credits.
- Jobs are less specific and divided into three categories, each with its own requirements.
- Hypatia appears to have been watching Mafia movies.
One Last Thing, Placed Outside the Cut Where You Can't Miss It
Fill out the Taken form. This means you. [insert threatening emote here]
no subject
the chits system looks like greek to me. idgi... i thought the majority of the votes were for not changing the credit system anyway, back when we had it?
no subject
The credits always kind of had a really high value in the first place; if gave the handyman a credit for the second scenario, you could basically be giving him a house for fixing your roof (if it was the first credit he got).
So now with this system, you can pay the handyman without getting him a whole house for fixing the leak in your roof. If that makes sense.
no subject
plus, it's messy and unclear at first glance. are credits completely useless as far as buying things go now? let's say they are and you can only build up chits, which i think is the case here... okay, what if a character doesn't use all their chits? are the extras erased at the end of the month or do they roll over? and if you build up a huge rollover amount, does your credit bracket increase? and even if it does or doesn't, we'll still end up with hellarich characters. either those with high credits already or those who just don't spend much each month. all these chits are just going to build and build. at least credits didn't multiply themselves every month.
idk i'm just bummed that we have a whole new system when the credits was one of the reasons i was attracted to the game, and plus after that poll i figured we wouldn't have to worry about it changing. with this, sure it sounds fun, but it looks convoluted and it's nothing unique. it'll fall to the wayside within two months, probably, which is a bummer, and it'll probably give the job board the boot. because why take up hypatia's jobs when you can work at a diner run by a pc and get paid chits there?
no subject
"Someone at the low end of the range will be just able to cover those expenses, and someone at the high end will have chits left over at the end of the month."
Chits can't buy housing and from what I see, building up a large amount of chits won't increase your credit bracket and can't be converted to credits. And like you said, we already have characters that are rich already, so it's not as though this is breaking the system.
I do know that there were some problems with the old system too, with people assuming that credits basically were cash. This is more ironing out the differences between credits and cash so that people that would like their characters to go on ill-advised shopping sprees or blow all of their money on a can of Uranium for plot/CR/fun times can, without worrying that it will somehow de-grade the housing they can live in.
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All you really have to worry about is chits. Gain yourself 2-3 credits, and you don't really have to worry, because credits=housing quality, chits=money.
...is how I saw it.
no subject
i have no problem gaining credits, ic-wise i already have enough credits to play comfortably in the game. i just don't like the new system or the fact that it was changed in the first place.
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Can we really buy Asphodel?
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i don't get this either weh.