The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Mind, that would mean I couldn’t grant you Permission once you go for it.

Email’s iximaz(at)gmail(dot)com.

Your mention of video games being the reason why HQ doesn’t run out of stuff, combined with Skyrim, gave me the rather amusing mental image of Medical treating injuries by stuffing the patients full of cheese wheels.

Part of my headcanon, once I started thinking about it, is that attempting to establish a single standard for currency value (let alone an HQ dollar) is a great way to earn a one-way trip to FicPsych.

One rather reasonable possibility is that there're actually multiple currency exchange standards depending on what you're buying: Rudi's and the like likely run on the Booze Standard, the Cafeteria, DoSAT, and similar places run on the "just take some, but don't ask too many questions, and bring us relevant things when you get them" standard, less usual goods (official or not) probably run on barter, negotiation, and some best-guess conversions, and so on.

Finance clearly (per hS) spends a lot of time trying to keep all this stuff straight, and it hasn't been too successful. The closest they've got is a big database of prices, which is inevitably extremely tricky to query.

To make everything worse, time travel is the sort of thing that makes accountants tear their hair out because you have to somehow deal with when money came from or open up some nasty exploitable gaps in your system. The Time Gentry are, sadly, not sharing their methods for fixing this. The problem gets nastier if anyone starts doing fun things like repeatedly looping money and goods back and forward in time to take advantage of inflation.

Sources of free wealth are probably sitting around in a few places if you go looking for them, but a lot of them might be tricky to exploit. For a hypothetical example, "Finance memo 458: Don't go taking entire planets off of the Culture. This is how we get caught. The occasional asteroid is fine though." I figure the broad summary of Finance policy is "don't get greedy and don't get caught", since they'd rather not crash an economy or expose the PPC.

On the other hand, things like video games and magic are probably why HQ fundamentally doesn't have problems with food, clothes, ammo, or anything else important.

And I didn't know about the Thieves' Guild being something that could help there.

- Tomash, who's writing this late at night and will be happy to expand further

Balderdash! Back in MY day, we had to haggle over the value of black market goods every single time we wanted to make a transaction, and we liked it that way!

I kid, of course. {= )

Actually, my headcanon is the Booze Standard we came up with a few(?) years ago, because that was fun, and it does seem pretty reliable. I'm sure Rudi's and other establishments would appreciate it if the DoF kept track of all that for them, though. ^_^

For your idea, Tomash, I think video game minigames could be a rich source of near-free wealth. Just send someone to do the rounds once a month or however often the game mechanics/economy allows, and you're rolling in dough!

Or, if it's Skyrim (or something similar), you can hire the Thieves' Guild to cook the books if things get a little skewed once in a while, and it's part of the normal course of life. No eyebrows raised. Might be best to reserve that strategy for iterations in which the Dragonborn is a thief, though, or the guild's luck might not be good enough to pull it off.

Transnormal Accountancy sure isn't a walk in the park, is it?

~Neshomeh

I enjoyed reading it. (The interplay between Sambar's loot-focused approach to badfic and Huinesoron actually trying to do a typical mission made for a good source of character interactions. The opening to the mission was also an interesting variation on the [BEEEEP]ing a console thing, and I liked it).

Now that I've checked, it's not linked from Sambar's page of the Department of Finance page, which explains why I never ran into it.

Having Acquisitions going into badfics to get stuff that shouln't've been there is similar to but distinct from what I had in mind. My picture of the economy is that a lot of things come in to HQ from Action agents looting them from badfic (even if they don't want it personally, having infrastructure people owing you a favor can help), and therefore one thing Finance has is the (name tbd) Exchanges Division, which does things like setting up a shop somewhere in Skyrim to sell off a bunch of weaponry and then skim a bunch of the food they'd gotten in return out into HQ.

... are this mission, which is actually moderately similar to what you're describing. Other than that, I think the only source material is Reorg/Crashing Down, which basically says 'they have archives'.

hS

My ever-expanding (I'm working on solving this) writing project folder includes a one-off story that tries to expand on/add to the Department of Finance.

Specifically, I'm putting together a piece about a new Finance field agent (whose job is to try and quietly make some money or get some needed goods off of stuff that the agents have brought in that somehow made its way into official channels) in a way that doesn't break anyone's economy or that is too noticeable (there were new ethics rules after the Reorganization), who's just getting introduced to the department (and HQ at large, if I end up going that way).

Since you're the other person who's written in Finance who's still around, we should compare notes?

- Tomash

\ ^ /
< : ( >
/ v <br>
((ooc: it took me longer than i am willing to admit to work out how to do a doktor trollenface))

Thanks for catching those!

On the last one, though, I think the structure of the sentence means I can get away with not writing "he had ..., but he had"; the second "he had" is implied. Unless it's insufficiently clear, in which case I'd put the second "had" in its place before "never."

... I have now spent too long on Wikipedia, trying to figure out if this is parallel construction and/or some type of zeugma or syllepsis, and if so, whether "had" is required as an auxiliary verb or not. I think I'm more confused than when I started.

"Zeugma" is a great Scrabble word, though. And "Have Some Madeira, M'Dear" by Flanders & Swann is a good song with great wordplay, whatever the grammar concepts involved are.

~Neshomeh

...shoot, just realized I forgot to put agent bios. Well, anyway, now's as good a time as ever! I'll write up those bios while I wait for you.

We already have six people up to play, with our characters currently being developed a bit. The current roster is:

Darien Libris (me): male tiefling envoy
Iria Leaf (FourMoonsWatching): female elf mystic
Esius Ashabal (Granz): male strix-borai witchwarper
T2T00 (Larfo): agender SRO soldier
X-Ray (Athena): agender gray operative
Marzon (eatpraylove): female half-orc mechanic

Any more than this is probably a tall order for anybody who wants to GM, so additional players are not needed.

I'd be interested in this!

Hello all! So a few of us have been talking on the PPC Discord server, and decided that Starfinder would be fun to play!

However, there's something rather important we're missing: someone to run the game.

Thus, this thread.

Would anybody be interested in being the GM?

Race ya? ^_~

hS

I've always loved manipulation of the rules of magic to pull off an unexpected result, and this is a brilliant example. I love how you used Jacques' POV to feed the reader limited information, so we can learn and be amazed-slash-horrified along with him.

I have to wonder what kind of price Dawn will have to pay for that trick, though. It sounds an awful lot like a Blank Cheque spell, and those are weighty things to be tossing around.

The rest of the story is also good. At the risk of sounding slightly disturbing, the description of the violence is perfectly pitched - not too gory, but also not too squeamish.

hS

it was as good time a as ever
Shouldn’t this be "as good a time"?

Thoth become noticeably more attentive
Shouldn’t this be "became" (past tense)?

He’d known it for a long time, but never really looked that knowledge in the face until this moment.
Shouldn’t this be past perfect to match the past perfect in "He’d known"? (Would the correct word order be "never really had looked" or "had never really looked"?)

HG

I'm glad I took the time to read both of these!

I love how Computron's narrative voice is presented. Thinking at speeds that make milliseconds relevant measures of time, and some of the other physical details, sure; but also his constant insistence that he can't feel emotions, despite all signs pointing to the contrary.

I also love that Computron inadvertently starts to touch off a surge of fandom for the older, less flashy sorts of robot that he is, through the fandom of the anime. I mean, Computron is a much more impressive feat of robotics than the breakdancing androids and whatever, but he's not big and flashy-looking, so the museum doesn't see him as marketable, or whatever. If they focused more on how complex his thinking is, rather than his appearance on stage . . . it's stupid for me to get flustered over a fictional robot not being respected, but here I am.

Thanks for the share, Tomash!

—doctorlit kept accidentally using male pronouns for Computron, and had to manually switch them all to "it," but then thought to double-check the original story and realized he actually does get male pronouns

Tom's Tips for PPC Agents:
-Don't irritate DoSAT. I think they hacked my teeth once. I don't know how. Thar's not a thing.

-Don't mess up your partner's bookshelves. Sure, they could fix it psychically, but they'll make you fix it. And laugh.

-Never believe any statements a flower makes regarding a paycheck.

-Given the above, be sure to verify goods when bartering on the black market. A genuine RX-78 that had been miniaturized and fitted with remote controls is amazing. A Gunpla masquerading as such is considerably less so.

-Don't lend your belongings to DoGA. They'll be singed.

-If you lend your belongings to WhatThe, don't ask where they've been with them. Said items may be in mint condition, but they will never feel clean again.

-Don't try to self-medicate depression with caffeine, alcohol, bleeprin, or extended sessions of Doom. Go to FicPsych. Go to Medical. Get some help.

Hey, if I've elicited emotions with my writing (in a positive sense), then that's a win.

I, uh, hadn't actually even remembered the term "errantry" while I wrote this, but no, it's definitely not an Ordeal. I was thinking of errantry without the term, so we'll go with that.

As for ages, my thought while writing was that Jacques was in his thirties and Dawn was in her twenties. He's...I don't know if he's the more experienced wizard, but he's the one who's done a lot more running around having adventures. Dawn's mostly stuck to her own planet and had fewer daring missions. How exactly they met I have no idea--presumably they bumped into each other on one of their planets or a different one altogether. After that, they kept hanging out and started traveling together (working together? Probably working together as well on more than just this last bit). Anyway, that's speculation for another time.

They do? I suppose that makes sense. I'll go in and correct it at some point.

I had this whole idea of who the Doctor could be in this YW AU, only to be told he was already in there! I really need to get a bit more information on the details of how that works. In the meantime, hey! Filled in a missing piece of sorts :D Or, at least, one way it could go.

~Z

I approve of this general trend~

Postmodern Jukebox did the Pinky and the Brain theme song, and it's glorious. ^_^

~Neshomeh

Maybe. >.>

Actually, the notion tickling my brain is something to the effect of "what the PPC is really like," and/or practical stuff like where to get the best food and how to find the laundry room ("yes, such a thing exists!"). What you said fits in, I think. You wouldn't have to go into all the departments, necessarily, but certainly the confusing or obscure ones. DAVD springs to mind. Maybe a bit of a heavier slant toward Infrastructure, them communicating what they actually do and what they want the field agents to know about them.

Intel: Look, we're doing the best we can, and it's ultimately your boss that decides what ends up on your console. Please stop sending hate mail.

FicPsych: We're really not coming to take you away, ha-ha. We're nice*, regular people**, just like you***!

* After we've had our caffeine.
** Plus a hooloovoo and Nurse Immac.
*** Okay, probably not.

And so forth.

~Neshomeh

Well, you didn't waste any time getting right to it, did you? Scary stuff! I was not prepared. Kinda made me want to hide under a blanket.

This is a good thing. {= )

I don't have much to say with regards to canon, because it's been a long time since I read the books myself, but it seems to fit well enough. I'm not sure if the confrontation was meant to be an Ordeal or regular errantry (if you can call it that), but I'm guessing the latter? The LP isn't guaranteed to be involved anywhere except an Ordeal (unless your name is Callahan or Rodriguez), but it just doesn't give me that vibe, I think because Jacques doesn't read as young enough to be on his Ordeal.

Oh, minor note, but IIRC, the PTBs always get capitalized pronouns in the books.

I like the inclusion of the Doctor and Rose. It's always amused me that the Doctor exists in the YWverse, which makes this AU practically compulsory. {= )

~Neshomeh

People seemed interested when I asked the chat, so I've gone and started a mailbox game thread.

On top of being fun, this thread will also be useful for getting T-Board poked at a bit. Over the last few weeks I've made a few minor tweaks[1] and dusting off the code a bit. The dusting-off process involved a bunch of changes that shouldn't've broken anything, but there might be something that isn't working that I haven't noticed.

Therefore, please let me know if something isn't behaving how you'd expect. Also, suggestions for things that could be tweaked some are welcome.

Delta and I still haven't settled on where the replacement Board will be hosted, but we have some ideas and will update everyone once we know more.

- Tomash

[1]: For example, the new reply indicator is now a lot loss eye-catching and obnoxious, and T-Board should load much faster now