Jeff Zeitlin, Tim Collinson, the Regiment O' Toms, other list members,
et al,

As per the subject line, the PA verse is not buggered.  Nor is it
resting.  And definitely not pining for anything, fjords or otherwise.

The limiting reagent has been me finding a) enough time, b) a chapter
name,  and c) enough brainwidth to write up the latest series of
misadventures overlapping the outbreak of Interstellar War 2: Electric
Boogaloo, since this mob broke the timeline away from canon in Parental
Advisory: Vector Thrust.

Player feedback has been fairly consistent in the game being a) fun, b)
different and c) sweating stuff not ordinarily sweated in our gaming
sessions.

Part of the fun for me has been deconstructing players' latent
assumptions (notoriously, Easy Frag) about what is _necessarily_ implied
by a sci-fi setting with FTL, even a comparatively near-future one as PA.

Deconstructing the assumption of faster-than-travel comms (I can't
abbreviate this as FTTC - my brain backronyms that as fibre-to-the-curb)
was fairly lulzworthy - especially Easy Frag's blank look (over voice
comms) at me telling him Nikki, his PC, was aboard one of the fastest
communication devices seen in the Milky Way galaxy in the past 300,000
years.

Universal Currency is another one, even if taking a few more attempts
than expected to mallet flat.  Part of it has been people like Jordan
Weisman (Shadowrun), Mike Pondsmith (Cyberpunk 2020/203X/RED/etc),
Hilmar Petursson (EVE Online), to name a few, opting for a universal
currency in their works (nuyen, eurobucks and InterStellar Kredits,
respectively).

I can't blame Hilmar et al as much - I've tried designing a
multiple-ingame-currency setup that addresses most of the known MMO
problems (I nicked liberally from GURPS Cyberworld) for a proposed MMO,
and the effort was significantly nontrivial.

Having a big pile of Imperial credits and said pile being sod-all use in
the Terran Confederation has helped drive the point home, though.

The sheer amount of _damage_ the PCs have done to their own ship has had
me in tears, laughing.  Especially now I've started applying the
"sustained damage" rules (MGT2 core, p 158 or so), wherein Das Boot cops
a severity 1 critical hit each time it loses 10% of its starting hull
points - I reroll the system affected each time, as it would seem to
default to hull hits otherwise.

Otherwise, second-order effects would kick in, with a severity X hull
crit doing XD6 of under-armour damage - for a 200 dton standard-frame
ship, the threshold is 8 points of damage.  A severity 2 hull critical
hit, from scratch, has a decent chance of doing 8+ points of damage,
which trips a critical hit, so a sev 3 hull critical has an even better
chance.... - it's not too difficult for a luckless 200 dton ship to cop
20D6 points of damage. That has an approximately 10% chance of doing 80+
points of damage outright, neglecting the initial hit - as the late,
great Terry Pratchett would put it, that would be "an embuggerance".

Besides, it's more fun to make them sweat.

I have yet to fully introduce the effects lack of faster-than-travel
comms has had on banking.  That should be interesting.

Everyone has been broadly happy with the rate I've been bringing rules
in - each group has to find their own balance, and my mob seem to be
happy with the balance I've found.

Things they've had to worry about:

- Temporary legal inability to lift due to lack of non-incapacitated
master's ticket holder while facing a cargo time limit.

- Nusku Highport "forgetting" to pressurise the berth after Curly, the
new pilot, bounced Das Boot off the framework on the way in.

- Aforementioned currency issues.

- Bank drafts, letters of credit, and the differences between them.

- Disabling the ship's armour.  (Nikki ended up stripping the entire
original, compromised, armour shell and is in the process of replacing it)

- El Capitane taking the helm during skimming (after Curly leeroyed into
the Deeps, imposing a -2 turbulence mod), despite having a net Pilot
(spacecraft) mod of 0.

Alex

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