I love that film.
Also Grand Prix.
Days of Thunder, anyone? (ducks)
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⌠thou hast spake the unspaeakable!
I actually went to Daytona for the 500⌠the year it was rained off and rescheduled. That was fun. Didnât even get a refund. The bastards.
I bet Juniorâs a NASCAR fan.
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That would be immensely disappointing!
Iâm re-watching Le Mans this eve. 'tis great.
The old man, though, heâs got more orange than home fucking depot.
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F YEAH Dayâs of Thunder!
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Might I suggest that we simplify repairs a bit?
The distinction between foreign and domestic doesnât seem to add anything to the game, just penalizes some players for a superficial selection they made at the beginning of the game.
Also the limit that some mechanics can repair some cars up to 80% made some sense when Stretch was still in the game, forcing the players to pay his exorbitant prices if they wanted to be fully repaired, but now it just means each player has to break out a calculator to figure out which mechanics can repair which damage. It just doesnât seem to add anything other than needless complication at this point.
I donât mean to bitch, just went through the process and found it slightly frustrating and am coming up with very few reasons why it should be frustrating.
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âStretchâ is still in the game; we just havenât posted his shopping post yet. Every location of Fleetwood MacChanics has a version of Stretch, and since the Citadelâs collapse knocked out the TCB link between Fleetwood and his junkyard branches, none of the other locations have any foreknowledge of who we are, let alone the fact that Fleetwood doesnât like us. So whenever we walk into another junkyard, as far as theyâre concerned weâre just ordinary customers.
And our Mechanics have, purely by blind luck, missed a couple of chances to get the Foreign Repair manual. (Seems that nobody stuck their screwdriver into Stretchâs left nostril when presented with the opportunity, for one thing.) Iâll keep trying to get it to them, but I wonât just drop it into their laps.
Mission Fiveâs ready to go up as soon as the âNew Stretchâ post goes up, so itâs probably best to wait and see what the junkyard has to offer before you do your repairs.
Iâm sorry but Iâm going to harp on this one. Another round where we are paralyzed while we are all trying to figure out how the repair system works again.
The mechanics are still trying to figure it out so getting any kind of rate from them isnât happening right now. We canât decide what upgrades we want until we know how and if we can repair. We canât start thinking about what mission we want to go on until we have our cars repaired and upgraded.
The repair system is going to cause players to quit. It needs to be simplified and it needs to stop changing from round to round.
We currently have a system where and NPC can heal all cars up to 75% for a fixed rate, then up to 100% for an certain rate per HP
We have almost all of our mechanics which can heal up to 80% on foreign cars and one mechanic who happens to be able to heal to 100% on domestic cars.
They have a fixed number of RP which they must now try to value using math that is at least complicated algebra, controlling for different variables as far as is this a repair beneath 75%? Should a mechanic charge more for a repair from 75-80% just because he can? Is there any incentive for Clank to charge anything less than a pittance below Stretchâs 75-100% rate on domestics? And why are foreign cars still being punished just for picking foreign?
The rest of us are now waiting to see how they will value these RPs in order to figure out how much we will have to shell out to repair our vehicles.
You guys have turned what should be a thoughtless and routine part of the game each round into the most complicated decision we have to make each round. A few of our mechanics have done wonders for keeping the game flowing by basically offering to repair whatever they can for whatever donation the other players see fit to give them, but our repair system shouldnât have to rely on their good will to keep it moving smoothly. The GMs owe those mechanics a huge thanks because without them many of the folks currently playing the game would have gotten frustrated and moved on.
I like the game. This is the first time I have played something like this and all in all it is a blast, but this one aspect of the game is coming close to ruining the fun for me. Donât take my word for it. Take a vote on the form for this round. I donât think anyone who is playing the game feels like the repair system adds to the game or makes it more fun in any way.
We need a repair system where an NPC can heal us completely for a fixed amount (basically an inn from a traditional RPG) and PCs can heal us by using their RPs for a certain rate. Cut out the foreign or domestic business, cut out the reapir to 75% or is it 80% business. That stuff is making it way too complicated. If you want to raise the stakes raise the fixed rate that Stretch (the inn) can heal and the mechanics can decide pretty easily if they want to up their rate accordingly. All players are on equal footing then and a repair is a repair is a repair.
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Our GM
Wait Till He Gets Going!
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Iâve just given up on ever seeing 100% again. I figure I got the Max HP increase a while back to compensate for that.
As long as Donald doesnât want to be brutal, Iâll rely on the generosity of the UAW and spend my LPs more usefully on upgrades. If he wants to be brutal, I guess Iâll just get killed.
ETA this round, although itâs still complex, you could repair up to 100% with Stretch fairly affordably (if you have a foreign car, anyway) Weâve perhaps been spoilt by dirt cheap repairs via the UAW. If Stretch gets too cheap, the mechanics wonât get many LPs, then they might get killed. Stretch has to be more expensive than them.
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You do strike me as someone who would enjoy some long hard months sweating.
Hi Everyone,
Iâve spent the last couple of days chewing over this whole repair thing, and what I keep coming back to is the fact that itâs not really worth chewing over too much.
When it comes down to it, nobodyâs getting bent over their radiator grilles too much. Foreign cars can get fixed to 100% if they have the LPs to spend. Domestic cars can fixed to 100% provided they can do the math and make the deal with the UAW promptly enough. But for the twelfth time, this is a postapocalyptic wasteland, and people should not reasonably expect to be able to maintain their vehicles at 100% condition round after round. Nobody loves having to get their car fixed, and the way we have it set up is certainly the most âshaddap and eat your veggiesâ portion of the game, and it bothers some people more than others. We have half the active players we started with. Might be part of that is due to the sheer volume of text and slow pace of this game, especially compared to the light and brisk experience that was Badass Space Dragon. Or it might be entirely the repair homework that made half the players give up in frustration. I canât tell.
I gave the repair power to an entire class of players, leaving it up to them to set prices. Since theyâre decent, collaborative people, their instinct was to make repair as painless as possible for all involved. Alongside the four or five characters that I voice, I am also the Heart and Soul of this particular Wasteland simply by virtue of GMing this enterprise, and while I am not a vengeful god, I am determined to be a postapocalyptic one. Life shouldnât be easy after an apocalypse; by definition it canât be, else it were no apocalypse.
So since I chose not to directly control pricing of repairs, I chose to control scarcity of parts for a time. And then, once a virtually unlimited source of parts had been secured, I had to make a Holy Visitation on my devout Mechanics to enforce the RP system, which works on both levels of preserving a degree of scarcity upon repairs, and being somewhat realistic in that any mechanic would be limited as to the amount of work heâd be able to perform in a given time period.
This presupposes that all players should be on an equal footing in this scenario. I hasten to emphasize that the instances where our Apocalypse seems callous and capricious and unfair to one group or another are entirely arbitrary and utterly divorced from the identities of the players themselves. When @daneel couldnât get fixed up to 100%, it wasnât because the Apocalypse (that is, I) had it in for daneel personally, and I believe he recognizes that. Our vehicle types and Classes were designed to be vaguely analogous to certain well-known RPG character classes (Iâm somewhat surprised I havenât had to mention in passing that a Scout âhas been eating all the food lately,â but Iâm glad everyoneâs playing their own, unpredictable ways), but Mechanics are Mechanics, not quite clerics and not quite healers. Bill and Clank have really run with the whole Mechanic thing, embraced it wholeheartedly even with its frustrations and limitations, and made repairs much more fun than they honestly deserve to be.
Iâm really sorry the repair process is sucking so much of the fun out of the game for you, but I canât completely rework it at this stage without completely betraying the spirit of the game as weâve played it so far. Every tweak and adjustment weâve made has been within the limits of things that (in my fevered postapocalyptic imagination anyway) are at least barely theoretically possible within the context of postapocalyptic science fiction. That is, weâre okay with wringing umpteen squintillion petajoules of energy out of human feces, since thatâs the fictional scenario the entire game world is built upon.
But Iâm constitutionally unable to reverse and contradict what weâve made exist so far. Your cars will not be invulnerable, repair cannot be âdrive-over-a-health-packâ instantaneous, and it should be very, very difficult (if not impossible) to get through the game with 100% health and a fat stack of LPs.
So I suggest a new gameplaying mindset: fix your cars as best you can without worrying overmuch about it. Boost your MaxHP and AR when opportunities present themselves, and donât be embarrassed about driving with a busted headlight or two for a couple rounds.
As much as your player-characters have come to identify themselves with these vehicles that they spend 24/7 inside, try not to do the same yourselves. The Apocalypse is out to annihilate your cars, and thus (by extension) cause at least some serious inconvenience (and possibly emotional anguish) to your player-characters.
But I (the Apocalypse) am not out to annihilate my players. I want you guys to have maximum fun. I will try to make the repair mechanism less frustrating on a data-crunching level, but repair is always gonna have to hurt a bit. So just concentrate on the fun aspects and try to minimize the amount of time worrying about repairs, even if it costs you a couple extra LPs.
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Donald, make repair as expensive as you want. Force us to drive around in half repaired cars. That isnât a problem. The multiple variables that relate to repairs are a problem though. The more difficult you make the game to play the fewer people who will play it. Make us choose how best to allocate scarce LPs that is fine. That is your job as a good GM, just donât make us break out a calculator to figure out how in the hell we are supposed to repair ourselves. The foreign vs domestic bit adds nothing to the game play other than making repairs more difficult to figure out same with the 75% repairs from one source, 80% repairs from another, and 100% for some players by one single player. If the UAW guys werenât basically giving repairs away for free and hoping we are generous enough to donate, your game would have died long ago because nobody would have been able to figure out how in the hell to repair themselves.
Each variable you have exponentially increases the choices a player has to make. I understand that you want to make us make tough choices, but the repair system as it stands doesnât do that. It doesnât make us prioritize resources, it leaves us working out the math of how in the hell we should repair our vehicles, something that should be a relatively straightforward process at the end of each round.
Please donât take this the wrong way. I am truly enjoying this game. I just see the repair system as a turd in the punch bowl. It has to be clear, simple, and relatively consistent because it is necessary for us as players to progress from round to round. If you want to make repairs more scarce then control how much Stretch charges. Hell you can even bring back repair kits and make them more expensive if you are worried that the UAW guys will undercharge. There are ways you as a GM can control the economics of the repair process other than âmake it so convoluted that players canât make intelligent choices in a timely mannerâ because that is where we are now. This most recent round proves it. Not that I begrudge the UAW guys anything but I just paid 10LP to get repaired up to what Stretch would do for 8LP. That wasnât a conscious choice, that is just where the chips landed because the repair system is a mess.
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Iâm actually surprised that weâve had a couple of easy rounds. I guess the non players will start to die off soon.
As far as repairs go, I donât mind not being 100% - and I agree, it shouldnât be expected. I actually like the idea of us limping into each round, with our numbers gradually diminishing. A good death never hurt anyone.
I did wonder why I bothered maxing out on repairs during BSD, when perhaps I could spend my money more wisely.
I just donât want to have to negotiate a rate for repairs. Iâm okay with it being expensive as long as I can make a quick decision as to what I want and pick my shopping and mission in one go. I think itâs working okay right now.
BTW am I supposed to come up with a riveting story/strategy for the Blob in the form submission, in the Round 5 thread now, or during the dice rolling action when vague reports come back and everyoneâs submissions are in?
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I think the fairly high attrition rate is to be expected. BSD suffered from the same thing. That isnât down to the specifics of this game.
And I want to reiterate to @Donald_Petersen that this is awesome fun once again. Genuinely, thank you for running this.
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~ sob ~
In the thread, first chance you get. Itâs okay if it comes in a bit late; I should have clarified that much earlier.
