Modern World STGOD Concept

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

Two things people should know about uranium-233:

1. Production of uranium-233 from thorium also produces uranium-232, which is a very strong gamma emitter. Expect lots of radiation-related deaths if people are crazy enough to work with it without first investing in remote manipulation technology.
2. In the few instances where U-233 was used as the fissile material in a weapon, yields were significantly lower than anticipated. Also expect lots of fizzles if someone's actually crazy enough to try.

Again, prohibitively expensive and difficult as all hell. We're not in science class, but it's still fascinating stuff nonetheless. As far as this game goes, slap on an Non-Proliferation Treaty equivalent to formalize things and have the mods dick around with anyone who tries to get wise, and we should be set.

[RogueIce]

Or another idea even:

How about you can experiment and try to make nuclear weapons all you want, pour however many billions you want into the project, commit your nation's greatest scientific minds to the problem for however long you want. It's just, because of [Insert Reason Here] nobody ever manages to produce a viable weapon and, at best, they wasted the money and resources. At worst, if they're a general asshole, they Chernobyl themselves but luckily nobody else because wasn't that a strangely lucky series of events that prevented a greater disaster. But you'd have to be a pretty big asshole for that one to happen. Nuclear power can otherwise happen just as we expect it to in the Real World circa-2000, and scientists the world over scratch their heads at this odd conundrum.

Obviously it's all up the player-base and what we, as a majority, want to happen. Just tossing out ideas for further consideration.

EDIT: And FYI I'll be gone most of the weekend most likely, so if anyone has any specific responses to this idea I won't see them until Monday, in all probability.

[Agent Sorchus]

Been real busy, and lacking energy at the same time. Dissenting Opinion though: I do think nukes should exist. Not common or easy to achieve stockpiles of, but they should exist. A) they are easy to use in story telling. Yes you can call it lazy, but is it a bad thing to write what you know/understand? When I mean they are easy to use I mean only from a storytelling standpoint. Example of easy of use is the potential of a story about a terrorist group trying to get their hands on one. B) Chemical and Biological. Yeah banning nukes and not at least mentioning these is just asking for them to be used (like shep did.) Also they are harder to write stories around, in no small part cause we have no good societal understanding of them and their use. Unlike Nukes that have shaped fiction for the last half century.

C) And what I would think a selfish reason; I want them cause I kinda built a nation around the idea that ownership of a handful of nukes has allowed a dictatorship to stave off revolution, and external coup. But honestly militarily what ever large states we have (without the potential for some sort of superweapons) can easily enough set out to conquer the globe and mostly not have to worry about taking any sort of comeuppance from anything short of half the player base mobilizing to stop them. Superweapons in my mind put some limits on that if they are uncommon enough their very presence doesn't utterly stop anything from happening.

D) I really just want to do some geoscaping using a nuke (even if I only have 4) to redirect a river. Cause I'll think of a fun reason to do so someday soon.

BUT: at the moment RL is kicking the shit out of me. No clue when or if it will stop. I will try and stay caught up with this for the moment though.

Look, let's reshape this question altogether because in the eventuality we actually want to nuke each other, the game will be as good as "ended".
...
So is there a point to having nukes at all? I leave it to a vote.

Samething to the first idiot who goes on a world domination trip. It will end the game just as effectively as nukes will. Do we ban militarism cause idiots can ruin everyones fun, or do we learn to deal with them smartly?

[Agent Sorchus]

You wanted to put a dictatorship there, right? A dictatorship sandwiched between a Communist state and a liberal democracy, and likely to have been one of the battlegrounds of this world's World War II-analogue conflict since fascist Klavostan and Cascadia had been belligerents and fighting each other. That means either you line your ideas for its past up with us, or we have to let you make what you want even if it blatantly contradicts what we have in mind for our history. And even if you dislike backstory, do you think it's fair that you get to dictate to your neighbors what could be critical parts of their history? I mean, if you decide "I was neutral in WWII", you're effectively forcing us to write our plans for that history around your demand.

I didn't think that A) you read the concept for my nation well enough and B) I probably didn't describe my proposal well enough. Yes I wanted to place three nations in between yours and klavo's, all of which at one point were part of a military dictatorship that was since started falling apart. In the past they would have been a decently strong buffer state that wouldn't be a push over in a fight.

If you had responded earlier I don't think we would've had a disagreement between your backstory and fitting my nation's there. You still haven't told me what aspect of your backstory you think is irreconcilable with having a failing dictatorship there. Just that you think that having a dictatorship between a communist and a republic is not smart cause ?reasons? Yet Yugoslavia was essentially the same thing, a dictatorship sandwiched between the USSR and western Europe.

Small nations forming any sort of a 'buffer' in between Cascadia and Komradistan are likely to end up rather Belgium and Netherlands-like, in the sense that get in the way of grand-scale army maneuvers, and end up becoming battlefields whether they want to or not.

And yet you proposed having a buffer state. Also I wouldn't call what would have been a decent sized dictatorship a small nation.

Sides whether you like it or not Belgium and the Netherlands still exist.

Sorchus, do you have any design concepts for where some of your nations exist? The one nation you proposed that would be wealthy from controlling a vital river's mouth would work well on the southwest continent I'd put in, although it could work fairly well east of Kagaria and UCOSR as well if you prefer.

I actually have given up with that concept state, since it was utterly boring.

I would like to request part of the equatorial South American peninsula for three nations with a total area about that of the Plains Republic. Also the Patron Democracy of ??? on what looks like the Korean peninsula with only a small area. (Though that one could be shifted to the west.) Shapes don't matter too much.

[Jub]

Been real busy, and lacking energy at the same time. Dissenting Opinion though: I do think nukes should exist. Not common or easy to achieve stockpiles of, but they should exist. A) they are easy to use in story telling. Yes you can call it lazy, but is it a bad thing to write what you know/understand? When I mean they are easy to use I mean only from a storytelling standpoint. Example of easy of use is the potential of a story about a terrorist group trying to get their hands on one. B) Chemical and Biological. Yeah banning nukes and not at least mentioning these is just asking for them to be used (like shep did.) Also they are harder to write stories around, in no small part cause we have no good societal understanding of them and their use. Unlike Nukes that have shaped fiction for the last half century.

C) And what I would think a selfish reason; I want them cause I kinda built a nation around the idea that ownership of a handful of nukes has allowed a dictatorship to stave off revolution, and external coup. But honestly militarily what ever large states we have (without the potential for some sort of superweapons) can easily enough set out to conquer the globe and mostly not have to worry about taking any sort of comeuppance from anything short of half the player base mobilizing to stop them. Superweapons in my mind put some limits on that if they are uncommon enough their very presence doesn't utterly stop anything from happening.

D) I really just want to do some geoscaping using a nuke (even if I only have 4) to redirect a river. Cause I'll think of a fun reason to do so someday soon.

I actually agree with all of this so I could go either way on WMDs. Really if you get to a place where they need to be banned, something is going wrong anyway. Plus not having them would make it much harder to base current militaries off of modern ones, I mean think of how different the post WWII world would look without nukes keeping the cold war cold?

[Siege]

I feel vaguely put-down by that last bit.

It isn't meant to put you down, but I can see how it might come across that way.

Let me elaborate. If we decide that nukes are out then that's a decision made purely for OOC reasons, because we've decided that nuclear weapons and the dynamic they tend to bring are undesirable. To then write about scientists being baffled that their plutonium chain reaction doesn't work to me is a kind of grating meta commentary on the rules we've collectively decided to implement. It's an IC critique of an OOC decision, which is bad form. "Man this ought to be working. "How strange that it isn't working." "Aren't you all also convinced that this thing should be working?"

I would prefer we didn't go down that way.

I'll say though that I like RogueIce's idea of just making up an element. Then as far as I'm concerned you can have all the stories about trying to do funny stuff with it (and failing to build an obscenely powerful bomb) you want. Otherwise if you want a big bomb you can go shove a MOAB out of your military transport.

[Beowulf]

Or of course, we could have alien space bats blow up heads. "I had this brilliant idea on how to make a more powerful bomb." *boom*

[Steve]

If you had responded earlier I don't think we would've had a disagreement between your backstory and fitting my nation's there. You still haven't told me what aspect of your backstory you think is irreconcilable with having a failing dictatorship there. Just that you think that having a dictatorship between a communist and a republic is not smart cause ?reasons? Yet Yugoslavia was essentially the same thing, a dictatorship sandwiched between the USSR and western Europe.

What I was saying is that if you insist on having one or more of your PCs between us, we're going to insist you align those nations' histories and such with what we have, including being the battlefield of our land war in the WWII analogue.

And yet you proposed having a buffer state.

A buffer state created for the purpose of our mutual history, drawn up by our agreement, which is different from a PC made by someone else.

Given all the open room, why do you want to be our neighbor again? Is there a storyline purpose you have in mind?

[Simon_Jester]

Siege:

I'm sorry; to me, that 'isn't that funny' scene with the scientists is not IC commentary on OOC actions. It's how actual physicists would behave- they'd predict something, find that it isn't true, and start theorizing about why.

This is something I like about science and like to roleplay about it: that it is not an incurious or passively accepting thing, when it encounters an anomaly that is not easily explained. If I didn't have a desire to write scientist-stories, I would completely ignore the whole issue. As it stands I will probably write various other scientist-stories as well or instead.

But it bothers me that when I talk about what is to me an interesting science story which could be set in the present day: "there appears to be a hole in our understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics." You interpret it as me wanting to go "hyuk hyuk, didn't we make a silly choice by saying 'no nukes?' " As though I were engaged in some kind of OOC politicking by wanting to do that, or as though I'm trying to stand smugly outside the game rules.

It feels like people are so worried about the nuclear issue that they're dropping the assumption that others are acting (will act) in good faith. And frankly, we need that more than anything else. The game is going to fall apart very quickly if we get adversarial and suspicious of each others' motives in desiring to tell certain kinds of stories.

If we had enough mutual trust, all the nuclear arsenals in the world would not make it impossible for us to have fun. If we lack mutual trust, we could be playing nations equipped with nothing more dangerous than rocks and sticks, and it would become impossible for us to have fun.

Now, I understand that this issue may be so sensitive that we have to agree not to extend mutual trust over it, because other people have bad memories about it. And I understand your concern that IC actions which directly touch on OOC decisions might act to undermine the game. But I hope this makes the source of my discontent easier to understand- it's the trust issue.
_________________________________________

Sorchus:
Pursuant to your known distaste for private side-chats setting the tone of a public game, I have decided that your objection to my posts regarding nuclear weapons should be brought out into the open. I think this is better for both of us than having me simply accept that I will be called out in private for doing things that, in my opinion, I have not done.

I have nothing to hide in this matter, and will willingly abide by any mod decision on the issue for the sake of making the game work, whether I agree with that decision or not.

However, because I recognize that you may not want your comment made public, I am going to give you a reasonable span of time to notice this before I post your PM and my response. I can't imagine why it would bother you to have that PM made public, but I respect your right to keep it private if you choose.

If you prefer, I will not post the PM-response combination.

However, if you prefer that this comment of yours not be made public, then please think twice in the future before accusing me of nasty habits. I do try to play fair and act honorably on this forum and in STGOD games. I hope I've got a decent reputation so far. If you think I am doing something wrong, I do not have a problem with you telling everyone about it, rather than just telling selected persons (me possibly included) in private.

I've learned my lesson; openness is good. Let's be open.

[madd0ct0r]

I don't really care either way, but seeing as my opening story is drive by is a recent Chernoybly type event I would like people to settle it.

[Simon_Jester]

I think we'll have nuclear reactors no matter what. And come to think of it, a meltdown in a thorium reactor might be particularly nasty if it results in U-232 being released into the environment, since U-232 is apparently more dangerously radioactive than most other things you find in nuclear fuel.

[Steve]

There will be nuclear power. Nuclear weapons are the only issue at large, and I honestly believe we shouldn't have any.

[Thanas]

Note: I am currently pretty sick so forgive me if thes lacks coherence.

If we had enough mutual trust, all the nuclear arsenals in the world would not make it impossible for us to have fun. If we lack mutual trust, we could be playing nations equipped with nothing more dangerous than rocks and sticks, and it would become impossible for us to have fun.

That seems to be extreme, just because I am not able to fly a jet does not mean I should not drive a car.

Now, I understand that this issue may be so sensitive that we have to agree not to extend mutual trust over it, because other people have bad memories about it. And I understand your concern that IC actions which directly touch on OOC decisions might act to undermine the game. But I hope this makes the source of my discontent easier to understand- it's the trust issue.

See, this is where I am coming from. My only real experience has been SDNW3. In that experience, people rarely read story posts in detail. Heck, Bearne and I had invasion maneuvers going on for over a year and wrote multiple posts about that both in story and budget threads. Yet a lot of people, including the player playing Britain, were apparently not able to pick up on that or ask themselves why Germany and France would be having 400k strong invasion maneuvers right near Calais and the Normandy costs. Malice probably wasn't a factor in it, but it still fell through the cracks. The result was an unfortunate escalation. I have no doubt that if I or anybody else were to start a nuclear program in secret then the same problems would be happening. So why open that Pandora's box over something that is completely unnecessary?

If people are not smart enough to pick up on huge giant armies massing near the borders, then why would they even be picking up on materials being shipped somewhere etc? Don't get me wrong, I loved SDNW3 and was glad that I was able to finish the character arcs the way I wanted, but why take the chance here, especially with something as heavy as nuclear weapons?

EDIT: BTW; if you or anybody else who is a physicist feels that the physics do not make perfect sense, then how do you think I feel as a historian about most of the histories produced here? Everybody has to swallow some bit of professional pride in this, I would ask you to do the same.Part of the sternghts of SDNW has always been a bit of silliness, so why not take the plunge?

[Simon_Jester]

Note: I am currently pretty sick so forgive me if thes lacks coherence.

If we had enough mutual trust, all the nuclear arsenals in the world would not make it impossible for us to have fun. If we lack mutual trust, we could be playing nations equipped with nothing more dangerous than rocks and sticks, and it would become impossible for us to have fun.

That seems to be extreme, just because I am not able to fly a jet does not mean I should not drive a car.

What I mean is, with sufficient mutual trust and good faith, it would be possible for us to all be playing nuclear-armed powers and still enjoy ourselves. Personally I think we're actually at that level, but I get that a lot of people disagree with me, so I'm not going to insist.

On the other hand, if we're all suspicious and determined to screw with each other, and constantly expecting screwing-over, then the game will be miserable and unpleasant even if we play at much more primitive technical levels.

I believe that mutual trust and willingness to have fun together is the sine qua non of STGODs- and role playing games in general.

See, this is where I am coming from. My only real experience has been SDNW3. In that experience, people rarely read story posts in detail. Heck, Bearne and I had invasion maneuvers going on for over a year and wrote multiple posts about that both in story and budget threads. Yet a lot of people, including the player playing Britain, were apparently not able to pick up on that or ask themselves why Germany and France would be having 400k strong invasion maneuvers right near Calais and the Normandy costs. Malice probably wasn't a factor in it, but it still fell through the cracks. The result was an unfortunate escalation. I have no doubt that if I or anybody else were to start a nuclear program in secret then the same problems would be happening. So why open that Pandora's box over something that is completely unnecessary?

Well, I damn sure reacted to comparable events occurring near my borders in SDNW4, but yeah, I get it.

Again, if you don't think nuclear weapons should be part of the game, I respect that. Because of the great number of people who agree with you, I'm totally ready and content to concede the issue and have an absolute ban on nuclear weapons as in "physically impossible," OR a treaty ban that is OOC enforced rather than just being an IC thing.

If people are not smart enough to pick up on huge giant armies massing near the borders, then why would they even be picking up on materials being shipped somewhere etc? Don't get me wrong, I loved SDNW3 and was glad that I was able to finish the character arcs the way I wanted, but why take the chance here, especially with something as heavy as nuclear weapons?

EDIT: BTW; if you or anybody else who is a physicist feels that the physics do not make perfect sense, then how do you think I feel as a historian about most of the histories produced here? Everybody has to swallow some bit of professional pride in this, I would ask you to do the same.Part of the sternghts of SDNW has always been a bit of silliness, so why not take the plunge?

I have no complaints about the physics- my point is simply that real physicists would investigate the anomalous behavior of fissile materials at or near the critical mass. What they would find, if anything, I do not presume to know.

[Siege]

It's how actual physicists would behave- they'd predict something, find that it isn't true, and start theorizing about why.

And the only reason it isn't true is because we've decided it isn't. Writing about how baffled scientists are by finding out means they're baffled by the framework imposed on the game by its players, so it's automatically a meta commentary whether you want it to be or not. I dislike that in my game and therefore stand by my opinion.

[Thanas]

I have no complaints about the physics- my point is simply that real physicists would investigate the anomalous behavior of fissile materials at or near the critical mass. What they would find, if anything, I do not presume to know.

And real geographers would argue the world to be impossible and only explainable by divine intervention.
Real historians would argue that the history of most nations makes little sense.
Real economists would argue that without a glut of third world nations the global economy would not work.
Point is, I am tired of arguing about what real people would do. Especially about an issue that should be much less important than those three realism issues I outlined above.

Let it go.

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

And real geographers would argue the world to be impossible and only explainable by divine intervention.
Real historians would argue that the history of most nations makes little sense.
Real economists would argue that without a glut of third world nations the global economy would not work.

I'll give the geography point to you, as I lack the expertise needed to contest that. Regarding the global economy issue, we're still holding out on additional PCs, so we can't put in NPCs to provide that glut of third-world nations... yet.

However, I for one am actually interested in a reasonably detailed explanation as to why the histories presented here make little sense, if only for my own personal edification. At least drop me a PM if somehow you don't feel comfortable posting it out here in the open.

[madd0ct0r]

just came across this blog dedicated to nation building. some good stuff
http://velartrill.tumblr.com/post/81342 ... nment-axes

[Steve]

Honestly I don't share this irritation with Simon's idea of scientists being confused by how things work in the world if we have blatant issues, but I think we're best served by not making a fuss about it. Simon undoubtedly had thoughts that it would providing interesting grist for his scientists in a story post or two, unsurprising given his profession and the fact he's playing a technocracy. That it comes off as IC commentary on OOC decisions is something that would be seen in how it was written and what was emphasized. Can we just leave it at the decision of "no nukes, nuclear power, and maybe a couple players have scientists discussing how this works as IC story posts", and if we think their story posts are dumb, well, that's when you write your scientists calling them idiots, in the finest tradition of SDNW and the sniping amongst PCs that drives interactions when they're kept impersonal.

And Sorchus, to be utterly frank, Klavo and I were discussing NPCs, but we've set our borders and I'm not changing mine a bit, so if you want a PC drawn out there, you can ask Klavo about redrawing his side and making his country larger to compensate, and if he says no, then that's going to be that. There's plenty of other space for your national ideas. Because I've yet to see any reason from you on why we should let you have a country between us, no recommendation of an interesting common history or anything, just "You said you were going to have an NPC, so you should have one of my PCs instead!".

Alternatively, you can shift further north and have a border between me, Jub, and Beo, in the area I delineated in brown, because I'm not sold on having to have an NPC there if a player wants that land. You'd be on my eastern border, just past the Rockies of this world.

[Steve]

Changed the north of the Omnia-Umeria continent, as requested.

Timothy, I moved Rogue a bit west to give you Fiji in about the same place, but Samoa is too small to really show, the same with Tahiti. Can you look over the map and add pixels for where they are, or just give coordinate numbers?

TRR, added the tropical islands for an NPC you requested.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm willing to cooperate. If it bothers Siege and makes me feel like I'm laughing at an OOC game decision for me to write a post on X, then as a favor to Siege I'm willing to not write such a post, even if for the life of me I don't understand what's bothering him about it.

This would be the case even had I not already endorsed Siege for mod, which would sort of impel me to listen to him for consistency's sake anyway.

So that's two separate, fully sufficient reasons to not write this hypothetical post, even though I would like to and think it is harmless. A "that's funny where did my neutrons go" post would give offense. I'll think of something else eventually.



That said, Thanas, I would appreciate it if you did not give me direct orders about what to think and talk about in this game.

[Thanas]

That said, Thanas, I would appreciate it if you did not give me direct orders about what to think and talk about in this game.

It was a request, not an order.

[Simon_Jester]

Ah. To me, that sentence and its context read as though the text was written in the imperative mood, not the subjunctive.

I get rather irritable when people start speaking to me in the imperative about the way I choose to play a game, unless I know that I have given them excellent reason to do so.

I am glad that this was a misunderstanding; I shall keep an eye out for other subjunctives that look like imperatives in the future.

[Thanas]

My apologies for the confusion.

[Siege]

Okay, with that out of the way, what else do we need to work out? I quite like how the map is shaping up, although there's still a lot of gray that needs filling.