http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/07/07/what.is.wikileaks/index.html?hpt=C1
Besides the rather interesting element of this story, go all the way down & read about the founder, Julian. He sounds like a Roller through & through.
I think its just as scary that my first thought was the same thing. But yeah, the highly mobile residence, the carrying belongings… sounds a lot like the standard Roller in our Troop, and apparently in others too.
I've been trying to find this post for the last two days. Home-diggety was on a 20/20 or or one of those late night news journals. There wasn't much in the way of new information, but half the world seems to be trying to sue him, including his native Australia. It was especially interesting to see him interviewed because I got to try an gauge what kind of person he was. He seemed pretty on the level. He didn't come off as a fanatic or have a chip on his shoulder.
All in all he seemed pretty down to earth, which was kind of scary.
It sounds very unlike the standard high roller over here. xD
It seems like we're all rich sometimes, but even the poorer characters have homes.
Weird. Everybody out here is constantly on the move, but that's to be expected when the elder characters are all being hunted by by a monstrous organization.
I take it you guys don't let work follow you home?
Well most characters won't make enemies just by going on games and completing their objectives. Of course, they can certainly make enemies if they make the wrong (or right) choices, but it's not a requirement. Most characters have their own side-story going on that's largely separate from individual games which we deal with during pre-games usually (and rarely side games).
That being said, games can certainly affect a character's out of game life, and frequently do. One time we were protecting a little girl and needed someone to adopt her so our characters decided to call up the GM's character (since he was maternal and had US citizenship) and he ended up adopting a little girl who had something to do with Cthulu mythos. xD
I went to a talk where Julian Assange himself was supposed to be speaking (at The Next HOPE in NYC this summer). Not overly surprisingly he was unable to speak because the place was crawling with feds in no time. From what I hear they want to ask him a lot of hard questions. So the talk was given by one of Julian's second in command. And the first thing he said when he got up on stage is "You have no reason to arrest me because I do not know where Julian is." Julian had gone into hiding and for his safety no one at the conference knew where. I bet he has safe houses and that sort of thing. He is being hunted.
So yea you are right. He is a real life high-roller. He risks a lot for a large result. Though in this case it's not for him it's for the world.
-Arthur
A critical difference with Assange is that he's all about exposing the secrets of the powerful to the world. It should come as no surprise that the powerful would fight back. For the most part, the NC/LA Rollers try to keep a low profile and avoid messing with those types.
As I understand it, getting enemies is almost inevitable. Granted, if you play your Games really well, you won't get the Enemies, but taking our recent venture to one of the Spider-Alien planets as an example, if you miss even one enemy, it can be enough to set an organization on you. Ed actually spent about 5 minutes thinking things through, before he decided that we weren't getting Enemies there.
And, oh man believe me I am aware of the fact that in game things can badly affect downtime. The entire Jane incident was entirely my fault. My first character made quite a few bad decisions involving the Mythos. He not only picked up a beautiful (and completely insane) mythos caster (is there any other type?), but also awoke a mummy that ended up creating a cult to one of the Elder Gods… yeah. Not my brightest moment, that.
Yeah, at least I can proudly say that when I mess up, I do it well. Sadly, that was before Journals and Downtimes, so the details are lost, but basically I was playing a politician style character, who went to Catheway on his second game. He rolled poorly on determining if Jane was lying or not, and he thought she was being held prisoner. Things spiraled down from there. I think i said it somewhere else, but I tend to avoid Mythos now, since I got so badly burned for just dabbling in it.
House Games has an incredible learning curve. Hell, it's more like a wall. That's been greased. With spikes at the bottom.
A poorly created character is unlikely to survive. A poorly played character simply will not.
Of our entire group there are only two characters that are first-run and still alive. One of them has managed to never be a priority target and run very fast when he needs to (Running is actually his Athletics specialty).
The other… Well, the other is heavily armed, has an ungodly Soak, and damn lucky. And even with all of that he has ended a game a hair's-breadth from being dead more times than I'd like to remember.
The point is, it's rough enough out there when you don't make serious mistakes. When you make a major one, like hooking up with a cultist or seeking out PISCES for helpful understanding, well, it drastically limits your PC's chances.
PISCES doesn't exist over here, or if it does I guess it just never come up. I'm not sure if that makes things any easier for us, but truth be told we very rarely experience a character death. Of the last 48 games or so, only two characters have ever died. That's especially amazing considering we we running with a short-fused, deranged, explosive obsessed, split personalitied, genius thrill seeker for a while. D:
I have no clue how we have had so few deaths. NC games used to be ridiculous. Devin is my first character to make it to seasoned status and I've been playing since I was 15, also I was the primary gm in the area too so most of my characters would start out with 40 or 50 xp. Even so they were almost always brutally murdered. I remember one game that had 10 players in it. Only two made it out alive. There was quite some time where almost every game had a player death.
We've just been lucky. I know for a fact Devin has made it out of one game incapacitated and 4 or 5 games mauled. I mean damn, his head was bitten by a werewolf for fucks sake.
Yeah, we have a few characters that have been to the brink of death more than once. Unfortunately, we just lost our most suicidal Seasoned character. I can't remember how many times that Quan Chi' finished a Game unconscious, but it seemed to happen more often than not. I can't claim to be much better, Jimmy has been end-capped twice in twenty something Games, but Simon was dropped thrice and in less than five Games.
I just can't get over that your characters have homes. That just boggles the mind…
Just ran across this, and thought it might be useful to someone.
http://ammo.ar15.com/project/Handgun_Ammo_FAQnRules/ExoticHandgunAmmo.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H0dYEjR-jA
This guy's got some sort of mastery or something.
Holy hell! I was thinking he was just bragging until he actually did something. So much for rate of fire, that guy could empty that thing in less than a second.
I actually saw a more recent video of this guy a couple years ago where he was firing a five shot revolver and reloading. He emptied the gun and reloaded it two or three times in about a second.
If I recall correctly, he wasn't using speedloaders.
http://plus.maths.org/content/richard-elwes
The math behind Yog-Sothoth.
