Let's draft an RP based on how many people in this forum like the same thing

I was gonna just make this topic to ask if there were any other Bionicle lovers around that would want a Bionicle RP, buuut I think I know the answer to that. :P

Anyone wanna join me in posting our interests and seeing if a significant number of others share them?

Well, yes. Yes? (There's also BZP, I suppose. Tumblr, even. But I'm in no hurry to look afield.)

So, things.

• Aliens, many nonhumanoid, in a fantasy setting (cough cough).
  
• Fantasy races in a posthuman setting, not necessarily Shadowrun - maybe more Eclipse Phase. Drones as wildlife.
  
• Anything about nature, red in tooth and claw, as a proper dynamical system. Online, reactive; sometimes cyclic, sometimes out of control.

Also, if anyone else remembers the backwards timeline RP:

• time travel / many-worlds + superpowers in social context + gods of ambiguously divine nature
  

I'd have to amend my contribution to 'god(s) as conflation of social group's collective will with nature more broadly'. Combine that with a superpower-based economy and sensible (world-jumping) time travel, and we'll have a whole reconstruction of superhero comics...

I'm good with anything fantasy/scifi

Fantasy/sci fi is always good for me, too.

And I almost forgot about that backwards RP! But I'd still be up for it :D Especially if superpowers were involved. I've been thinking of a cast of superpower characters recently, too, and a couple of them are time themed. One's a spoon.

im always down for sci-fi/fantasy

Am I too late to crash this party?

Hell no, get in here.

Sweet!

... I have nothing to add!

FANTASY IT IS

Anybody got any cool ideas? :P

You know what is bad is I had a roleplay idea a while back and was like maaaaan this would be so coooool.

Now I am drawing a complete blank on what it was. So there is that.


On another note I had this stroke of inspiration from this video I saw on Youtube, which I can post later. The basic idea, inspiration I had, was seeing a machine having dreams, like it was reliving a life it had lived. So you see this robot, but it is seeing cherry blossoms in Feudal Japan, turning to see a terrible Shogun approaching him for battle. And so over and over you see this robot having these dreams, and it hit me.

Souls are reincarnated into machines in a distant future when humans are now extinct, and artificial intelligence took over. They eventually become so human like, or so alive and less machine, they begin to attain souls. In this case, the metaphysical sense of the word of soul. Why reincarnated souls? Perhaps it is a machine designed to pull souls from where ever they go after death, and place them into the vessel of a machine. Why?

Perhaps the machines, in even their superiority, feel sadness for their human creators going extinct, and want to kind of keep them going. So fantasy meets sci fi, seeing as a soul ripping technology is technobabble there.

I just picture a robot getting a bad soul. Think something like the soul of Jack the Ripper reincarnated. Or Josef Mengele, the Nazi scientist called the "Angel of Death."

Just someone truly terrible, and the chaos they bring about being brought back after so long. Then a group of machines rising against it, each holding the soul of someone that once lived. but then it asks the question, are they really being imparted with souls? Or are these just simulations being ran, to make them more "human", something started before humans died out, and now that no humans are left, the system is still running. Did humans ever exist? Has machines always been the real life in the universe, organic life a myth of sorts.

I dunno, I am not explaining myself well, its easier to explain it to myself in my head. :P

EDIT: Here is the vid i was talking about, just liked the idea it kind of gave.



Even though it is basically just an over glorified advertisement for some skins for League of Legends, the animation and the feeling i get from it personally is top notch.

My bias is that 'soul' is a catch-all term for complex physiological processes acting on complex underlying state, acted on by complex environmental factors. These aren't easily preserved, let alone transferred between things.

(I haven't seen Pillars of Eternity's treatment yet. Have more been looking forwards to Tides of Numenera spoilers, on the posthuman front, lately.)

I know technobabble can handwave anything. I just have an aversion to simplicity in this particular regard. Cyberninja robots among the cherry blossoms are indeed pretty cool. Robots may as well be especially prone to mixing up VR and RL.

So, sociopathic robots in a position to do lots of damage are a classic subject. As are rag-tag groups of individuals with some mysterious connection derived from the ancients. Prime game for subversion, as you've suggested for the latter.

I dunno. I think your explanation's coherent.

It's good animation work. The symbiosis between that and merchandising is another matter. The gender dimorphism is pretty rote, but I guess that's the corner they're painted into.

Edit: Incidentally, I've tried starting the reverse timeline RP, over in Sci-Fi. I really don't know what counts as a good hook for these things.

Yeah, when dealing with the word soul, as I said, it turns it into a fantasy route simply because it is not something easily understood or observed.

My personal explanation is souls are "something", a kind of energy of sorts, and after death, it moves into a kind of alternate dimension. With the right technology, one can pull a soul from that dimension.

Transformers, not that Michael Bay shit either, is the perfect example. All Cybertronians hold a spark, and that spark is pulled from the Matrix/Allspark. It exists in an alternate dimension, and a computer called Vector Sigma is able to pull a spark from that dimension, and place it into a metal husk to create a Cybertronian.

Ironically, I totally forgot Transformers did something similar to what I was talking about. Just minus the past lives thing.

EDIT: With a reverse timeline kind of roleplay, I do suggest a read of All You Zombies by Robert A. Heinlein. A short story, so quick read, but an example of a story starting at the end of a cycle while also starting at the beginning, and you watch the ending and beginning come back together to fill out the entire story, and then going "forward" until it is all explained. And has nothing to do with zombies either, btw.

Yes, it's not easy. That's precisely why we use science. In layers upon layers - consider biochemistry, development & anatomy, ecology of mind, ecology of society. Each filled with technical detail, moreso at the low-level hardware and firmware which are presently (modestly) better understood.

Any 'comprehensive' picture than can be conveyed in a lifetime necessarily takes for granted some or all details. Computer users likewise arrive at various rational compromises in their depth of understanding, for instance, regarding the nature (and existence) of ICs and northbridges and drivers and OSes.

The existence of spontaneous transfer of state information after death to alternate hardware (in a suspended or antero-amnesiac state?) in an unobservable dimension is unfalsifiable. It probably does violate thermodynamics somehow, but you can throw that out, if you wish.

Spoiler:

This story goes in order of successive alternate perspectives being revealed. Moreover, it goes in locally forwards-chronological order (with some double-covering; triple-, counting the backstory dump) with respect to the protagonist. 'Tis fun to talk about, though, thanks for the lead.

On the other half, my science on it honestly, would be it is explained as some soul tech used on humans to get their attention before extinction took place, but in reality it is just simulations of individuals, memories, etc, not real souls.

Although, Steven Hawking did say information does indeed disappear and ceases to exist within an event horizon, thus breaking the laws of physics itself. That would mean the opposite is also possible, information from an impossible source brought here. Although that gets into theoretical science at that point. And one has to argue what "information" means, when I am fairly sure he means matter and energy disappearing, quantum states, all that rot. Why I would probably not get delve into hard science and theoretical quantum physics, you get into mumbo jumbo the regular person wouldn't understand, and take a loooong time of research unless you were already studying that.


Yeah, it does sadly go in chronological order, if it was done the other way no one would know what the hell is going on.

I guess the issue is the human brain works chronologically, we have problems seeing things backwards, anachronism, to see effects first, then causes. Why you can get more complicated time travel films such as Steins;gate or Primer, and first little run through are confused as hell, maybe, unless you are fairly deductive, but you figure it out eventually. Because, even in time travel fiction, ignoring the bad ones, are still chronological. This guy goes in the past, to the future, does this, does that, and while to the outside observer makes no sense, in that individuals personal timeline/worldline, it is still in chronological order. Why most paradoxes cannot realistically exist if time travel were really possible, most can be explained away with closed timelike curves.

But when you get into complete reverse timelines, you touch a vein that I haven't personally seen really delved into. You basically throat punch the brain and tell it to stop deducing the way it is designed to do so. I figure that is why there is not a lot of fiction on it, and why a roleplay on it will be difficult, to say the least.

It might be easier to take it in babysteps. Start with anachronisms instead of straight up reverse time arrows. That is, effects, then causes. Effects in the roleplay proceed the causes, screwing with causality. And moving forward into more complicated steps, whatever those may be. Reminds me of that roleplaying game like D&D, Continuum. Time agents trying to remove criminals that are seeking to cause paradoxes to erase unfavorable conditions as well as the agents of Continuum. Think it was like agents of Continuum believe the current timeline is the status quo of the universe, no tampering. Whereas the others, forget their names, seek to remake the world in their image. Part of the gameplay, is playing with causality like this, to create conditions to erase individuals. And you, as an agent, may find yourself being erased, and again, have to play with causality to save yourself, and find out where in your own timeline, you are being attacked from. Interesting ideas there, simplified for the game, but still interesting.

Haven't got time to write up a full careful reply. Lemme jot something down.

In-universe, I have no objection to magical thought. I suppose it is the idea of one kind of magical thought being invalid because some other kind thereof is, instead, that disappoints me.

You're thinking of a white hole. For something to come out of a white hole, does it have to fall into a black hole first? Can its provenance (incl' whether it came from a star or a human brain or a fruitfly's ganglion) ever be determined? Argh.

Information can always be encoded as bits; the absence of information is bits drawn from a uniformly random distribution. In practice, since we can only examine a finite portion of a given stream, 'tis when the sampled bits probably came from such a distribution... ahem. I'd say only some of theoretical physics and/or learning theory is mumbo jumbo, but yeah, it's nontrivial to distinguish.

something paradoxes something something many worlds

Effects before causes, sure, that's an accessible starting point. People ask 'why' often enough. I remain curious whether it's viable for every effect to predate the cause (in our writerly frame of reference). There is (possibly? hopefully?) the complication that the notion of 'cause and effect' is not well-defined physically, and purely a matter of subconscious inference by our brain. Also, that's some solid fluff for a tabletop RPG I've never heard of, cool.

I more look at it as wormholes to another universe, multiple worlds, that sorta jazz. To the inhabitants of the universe, the information is coming from nowhere, an afterlife, in the big picture, its information from a parallel universe. And not souls from an alternate universe, as much as information to piece together simulations that would then be encoded into a machine. To hold on to the "legacy" of humans, programmed in before humans went extinct. Makes the most sense probably.


Continuum is a fairly interesting idea. They gave a simple example if you were a time traveler, to explain causality, and how closed timelike curves are to be created so paradoxes do not form.

You are a time traveler, just chilling at home. You reach underneath your chair, and there is a cold beer waiting for you. Now, that is a predestination paradox. By doing this your character, in RPG, begins to fade away, so the universe can try and "make sense" of these events, because causality is reacting backwards now. Obviously, to finish the timelike curve, an hour later, you take a cold beer out of the fridge, travel back in time just before you sit in that chair, put the beer under, then go back to your present. Doing so causes any temporal damage to your character to disappear, and no paradoxes. Even though the original beer came from nowhere, you finished the circuit.

Now imagine a mission/quest where another time traveler decided to assassinate you, and they did it, somewhere, in your timeline. And you have to try and figure it out and fix causality again. Read that game can be fairly slow as people try and figure out everything and research, etc.

But yeah, generally speaking in the universe, causality is almost a universal truth. Cause, and then effect. I believe the only time causality goes on its head, is within the quantum realm, and again, down into quantum physics. But, one also has to remember with most time travel fiction, every action taken in the past does not yield a new future, it is only major actions. One could assume you wouldn't need every effect to predate the cause of this and that.

I dunno its weird.

Wait, are we discussing an RP about ensuring that all unexplained events are accounted for? Cause I would be down for that. Like the first few pages a bunch of crazy weird stuff happens and then for the rest of the RP we scramble around to try and justify it by making it happen with time travel shenanigans. :P