10 KiB
Genius: The Transgression [RT-ish]
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Author: u/traverseda With dread but cautious optimism*
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Score: 17
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Created: 2015-09-24T16:09:28
Post:
Comments:
u/traverseda [+8] With dread but cautious optimism (4 minutes later)
Rational horror of a sort
"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," Dr. Cliver repeated. "It's a simple proverb. What does it mean?"
I knew what he was doing. I was by no means an expert on schizophrenia, but I was familiar with the symptoms. Blunted affect...disorganized speech and thinking...No one symptom by itself is evidence of schizophrenia...No one thing by itself is evidence of...
"The proverb," Dr. Cliver said. "What does it mean?"
"It means...the bird in the hand stands for your inner character," I said. "While the outer world seems larger, the inner world..." No, that wasn't entirely clear. I tried again. "It means that what you understand is more important than...what you...what you do."
I felt naked as Dr. Cliver stared at me. He looked sympathetic, but I could only imagine him shaking his head.
"Am I getting it wrong?" I asked. "I feel like I'm..."
"You're close to the mark," Dr. Cliver said. "If you were a schoolteacher instead of a psychiatrist, I'd praise you for your nonstandard reasoning abilities, like I was the teacher and you were the student. But instead I'll act like I'm the shrink and you're the patient: you're displaying evidence of a schizophrenic thinking disorder."
I was drowning. No air. Air.
"I don't want this," I said.
"If you didn't want this, you shouldn't have spent all last week trying to figure out the true nature of thought. You shouldn't have started building that thing that you think can glimpse the thoughts behind the thoughts, the syncopated concepts that piggyback on what we call consciousness." Dr. Cliver sat up. "You deduced their existence, and now you want to see them. You want to see the world of Inspiration, to see that light face-to-face."
u/MugaSofer [+7] (2 hours later)
"You're going insane by inches, Doctor Ibanez," Dr. Cliver said. "You can feel it, like a fever in your mind, like weevils eating your brain."
This is the peers' lesson to their own: mad science is mad, and believing oneself sane is the deepest form of madness.
u/MugaSofer [+7] (2 hours later)
Ooh, I love this game. The rationalist-horror installment of the nWoD.
u/None [+3] (3 hours later)
[deleted]
u/traverseda [+7] With dread but cautious optimism (3 hours later)
It's a setting for a pen and paper RPG. A lot of those pages are going to be descriptions of rules, an encyclopedia of the local magic, etc.
u/None [+2] (4 hours later)
[deleted]
u/callmebrotherg [+4] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (7 hours later)
I was one of the playtesters. It's pretty good. I'm running a different game right now, but would you like for me to message you when I run a Genius campaign?
u/None [+3] (7 hours later)
[deleted]
u/callmebrotherg [+5] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (7 hours later)
I'm fine with that. In my experience the ruleset has been pretty easy to learn.
u/traverseda [+2] With dread but cautious optimism (8 hours later)
would
yes
u/callmebrotherg [+3] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (10 hours later)
Haha. I'm getting a bit more attention than I expected. Might not be for awhile, I should warn you, but I'll make sure to let you know all the same.
u/tadrinth [+3] (2 hours later)
laughs maniacally
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+2] Roll the Dice on Fate (4 hours later)
WoT is telling me this site is less than safe, however there is a low confidence interval. Then the site asks me to download an attachment. Looks fishy.
u/traverseda [+7] With dread but cautious optimism (4 hours later)
It's the CDN for google sites, which means it can host arbitrary files. That means malicious people could use it to host all kinds of nastiness.
I don't think it's bad in and of itself, just that it's flexible enough to be used for evils.
Here, use this link, instead of my direct link.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+2] Roll the Dice on Fate (5 hours later)
Ah, thank you. I suspect I'm probably just being a bit paranoid, but what point was there to downloading such attachments if I ignore them? Anyway, I like this descent into madness they've got going on.
u/traverseda [+3] With dread but cautious optimism (5 hours later)
No worries. It's a good rule of thumb if you're not doing this kind of thing professionally, and can see where things are likely to be security issues. I still use it for detecting scams and non-technical attacks.
u/Charlie___ [+1] (4 hours later)
If the attachment is a .pdf, you're probably fine.
u/traverseda [+3] With dread but cautious optimism (4 hours later)
PDF is one of the formats that have had a lot of issues lately, so I disagree.
u/clawclawbite [+3] (6 hours later)
I remember finding this on rpg.net years ago, and being really turned off because it was very anti-rationalist in that all of the acts of genius were uunrepeatable and unexplainable.
But it has been a long time and that is just a memory of an impression.
u/traverseda [+8] With dread but cautious optimism (6 hours later)
in that all of the acts of genius were uunrepeatable and unexplainable.
"What are we doing?" He dropped the half-finished machine on the desk, just hard enough to draw the old woman's attention, but without enough force to damage its delicate mechanisms.
"We are creating the future," the old woman said. She leafed through a glossy copy of Alloy Blend, frowning at the garish use of color. Danish modern was in again for robots, it said. The picture showed some hulking Rubix Cube-looking monstrosity with two big glass eyes.
"There's no future here, grandma," the boy said. He poked at the machine, like a kid moving broccoli around his plate. "It's all just mind-tricks, some kind of consensual hallucination. It's not like we can mass-produce this stuff. It'd be like thalidomide crossed with giving kids dynamite."
"Don't look at the technology, then," she said. She flipped a page. More stuff on Mars: ruins, and girls surrounded by rust wearing too much makeup and too little jewelry-slash-clothing. "Look at the raw science, the knowledge you can accumulate. You have an avenue of discovery that regular people don't have."
"What's that?"
"Build something--a flying machine, say--then strip it down. See what's fueled by Mania, what just works. Figure out the principles behind the parts that work normally. Write up said principles in a sane scientific paper. Submit to a sane scientific journal. Profit!"
"You can do that?"
"Mm-hmm. Would you want to?"
"Would I...?"
"Would you want to tear apart what you've made, hunting for mundane truths that you can sell to Nature like a photojournalist with salacious pictures? Or would you rather do what you're doing now?"
The boy looked at the machine in front of him for a moment, then picked it up and set to work, delicately adjusting the copper wires that framed the tiny power plant.
"That's what I thought," the old woman said. "Finish your robot, dear, and then I'll make dinner.
u/clawclawbite [+4] (7 hours later)
Hell yes, and I don't think even think Nature pays. It's a journal, not a magazine.
If you really want to change the world, you publish. Then other people build all kinds of cool stuff you never expected from it.
u/callmebrotherg [+6] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (7 hours later)
The acts of genius are unrepeatable and unexplainable because they're not operating according to actual physical laws. "Unmada" are Geniuses who have totally lost their reason and now bend the world around them so that they cannot be shown evidence that conflicts with their beliefs. As a Genius who hasn't reached that point, you're just not that bad, but you are still someone who has Problems.
Being a Genius is something that you can find silver linings in, but ultimately it is a horror game, and there's something to be said for people who aren't Geniuses.
u/Shadawn [+1] (2 days later)
This game is great stylistically. I didn't play it, but, IMO, it's not very good for rational players unless they are confident in role-playing madness. Even with all limitations and without power-play, most funding problems driving the game can be made much more trivial. Ofc it's just my opinion and heavily depends on Game Master.
u/None [+1] (5 months later)
Yeah. This is a triumph of great concept, terrible execution. I'm redesigning the entire thing from the ground up. Mechanically, the new system is pretty different, being much less simulationist, more gamist, and much more narrativist.