#TimeTravelingGhost EP 7 Post 78: 12 May 1999: London

#Wss366 Bowels #MastoPrompt Winsome #TimeTravelAuthors 03/07. Quiet/loud

Now that we had seen the sights, I caught a cab to the British Museum, while Emily flew overhead. An insipid ballad, “Swear It Again,” played #loudly on the radio. So I tuned it out along with the heavily accented East-Indian voice of the driver offering me additional ride services. Instead, I manifested a cell phone and played with the browser. I had forgotten how janky that experience was in the late 90s.

When we arrived at the museum, I showed Emily the phone and the internet. She was suitably impressed and offered me a #winsome smile. It wasn’t flying cars, but she was thrilled.

Since it was a Thursday morning, the museum was #quiet when we arrived. We hurried through the lightly populated rooms to the archaeological section, where I spent most of my time. Some items, such as German World War II artifacts and Crusader swords, made me uneasy. I couldn’t tell whether that was due to their supernatural aura or my own biases.

The Sutton Hoo exhibition, however, was wonderful. As I gazed at the treasures, fragmented memories surfaced of seeing them as a young girl.

At some point, Emily and I separated, with me exploring the public exhibitions and her roaming areas unavailable to visitors. I had just begun examining some Chinese jade artifacts when she appeared.

“Follow me,” she said.

“What did you find?”

“You were right. There's more here than meets the eye. Come on, you'll understand when you see it.”

We hurried through a door marked "Private," down a set of stairs, and through a maze of corridors. I wasn’t sure how Emily had found anything here. Finally, in the #bowels of the museum, we arrived at a heavy metal door.

The Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo:

#TootFic #MicroFiction #NMFic #UrbanFantasy #TimeTravel #HistoricalFantasy

@iain Let's say there's you and another player with a FOO factory, and it has (or will have) 4 dice and you're looking at where you want to be in turn order and how much is worth spending to get the turn order you want. How big is that edge?

If you are before them in turn order, by default you'll get the first and third dice in the market and they'll get the second and fourth dice. However if they are before you in turn order, then those positions are reversed. How much better is being first? How much more capacity (and thus money) could you get than them on average?

Of course, there could be three players, then the first player in turn order would be looking at first and fourth and the other two players only second and third. On average, how much better is first in turn order than second than third in that case?

And then other variations. (And of course, the dice when actually rolled, may not agree -- but you are playing each round to setup the next round...and so you're betting on averages and risk postures...)

Then you can start looking at managing cash reserves and capacity across different factories so you can suck up windfalls without compromising your position, and what the risks/stats are on that.

(The rabbithole keeps going)

I don't remember the numbers any more, but they were eye-opening for me at the time.

#winsome #winsomegames

@iain A game-changer for me was spending a weekend looking at all the founding patterns, like how much better worse first and third of 4D6 is than second and fourth (and then all the other patterns etc). Those shapes were not what I expected...and in turn that revealed the risk-posture basis of the game in ways I'd not thought of until then.

#winsome #winsomegames