I write science fiction and pester magazines with it
https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com
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JacobCoffin
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@zannesan @pluralistic the feedback would reflect poorly on them, might hamper their careers. Business failures are only important if you care about the business lasting
@pseudo_ursus we've also done campaigns around political thrillers/conspiracies (reinforcing the guardrails of a better society and testing whether bad people can still find ways to amass personal power); around investigating a successful heist and around preventing one (if anything planning a heist is probably easier in a society with safety nets when people have more time); and resolving conflicts between two families, as their growing feud starts impacting their larger community
@pseudo_ursus
I think the really interesting stuff takes place in investigations, negotiations, and dialogue, so I tend to build campaigns around that stuff.
As far as finding reasons for conflict, some of the most acrimonious arguments you'll find are between people who 90% agree with each other. A solarpunk society has plenty of room for that.
I think you can find plenty of drama in the trade-offs and nuances in something like whether to clear way for a new train line or green power line
@pseudo_ursus There's disagreement over how to handle confrontation/violence in these games but I prefer to set things so that the players are fairly normal people in a society where violence has real consequences and let them roleplay from there. I've thrown I think fairly realistic situations where other people are unreasonable, even violent, at them and multiple groups have done me proud by de-escalating, negotiating, and otherwise cleverly sorting things out. They've been pleased with that
@pseudo_ursus my preferred solarpunk TTRPG tends to cast the players into the role of mediators in an escalating conflict, fixers trying to get some big project with a lot of stakeholders done, or investigators in some kind of crime or other mystery past or present.
@pseudo_ursus speaking more generally I think there are a few good options for conflict in a eutopian setting:
Cleaning up harms left by the past- usually environmental, but this could also include regressive cultural stuff
Conflict around scarce resources: my go-to is land because even in a post-scarcity setting the amount of land is fixed and there's lots of room for argument over how we use it. This could be as simple as a disagreement over turning a bike path back into an active train line
@pseudo_ursus I've been running (and preparing to publish) one where the players are searching a mostly-abandoned exurb (which is undergoing deconstruction and rewilding) for thousands of tons of industrial waste illegally dumped there decades before. The idea is that when they find it the environmental restoration co-op that hired them will extract the waste and provide it to the geopolymer industry where it's a useful input. But the investigation unearths a cold case murder and coverup
@susankayequinn if authors can push updates into already-purchased ebooks, so can amazon executives. Any guardrails meant to prevent that are just corporate policy, and thus can be changed or ignored on a whim.
@susankayequinn I was asking about the advertisement. And I'm saying this is enabled by their centralized control over ebooks and their ability to push edits - which you said you don't have a problem with.
They can use this tech stack to promote fascism and other billionaire whims. LLMs just make it easy for them to do en mass. If you buy a book from them you don't own it, you don't even have any guarantee it'll be the same the next time you open it.
@susankayequinn wait how do you think this happened?
If you don't think amazon will use their LLMs to add advertisements or adjust the politics in books under their control to match whatever libertarian or fascist leanings their leadership favors, then it doesn't seem dystopian. In that case the only place ads could come from is the writers themselves, and that's been done before.
To me, the threat is that corporates love this tech and it makes this kind of injection or revision easy for them