(no subject)

[camwyn]

*sigh*

Damn you, Reign of Fire. Why can't I resist the urge to patch your plot holes? Whyyyyyy? Damn it, someone make the studio people go off on a six week vacation in Aruba or something so they won't notice that someone's actually trying to make the blasted thing plausible when they're not looking!

Or in other words: Show of hands, peeps. How many people here really believe that a species that has to go from an egg the size of a man's torso to an animal the size of a small Indian elephant in the space of less than ten years could have been responsible for destroying everything? Uh huh. Now, how many people think for even one instant that every half-assed terrorist group on the face of the planet wouldn't view the dragons as their allies against established governments and use that distraction as their chance to blow up everything they could get their disgusting little paws on? It wasn't the dragons that blasted the world into ash, although God knows they were trying. It was humanity's attempts to eradicate the dragons combined with humanity's internal secondary conflicts that did... oh, at least two-thirds of the blasting, I would say. The dragons just kept on coming, that's all.

ETA:

Brane.

NO.

No, you are not allowed to put together any sort of strategy game whatsoever in which you assign the different factions (Dragons, Human Governments, Human Opportunists, and possibly Civilians) different strengths, weaknesses, and bonuses and then rustle up people to play it multiple times so you can finally figure out exactly what it takes to get the Dragon faction to win! No!!

Comments

[mm_madb]

Camwyn? Please stop typing the things my daddy was shouting at the screen. Its sorta scary. Especially when his face looked just like your icon, there. Only without the gun.

[jeditigger.livejournal.com]

Yes, but...

Christian Bale in a beard = winner. :P

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

I just find it unlikely that anything that big wouldn't be hunted to extinction in short order -- humans have mananged to eradicate most of the world's megafauna, and that was *before* the invention of the machine gun, not to mention the surface-to-air missle.

[camwyn]

Yeah.

*sigh*

That would be the 'why' part, I suppose.

[canadabear.livejournal.com]

That's the exact impression I got from the movie: the dragons were a pest, humans tried to exterminate them and ended up screwing themselves instead.

[camwyn]

Sorry about that. *pats Sarge cheerfully on the head* You can put the gun away now, Harry.

[temporal-tech.livejournal.com]

Also, if you could explain away how one male dragon fertilizes all the female eggs in the WHOLE WORLD, I'd appreciate that too. While you're at it. If its not asking too much.

[blackswanevent.livejournal.com]

Dear Cam's Brainmeats:

Do it! Inquiring minds want to know!

Dear Dragony-things:
I want to know the science behind you dudes. If you originated in England, didya fly across the Atlantic and the like? Was it a sort of networked chain of tunnels triggered by the awakening of one gigantic queen like in Alien? Or am I completely insane?


Dear me!:

staying up late and then trying to comment before fleeing to work is a BAD thing. --;

[rajrr.livejournal.com]

Damn. I'd play that game.

[camwyn]

Oh, that one's simple.

Helicopter Pilots Suck At Statistics.

Our girl Alex is the one who supposedly ran the epidemiology on the dragons, right? (I'm going to grit my teeth and bear up under the misuse of one of my favourite parts of medicine.) Exactly when did an attack helicopter pilot have time to learn epidemiology in any kind of reliable fashion, or do the math necessary to realise that her proposal wasn't going to work? She said this, and she made a case for it, and Van Zant believed it- but she was wrong. There are other males. Not many, maybe, but they're out there. I reckon at least one in Australia and one in the Americas somewhere. I also think that they're territorial bastards, that they probably assault the offspring of other males wherever possible to bring the local females into heat and lay their own damn eggs, that they're quite capable of killing one another in mating-season combat, and that the young male dragons in any given clutch are slower and heavier than their sisters- thus dying more often when the big males assault the nests. Take out the adult male and you'll have peace but only until the little ones hit puberty, at which point they either attack each other or go in search of their own territories or both.

Also, they eat meat, but require ash to balance their internal chemistry.

[camwyn]

*sigh* Yeah, I probably would too...

How did you want to wrap up the WWOM stuff? I'd like to finish the threads we've got there and post a link back to it in the main game, so we can start on pushing people through canon.

[camwyn]

True. OTOH, most megafauna are K-strategists- putting a lot of time, effort and energy into one or two offspring at a single go. The dragons are almost certainly R-strategists, spewing many offspring, most of which die before reaching maturity. They certainly have the reproductive capacity of cockroaches, if the spread in the movie can be believed. Throw in a little bit of mama-crocodile protection for the initial nestling-raising, and you get something that's a good deal harder to kill off.

Not impossible. Just harder.

[rajrr.livejournal.com]

Hah, love the icon, by the way...

We can do it however, really, just kinda fade it out where we are, or get to, "This is where you're sleeping, kbye." Doing the whole next day, with the stories for the kids and all, might be a bit much at this point, I don't know. It's a fun bit of plot, but moving on will be shiny, too.

I'm proud of us, though, for adding something like 100+ comments in the past two days though, after stalling for so long. Hee!

[camwyn]

Mm. Either we fade or we get to the assignment of sleeping quarters. I think we can do that pretty quickly, as it's been a very long day and there's been a meal involved; that tends to make most people tired. We can handwave the stories and music and stuff, or go back and write them later at leisure.

Hey, they were all just building up. I should've kept going before, but at least we got 'em going!

.... and I just wish Creedy didn't have such a 'hyuck hyuck' expression in that one frame in the icon. *sigh*

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

We almost managed with alligators and crocodiles inadvertantly, so I can't imagine that the humans wouldn't win if they were to make a concerted effort to kill off the dragons.

I really think you need to roleplay to find out what sort of scenario is needed for the dragons to win.

[camwyn]

Yeah, probably. *rubs at face* I know squat about game design. This is gonna get interesting.

[rajrr.livejournal.com]

We can handwave the stories and music and stuff, or go back and write them later at leisure.

Yeah, I like this idea. But then again, I've grown pretty enamoured with the idea of flashback-plotting recently, having details come out only in conversations and side comments, after the fact. Milliways is a good medium to do that kind of thing in, I think... you end up involving people with plot, and they don't even notice. All of Eros' return-plot is going to be that way. Helps with my mild guilt about writing so many OOMs, and feeling exclusionary.

Wow, TANGENT.

GB does make a whole lot of silly faces in that movie. Comes from being the closest thing the film has to comic relief, I guess.

[camwyn]

Sounds like a plan, then. I'll go see about heading for the sleeping quarters thread-wise, and we can spin stuff out for the rest of it at need.

I don't really blame him for that particular face. Any change of facial expression is going to involve going through a number of distortions and gyrations that most people don't even think about. It's just that when you're going frame by frame, you see all the interstitial expressions and realise that we look pretty darn ridiculous on our way to other expressions. In this case he was going from, I think, neutral or OMGWHUT face to squinting into the sun, and it worked out poorly.

[rimestock.livejournal.com]

... can I play a tinypetite crazy redhead female named Jack, on the list of the Human Opportunists? *hopeful* She likes blowing things up!

[the_croupier]

So..sort of like Axis & Allies, only updated for the modern day, plus dragons?

Ok. I'm there. =)

*enables*

[daniidebrabant.livejournal.com]

Yes.

...*raises hand to help*

[camwyn]

I hate you all and I hope you die.

*grump*

[camwyn]

I was thinking more of a boardgame than an RPG, as the personalities involved in determining how a bunch of big hungry lizards win aren't as important as the plain ol' capabilities. Of course, given that last night I played a game of Risk where about half our invasions were prompted by announcing that this or that supreme leader really wanted $ETHNIC_FOOD_OF_REGION, you could probably just say that your Jack was the leader of the Human Opportunist faction and go at it like that.

[camwyn]

I've never played Axis & Allies. All my tactical wargaming consists of about two games of OGRE, ever, a lot of the Dune 2 and Dune 2000 video games, and the tactical/strategic know-how that you get from playing enough of the Civilization series of video games. (F'rex, "Mountains. Why did it have to be mountains.") But, yeah, that basic idea.

[daniidebrabant.livejournal.com]

But then the couch would smell funny.

[parke-matru.livejournal.com]

The new take on suicide bombing: Wait for a report of an incoming dragon. Then stand on top of the target location and spread out a case of accelerant.

I'd object, but I couldn't fight my own temptation from a random impulse to make an RP based on 'Night at the Museum', or at least the concept.

[camwyn]

I wasn't thinking so much of it like that as, well, no matter how hard a country works, its military resources are finite. Soldiers take time to train. Vehicles take time to build. Everything takes time to move around the country, or around the globe; if America is busy trying to blow the dragons out of their hidey-holes in the Appalachian Mountains, they can't be expected to spare any real force to come to- say- Israel's aid, can they? Or pick the African internecine conflict of your choice; d'you really think the government in the Cote d'Ivoire stands a chance against dragons eating their civilians and local insurgents running amok through the best and most productive land in the country?

That sort of thing.

[camwyn]

BAKING SODA.

[daniidebrabant.livejournal.com]

...and Shula will be meowing at you FOREVER.

[illmantrim.livejournal.com]

In fact, maybe it wass a terorist attack or two that allowed Dragons to gain a foothold at all. If a terrorist attack, launched in those early years, something even strogner, or equal to 9-11, were to divert humanity's attention, which can be incredibly fickle, it might give them time to establish a foothold species wise?

And if maybe, the first attempts to stop Dragons made them stronger? I dont know movie mythology, but what does it say about their reactions to radiation and chemicals? Could initial attempts to eradicate them have mutated them into a hardier species that quickly? *is completely unsure of mutation factors or such*

I dont know anything about animals and spreading of them, myself, but from the comments below, it was just an idea I thought I would throw out there.

[camwyn]

The mutation thing's an idea, but I spent a long time in college studying teratology- the science of birth defects and deformities. Between the reports on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, other studies on the effects of ionizing radiation on humans and animals, and the general study of the effects of chemicals on developing human or animal embryos... no. It's an unfortunately grim fact that in the natural world, ninety percent of all mutations in an organism's genome are either useless or unseen, and most of the ones that remain are harmful. Mutations and/or physical changes induced by chemicals or radiation are much more likely to come up harmful than useless- and more often than not leave the resultant offspring sterile.

's a nice thought, though.

[rimestock.livejournal.com]

Yay!

Sadly if you play it as a boardgame, I will not be around to play. *sadfaces* On the other hand, I bet Rue could play Jack pretty accurately.

[illmantrim.livejournal.com]

Ohhhhh... oh well.

I am sure you can figure out another factor to introduce to keep the system working... there has to be soething that would a- keep most of humanity not concentrating on exterimination, and b - allow for fast and protected growth.

[crisavec.livejournal.com]

Surface to Air missiles Do Not Forgive.

Nor do they hit anything.

[jessara40k.livejournal.com]

Maybe, but the human extermination efforts could have caused accelerated natural selection. So if some of the dragons started off with a slightly higer resistance to various chemicals, humans used those chemicals and the ones with the higher resistance were the ones that survived to breed again. Only problem is how slowly they mature.