On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 11:18 PM, Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:

Hope you enjoy spending the rest of your life sedated, in a nice soft form-fitting pod, for your own comfort and safety (and everyone else's).

Exactly the point Craig and I were making earlier.

It doesn't matter in roleplaying terms if *logically* your high-tech background should allow you to create technology that's totally safe to use.

Because if you do that, then where are you going to find adventure?

Answer: With perfect technology, you will constantly find yourself having to invent something which your perfect tech wasn't designed to deal with . . . exactly like the plot arcs of the majority of Star Trek episodes.

There is only so long that you can believably have "Pesky Element Of The Week" plotlines.

It's much easier to simply put a relatively-low upper limit on the effectiveness of your commonly available technology. Leave perfect tech stuff as the rare impossible-to-reproduce and tends-to-burn-out-after-a-few-uses plot device.

Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident." Robert A. Heinlein

"I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as Muhammed." Alexis de Tocqueville (1843)

"We know a little about a lot of things; just enough to make us dangerous." Dean Winchester

"It has been my experience that a gun doesn't care who pulls its trigger." Newton Knight (as portrayed by Matthew McConaughey), to a scoffing Confederate tax collector facing the weapons held by Knight's young children and wife.