2 Parsecs from sol, was created and I encountered a serious problem for me - How to resolve space encounters. Around this time I discovered the movement rules didn’t exist in the CE SRD and there were many problems with the Encounter mechanics: Particularly range and Threat.
If Space Combat was too lethal and outcomes forgone (when we measure firepower of the ships against each other) then its important that Players have PREVENTATIVE actions to feel in control and to have some agency in the story. If the Space Combat was a slug fest of attrition - it may give more agency but could be too tediuous and time consuming. So this was what Mneme Space Combat Tried to fix - the thing about it is that it’s not what people complain about except my self. I come from GURPS and i used to a heavily front loaded game, I also like war gaming and I like knowing the odds and I want to do the math to model it. If you know about Tier5 Mech Warrior Player you will find me breaking down combat into usable Heuristics (Like the Alpha of a Mech determines how much Mobility they need to be in a position to generate Opportunities to fire) and if you saw my older Airsoft Blog I did it when it came to Physical Performance and combat as well. I want people to feel like they can see the pattern or have a framework to understand the chaos of combat - for me when the Chaos of Airsoft became Sane and I was able to make sense of shots being fired, their direction, silence, and trying to predict enemy movement - I enjoyed the game more than when I didn’t understand it - even if Airsoft was very chaotic and had too many variables.
So we made Mneme Space Combat, today around 21 books were sold since October. I had hoped more and that the demand and sales would allow me to hire more: 50 sales would have resulted to 300usd (6usd x 50) and I would have been able to make a down payment for the Freelancers - Students that I’ve taught when I take on OJTS from various schools who I teach about multimedia, programming and or 3d Modeling). This is a hobby that I love so pretty much 100% of the profit goes back to the business. Right now, instead of Buying TRPG books, all the money I would have spent buying the latest Mongoose Traveller Product or various other books goes to making this book more valuable.
So now that Sales have slowed down I was thinking of making 2 Parsecs from Sol sell for 5usd and sale for 2.5usd. The AI revolution happened and we at first thought of making it with Stable Diffusion, but we held of against it. We have a version of the Book that uses AI art. Even Mneme Space Combat has an AI art version. Actually AI made art not matter - to an extent. When anyone can make Beautiful art - it ceased being special - especially the AI made ones. I taught my Industrial Design students Blender and Stable Diffusion and how to use the AI to prototype much faster with the AI and after teaching others to use SD - and I can teach people in GITB to make their own Character art. I used to be an Artist before I became an IT head and i love how AI made art more accessible - its just that what’s the point when the beauty of AI will eclipse all the hard work of an artist who spent hours making it. So I decided we will focus on things the AI has a hard time doing: DEPTH - ships, layouts, and engineering of the worlds and technology.
I lurk in reddit and see all the AI art and see all the AI avatars and “AI girlfriends” and what can be done with Stable Diffusion. OMG - beauty = AI. beauty is FAKE. Every picture is now AI until I can tell its providence. I use AI in making Characters for our Saturday night games - we would generate Art as we gamed to help the other players visualize with a RTX 3090 24GB vram. I have a civitai account and learned to tell which model is being used but - when you make a book and you have to choose what Hours I will be paying for to make this book - Lets make something the AI can’t do.
Adventures have lost their luster - I’m just fixing our H20AI and will train it to Referee as well and hope to create a small specialized one that can run off a CPU - basically a choose your own adventure AI. Like the books us Gen Xers grew up with, and in the philippine I could barely afford those books and had to borrow the books of friends. Now the Referee can join the adventure, now the Guys hanging out on the week end to game can have the AI run the adventure and everyone just enjoy hanging out. The AI will document and weave the narrative - posting the session outcomes.
The output of GITB - as of current - the Mechanics, Models, and the Rules cannot be made by AI. The fluff can be made by AI, of course the overarching world building and demographic and economic and cultural trends will follow a writing style more than analysis - so that still is within the human vision for it.
How can 2 guys from the Philippines make a great product, and people recognize this is special? What’s funny i’m so open that once I figure it out, I’ll tell everyone and since I’m so niche no one believe it.
We will be improving the boats and creating the cutters and various other small craft. But far in the future. My break even is about past silver lolz
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