So I made a bunch of pre-gens characters for the con game at Queen City Conquest this past weekend and one of the characters had a piece of equipment that isn’t in the book, an electronic lock pick device. My son said “Whoah! Where did they get that?” I chuckled and replied that you can make any kind of equipment you like with agents. But examples are nice so here it is.

Electronic Lock Pick
Cost 3d
Pool 1d
Technical trait Unlock Doors 2 Steps

It’s really that easy!

The question comes up frequently, can an AI simply copy itself a billion times and make itself more powerful?

By necessity, there would have to be a system in place that keeps this from happening or malicious AIs would just take over everything, just because they could means someone at some point would make one that did.

It’s possible that AIs are actually constellations of programs that really do copy themselves all the time and that’s just how they function.

But how would one prevent an AI from copying itself onto billions of computers? Maybe they operate like crypto-currencies that can be transferred but not copied.

It may be that there are special requirements to copy an AI. It could be that the program simply won’t allow itself to be copied. If that were the only safeguard though, someone would make an AI that would turn itself into a virus.

There has to be something about the architecture of the AI that will not allow it to copy itself. A blockchain validation would fit this bill. There could be something in the neural network that prevents copying too.

In Jump Temp there are dozens if not hundreds of currencies. Shady governments may offer payment in their own currency that they know is almost worthless anywhere else due to bad credit.

One solution is to use a crypto-currency, of which there are many. These currencies are data packages that can be transferred but will not allow copying. Forging a crypto-currency is very difficult and most competent AI’s can sniff out a fake in short order. This makes them very handy for independent operators without a reliable data connection.

One feature that some crypto-currencies have is that they can be traded for a real world thing. Proc Coins are one such currency. They can be traded for the use of a distributed net of AIs. For every money agent die, a character can “rent” time on this AI net to solve or help solve information based challenges. Each money die spent in this way becomes 1d of an AI assistant.

Using Proc Coins this way requires a working data connection and the AI cannot be influenced to do anything illegal. The AI assistant is available until it’s dice deplete.

So if I hire you to take a gold brick across town to the bank, how do I ensure you won’t just run off with it?

This problem comes up in star travel frequently. By definition the cargo has to be at least as and preferably much more valuable than the resources it takes to transport it.

Because of this, many high value shipments require a ship to have a caretaker AI enter their computer systems.*

Caretaker AIs come loaded with some powerful software that can disable a ship and even fight against another AI with dangerous attack programs.

Energy Pool 4d

Trait – Attack Program 8 steps

*Even if a ship does not have a special system designated as a computer, all ships have computers, they’re just unmentioned because their capabilities are limited. A starship would not be able to function without computer control.

The Energy System allows the players to narrate or better yet interpret, what the results of their rolls are. Some players have a bit of trouble with that and understandably so, since in most games they are passive when it comes to narration.

Because of this, I’d like to give the players some simple processes that would help them think through narration (or interpretation).

GMs do narration all the time, they’re used to it. Fill a table with players that have been GMs and I think there would be no problem. Some players think they could never GM. It seems magical to them how this person comes up with all this stuff.

To make the choices simpler I thought about introducing a list of ideas to develop the players narration but it ended up being either too vague to be useful or way too long and overwhelming.

So I need a different strategy. It needs to be concrete as possible for the players to easily absorb the advice.

I actually have a goal for player narration in the Energy System and that is for the narration to explain the dice roll as much as possible. That, I think, is key to this effort.

Of primary importance are dice depletions in this system and so I think that should be the focus of the players “interpreting” their rolls. Encouraging the players to say how each die depletes and why would be a great step forward.

In their early stages, with a player struggling to develop their narration skills, the GM can readily help out at this point. I’m thinking of something akin to Archipelago’s ritual phrases are in order. They don’t have to be as robust, they just have to be functional for the prompting we want to do. If there are phrases that are standardized, they’re less surprising when said, they are much more likely to be supportive than unintentionally demeaning and are probably easier for the GM to recall and use. This also conditions the players to expect GM intervention in their narration which is occasionally needed if the player is narrating something that contradicts known facts (even if it’s only the GM that knows them at the moment).

As the player gets more fluid in their narration, they will need less and less prompting. I can imagine a rules lawyer player using their narration as a weapon to suss out secrets from the GM, but that’s a problem for a different day.

Here are some prompts to help the players interpret the events connected to their rolls.

What made it go that way? – Prompting the player to start off a description.

What mistakes were made? – When the player hasn’t described a depletion.

Keep going – When you want the player to add more narration either because they’re doing well or they’ve stopped before fully explaining the roll.

Think of other ways  – When the player uses the same description again.

That can’t be – When the player contradicts facts that they may or may not be aware of.

I’m not sure if these are the best phrases to use, I’ll try using them in our next session and see how it goes.