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[Yami]

Okay, Fair I can get behind.  That sounds like a much better complaint to have.  I can understand that.  Allow me to put forward my own thoughts.

Now, a fair GM wouldn't hand us a resource someone else had screwed up, so, seeing as how I've seen nothing but fairness and awesomeness from Man of Paper so far, we can safely assume that the material we were handed was exactly what we wanted.  As for the enemy getting our primary resource should they be searching for it, well, yeah.  That's fair.

That's how fair works.  We both want the same thing, we both get the same thing.

I mean, we haven't even flubbed a roll yet, and you remember the hot mess our first special resource turned out to be.  Yet is it not nifty now?  Have some faith in your DM.  That's how these games work.

~Yami.

[Maximum Spin]

I'm getting the impression that a lot of the complaint revolves around the fact that the flavourtext details of the design weren't exactly the same, viz., all the silly nonsense about the effect of gravity depending on the orientation and being able to extract arbitrary amounts of energy from the gravitational field for free. You guys seriously expected to get everything exactly as the players described without being rebalanced or altered to fit the setting at all? Why didn't you just write "a material that wins the game" then? Especially since it was already specified that MoP had special resources already designed that we might hit upon; if one of those had been an antigravity metal, you'd be getting that, not something that directly contradicts it.

[Chiefwaffles]

Geez, I wouldn't want to be in a game with you as GM if all you got from the design was "do stuff with gravity lol". Not everything other than a 1-sentence summary is flavor text.

[Yami]

Yeah, there's a reason I don't run play by posts anymore.  Still, the core hasn't changed.  If you keep second guessing your GM, you're not going to have a fun game.  Sure, call them on things if they seem wrong, but this time we haven't even tried anything with our new resource.  There's nothing to call them on save for a difference in flavour text, and maybe the thing not being exactly what we asked for.  Maybe, as in, after the rolls.  You know, like our first thing.  That worked out awesomely in the end but was a hot mess turn one.

~Yami

[Man of Paper]

Right so here's what's going to happen for the time being:

I want both teams to write and vote on proposals for this phase as if we are going to just roll with the events of the last phase. I am not ignoring the issue at hand. There is a point I am going to make, so I need you all to trust me and treat this phase as if nothing happened to upset anyone.

So design revise and vote as if you both now have access to caelium and are not getting an action refunded. This will not necessarily be how we work with this issue, especially in regards to the lack of refunded actions.

Once votes for this phase are locked in I won't be rolling for them until a general consensus is reached on the situation once I can safely explain without giving things away.

I ask that you trust me for the moment.

[NUKE9.13]

Very well. Might I just say, MoP, that you've handled this very well? Like, I realise that what I'm doing is kinda shitty, though I hope it's understood that I'm not acting out of malice, but from a genuine desire to have the game work as well as possible.

IDEK. I think they only saw as far as "floats a few millimeters off the ground" and stopped reading. cf, for example, Madman NUKE's complaint about "how can this work if you bring it to the top of a building, and if you put it on top of a brick tightly attached to it then it would fly off into space as it tries to pull itself the designated distance up off the brick". When it seems obvious to me that it just settles to a certain level *in the gravity well*, possibly due (since its floating is affected by current) to electrical fields induced by the Earth's magnetism or something. And if you tried to lift it higher than that level it would, you know, have a weight.

See, Spin, that would make sense if the planet we were fighting on were a perfect sphere. But it isn't. The description doesn't say it "Floats a few millimeters above sea level, with the exact height depending on distance to the equator", it says it "will float a few millimeters off of any surface below it".
So my dumb hypothetical of tying it to a brick is a perfectly valid question. Maybe chill out a little, eh?

[Man of Paper]

Honestly the hovering bit was some half-awake fluff that I didn't think about the implications of, one of those tiny details the writer creates without expecting readers to hook to it. I was thinking more "pile of ingots floating over a table" as opposed to "even further break physics". I should know better than that though, this is Bay12.

As for handling the situation, I can't get angry about it because you guys only have half the picture right now. I understand where you're coming from with your perspectives and haven't taken anything to heart. I appreciate you guys at least for now trusting in the process, given my relatively low activity on this board and zero experience as a GM on this forum.

[Man of Paper]

Now that both sides have their votes locked for this phase let me explain, and let's set an even playing field here:

Caelium was created by Abbera with the purpose of manipulating gravity. Gravite was created with a similar purpose. Instead of keeping track of two separate research trees I opted to go for one with two sides ultimately racing to define it. I also wanted to refund both sides a design credit and make Caelium a global resource. I wanted to do this because it set a precedent should the occurrence happen again.

And lo and behold, it has.

This is Abbera's first time finding it out, because I wanted everyone to find out and they might have been able to deduce something was off, much like Salvios did, before I had the chance to break the new. But you both also decided to research a material useful for producing energy.

Known as Gavrilium by the Salviosi and Promethium by the Abberans, it was even described by both teams as being used in a rod form to use as a power source and being used for improved battery technology. Gavrilium and Promethium are, in my opinion, even closer in purpose than the antigrav materials. This is why I was saying things like

both teams aren't doing all that great in terms of being unique

and

Keeping tabs on a half dozen related bundles of infinite possibility would be a nightmare.

I don't think it's not going to happen again either, so I'd rather assign a rule to the circumstance instead of pretending it's rare. Literally the first two accepted proposals and maybe another floated idea were the same for both teams.

So now that everyone knows what everyone's first resource is and you guys have some understanding of my perspective and why I took my approach, what are opinions on how we proceed?

I'm in favor of refunding the designs to both teams once the resource is discovered by the second team, simulating a desire to progress further either in the field of that resource, discovering a new one, or whathaveyou. The resource is placed on both teams lists, and we keep this train a-rollin'. But I'm open to other suggestions.

Actual turn reports will come once we decide on what to do or after I'm done work, whichever comes second.

[Maximum Spin]

Heh. I don't really think it's necessary to refund the designs — I mean it does take R&D to discover something like that. Status quo seems perfectly acceptable.

[Taricus]

I'll happily take the refunded designs, even knowing that Abberas is going to get one as well.

Though I'd like to thank Abberas for finally making something with a name that's worse than ours

[Rockeater]

Heh. I don't really think it's necessary to refund the designs — I mean it does take R&D to discover something like that. Status quo seems perfectly acceptable.

I'm for that but I think that now both sides could have one extra desing so we don't get stuck with both sides useing hovertank\airships+ superengines until someone make something useful out of their new staff

[Tyrant Leviathan]

Damn. The first two resources were the exact same thing? Man, we are so gong uncreative.

[Twinwolf]

I don't mind either way, on the designs. I do hope we end up using our resources in different ways (and hopefully come up with actually-unique ones down the line :p)

[Rockeater]

Damn. The first two resources were the exact same thing? Man, we are so gong uncreative.

The first two super resources on "Guild to fantasy not looking like Lotr"

[Tyrant Leviathan]

How can we even look Lotr when none of the fantasy stuff is here? I heard it was soft high tech WW1. No swords or arrows in sight.