RE: [DL] Mad Scientists are so weak!

["Jeff Yates" <jyates@primaryfunction.com>]

Long post, so I snipped pretty much all of the original stuff....

I think I see most of your problem.  You keep wanting to build things
that are way beyond the technical capacity of the 1870's.  Heck, a
weather machine is beyond current tech skills!  And water purification
(beyond pouring the water thru cloth filters, or maybe activated
charcoal filters) is a technology not seen in the 1870's.  Pushing the
envelope that hard is not going to be pretty!  Everyone else builds
things that are just a little bit better than existing items -- Gatling
Pistols are slightly better (smaller) than the Gatling guns of Real Life
1870's, not revolutionarily different.  Flamethrowers aren't that far
off from what really could be done in 1870.  That example items you give
are things that would be a Mad Scientists Masterpiece, his life work,
something he spends 1 to 20 YEARS, if not his entire life, working on.

IIRC, reliability goes up if some of the rolls involved in the creation
of the item are high, right?  Raises get you boosts to the reliability
score (I don't remember if it's during construction or design tho).
Spend chips on that roll, get yourself some phenomonally high totals.
Same goes for getting more cards, since the number of cards is based on
the result of a chippable dice roll.

As far as the specifically-detailed explanation of how ghost rock
derived/powered devices can work, that's easy:  It is Magic.  There is
no other explanation.  Due to the magic properties of the magic (ghost)
rock used instead of coal during steel-making, Ghost Steel is lighter
and stronger than mundane steel.  Due to the magic properties of ghost
rock, mixing it with other chemicals results in magically altered
chemical mixtures.  Due to it's magic properties, ghost rock burns
longer and hotter than coal.  It's MAGIC.  Build a complex device, and
you get a manitou helping keep it together (kinda like a totally evil
tech spirit, if you're HOE knowledgeable).

And my take on why Hellstrome and his contemporaries aren't totally
insane -- flunkies.  Gather yourself a bunch of Mad Scientist underlings
to take the psycological beatings, steal (in a
corporate-you-signed-me-the-rights-in-your-employment-contract kinda
way) the blueprints, and get famous while keeping some of your marbles.

I'm not trying to flame you or anything, but if it were my campaign, any
device requiring a hand in the Straight flush range is a life's work
device, you would only really get the one (spent your whole life on it,
after all), so you might as well save up a bunch of chips to get some
really really high rolls for the design and build.  However, if all you
really wanted to build was a wagon with a smmmooooooth ride, then all
your doing is making so neato springs (mostly), nothing terribly
special.  Then you could also have time in your life to build a better
pen, a better mousetrap (no, really, for catching mice), etc.  "Building
a better" is so much easier than building something never before heard
or even thought of!

Jeff Y.
Marshal for the Dynamite Gang