From:	Stephanos Piperoglou <sneakabout@**********.HOL.GR>
Subject:	Re: stupid questions
Date:	Sat, 17 Jun 1995 13:24:21 +0200

On Sat, 17 Jun 1995, Matthew Deatherage wrote:

> Do you allow starting deckers to use the cyberdeck construction
> rules in Virtual Realities or do you make them buy and modify the
> commerical decks provided?

This is sort of a complex thing... VR says that "real" deckers don't buy
decks off-the-shelf (in fact it says you have to make your own MPCP
*anyway*). Thing is, s'pose you have Resources A, and you wanna buy a
novahot deck , but chicken out because it's off-the-shelf. SO you decide,
what the heck, I've got great C, CT and C(B/R) skills, I'll build it.
Save some money too. So we start rolling dice, and the total time comes
out like 16 years or something. Which is pretty disturbing. I can't
really see a decker building a deck full-time since he was in
kindergarden. And I can't see him not buying a better deck off the shelf.

It makes sense; How long would it take for a single person, even if
he/she had a doctorate in CS, to actually design and build a RISC
workstation, design an OS and a full suite of apps? A lifetime, that's
how long. I just don't see deckers going for average decks just for a
stupid rep thing. I ruled that if it takes more than 2 years (which is a
pretty long time if you think of it), you can't have it.

------[ Stephanos J. Piperoglou ]-----<sneakabout@**********.hol.gr>----
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