taxonmods | Expanded FAQ - Money, Jobs, Adventure, Glitches, and Tablets

The Economy and Stuff

Money

Taxon has a form of currency, known as credits (¤). Each month your character will receive 300¤, as a subsistence allowance. Anything not spent from that initial 300¤ (or other money your character earns) rolls over to the next month.

As far as purchasing power goes, for simplicity's sake the ¤ is roughly equal to the American dollar-- you could get a fast food meal or a fancy cup of coffee for 5¤, a slightly nicer meal for 10¤, so forth and so forth.

Credits may be transferred between characters using the tablet application called 'Bankbuddy'. Purchasing things in shops or at the Bazaar automatically deducts the credits, unless your character makes a specific attempt to steal or shoplift.

How do I get more credits?

The simplest option is to get a job. Most Taxon business are always hiring. Unskilled labor (retail jobs, waiting tables, mowing lawns) will net the character an additional 500¤ per month. Skilled labor (medical professional, inventing gadgets, providing technical assistance) will net a character 1000¤ a month. Starting a business that employs other characters will give your character additional cash on top of that, so, for example, if Dr. Watson opens a medical clinic, and employs Dr. House as an additional employee, Watson would earn 1500¤ (1000¤ + 500¤ per employee) in addition to his base 300¤.

There are jobs such as busking, or giving massages, or reading people's fortunes, which qualify as non-salaried employment; such jobs will give a character 20¤ a day from the Extras, not counting whatever your character convinces real citizens to pay them for their services.

If your character has a job, whether salaried or not, we request that once per month you make an open post of them 'at work'.

As mentioned, characters may transfer credits to one another. This is entirely at the discretion of the players and characters involved-- your character can ask for loans, or paint a masterpiece and sell it at whatever price she can obtain from another character, etc etc.

There is currently no way to 'steal' pure credits in Taxon, at least for PCs, but it is possible to steal merchandise from the shops and resell it, either to PCs or to Extras/other shops.

Finally, your character has the opportunity to loot things in Adventure Zone. In a genre crime world, should your character break into the bank vault, he may find that his credit balance has gotten a big one-time boost. In a genre fantasy world, stealing the treasure from the dragon's cave likewise causes your balance to shoot up. We request that you at least play out some of the effort involved in getting this, rather than a post of "Jack Sparrow loots the chest, then looks at his bracelet to see how much he's gotten for it."

How do I get things?

Taxon has many shops and stores, although their selection tends to be more basic than a genuine city would support. There are many things your characters may want that are not present in the generic shops of Taxon as a general rule: these include weapons, explosives, technological appliances more complex than microwaves, drugs harder than nicotine or alcohol, and chemicals beyond those found in the average household.

That doesn't mean your character categorically CANNOT obtain those items, merely that it will be a little bit harder.

The Bazaar is often the first shopping point that characters will find, being right next to the Sanctuary in an open plaza. It resembles an open-air market stocked with many curiosities; fresh produce next to singing birds in cages, junk parts from spaceships, television sets, stall after stall of clothing options from a hundred different eras (you know you always wanted a TRON-style jumpsuit), lawn chairs, and other weird things. The Bazaar has occasional exceptions to the list of hard-to-obtain items in Taxon, found most often through obsessive scrounging and bargain hunting. If you want your character to find a special something in the Bazaar, request it here.

Alternatively, your character can quest for certain items in Adventure Zone. Medieval fantasy land is a great place to pick up a sword, for example, or a mystic book. The high-tech secret super-science facility is a great place to get computer parts or a high-powered microscope. Petitions are not necessary here, but you should make a stab at threading out your discovery and retrieval of the item, with much adventure had in the getting of it.

Finally, Taxon's inhabitants have many skills among them-- it's possible that tech doodad you want can be tinkered together by a PC, or that magical potion you want brewed by a PC. Explore the options for creating interaction!

(Note as of 2/18/13: items your character already has at this date that would be 'hard-to-get' are grandfathered in. You do not need to retcon having those items.)

What about cost of living?

Characters are responsible for their food, clothing, and etc. Transportation is fairly cheap: a one-way tram fare to anywhere in the city costs 1¤ (although most destinations are within walking distance). Rent and associated costs are FREE in Taxon; your character can pick a place to live in the city, any place to live in the city, and no credits are deducted regardless of whether it's a studio apartment or a ten-bedroom McMansion.

If you're looking for an interesting picture of a place for your character to live, check out Taxitecture.

Adventure Zone

Adventure Zone/The Northern District is a mutable area that changes from month to month. It's a part of the city where stuff happens: exciting stuff! Dangerous stuff! Characters of the adrenaline-junkie stripe can always go into Adventure Zone to find things like dinosaurs, homicidal robots, goblins, ancient ruins, and the like.

Adventure Zone can take the form of either generic "genre" landscapes (futuristic spaceports, medieval castles, the Wild Wild west) OR it can be modeled after a character's own canon. For instance, a player of Batman can nominate Gotham City as Adventure Zone. A player of an X-Man could suggest Genosha, complete with stomping Sentinels. (Note: players are not restricted to suggesting only their own canons.) In the case of those settings suggested by a specific player, that player becomes a kind of co-moderator in helping describe, for everyone else, what sort of threats are present in the setting, as well what sort of goodies are available to be looted from Adventure Zone. Canon-specific Adventure Zones often have specific things that their generic counterparts don't. For instance, if Adventure Zone was Hogwarts for the month, the Mirror of Erised could be a retrievable prize.

Which brings us to treasure. Both items and credits can be looted from Adventure Zone, making Adventure Zone a primary way to either line your pockets or obtain items that are normally hard to get in Taxon. The only thing we ask is that you thread out the discovery of these items-- if you just handwave your character finding them, that defeats the purpose of creating a challenge for your character to overcome.

Adventure Zone is primarily 'self-moderated'; every once in a while the moderators will jump in to describe a threat your characters are facing, or the aliens will send you messages (and adjust your bank balance) due to what you do in the Zone. But ultimately things in Adventure Zone should be player-driven. It's best to plan to thread with another player, so that you can alternate in describing threats and challenges for each other. If you really want moderator involvement in a thread, just let us know.

You can nominate Adventure Zone possibilities here.

Past Adventure Zones:

February 2013: Medieval Fantasyland

Glitches

Much like Adventure Zone, glitches are things that offer a break from the monotony of Taxon. However, while characters have to seek out danger by entering Adventure Zone, glitches are out of character control. Sometimes they are intentional on the part of the aliens, and sometimes they are... not.

Glitches can be anything from a city-wide zombie apocalypse to a single character turning into a juvenile version of themselves. They can be as silly as a compulsory musical glitch, or as serious as everyone's darkest nature coming out to play. Players can suggest (or even run!) glitches, and can do that over here.

Past Notable Glitches (not a comprehensive list):

Zombie apocalypse
Jurassic Taxon
Musical Taxon
Body-swapped Taxon
Fairytale Taxon
The-Horrors-of-Old-Taxon
1950s Pleasantville Taxon
A languages glitch
Shipwrecked-on-a-jungle-island-with-homicidal-giant-pygmy-hamsters Taxon
City rearranging itself (not technically a glitch in the usual sense, but it's happened a few times)

The Tablet

Tablets are basically really expensive smartphones/iPads/flipbooks, complete with a stylus. You can draw or write on them, dictate to them, call somebody (or call EVERYBODY), project holograms of yourself, video-chat, and use them to get around Taxon. Each tablet has a 3-D map function that tells you where everyone is (unless they're cloaked). The tablets can be resized, anywhere from 'large iPad' to 'widget in your wrist-bracelet'.

This is more or less what the tablet will look like when your character first uses it. (Exact icons probably include a calendar, contacts list, and other such options.)

The tablet's default is touchscreen controls. The included stylus may also be used to control it, and voice commands can be configured as well. The settings menu is extensive, and tech-savvy characters can likely configure any sort of control mechanism they find feasible. Also, tech-savvy or tenacious characters can discover options to do things like change their name as displayed on the tablet, hide their location on the map, or hack the locked conversations of others (assuming OOC permission).

Characters' conversations are automatically logged by the tablet, so that they can review what they said later. The public conversations of other characters are also viewable (but as a player, check permissions first).

Tablets also have a tendency to broadcast when your character may not intend to. Great opportunities to embarrass your characters... or leak their secrets.

Post types

There are four basic formats your character can send tablet messages in: Holo, Visual, Voice, and Text. (Also known as Action, Video, Audio depending on your preferences.)

[holo]:
Like in Star Wars, only better! Holo posts are full color, very detailed three-dimensional holograms to 1:10 scale of the character posting, and that are transparent only if you squint and turn your head just right. These posts are recorded with transmissions between the character's bracelet and the tablet, so only the character posting will be seen by others, in addition to whatever objects are being held or touched up to two feet out from where contact is being made. (Meaning, most of a small chair will be visible if a character is sitting; a little bit of floor can be seen if they're standing or laying down; tables that are getting leaned against will be partially visible, but will then fade out into nothing.)*

[visual]:
Kind of like having a conversation over webcam! Except it's crystal clear quality and has no lag at all. The tablet's screen records the image of whatever it's facing (future technology, how great thou art) and will automatically focus on any face or faces in front of it so there's no awkward blur going on.

[voice]:
What it says on the tin. An audio-only broadcast, like a phone call.

[text]:
This can be hand-written or typed. The tablet comes with a small stylus pen for handwritten or drawn messages and a keyboard for typed ones, though anything your character sends or posts in this mode will include their name as it appears on the city map.