@hedgehog I couldn't tell if the woman who came in wanting a Carpenters album was being intentionally ironic or not.
Posts made by Autumn
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RE: Where's your RP at?
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RE: Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning
Sometimes a little RP blocking is excusable. Heck, sometimes it's the right thing to do.
If you've been playing a character in an established situation, and a new player comes in and wants to establish something that would change your character's world in a way you aren't comfortable with, it's okay to say no. If you're not happy with saying that your character's childhood guardian, whose death set her on the path to be who she is today, is actually secretly alive and turned to evil, that doesn't make you a terrible person. (If you are willing, awesome, but there's nothing terrible about saying no.) "Collaborative" doesn't mean you have to bend over so far backwards that you break your own spine.
I just try to remember that this is equally the case for everyone else. No matter how minor a revision I think it is to existing continuity to have the Marquis of Montrose have a secret illegitimate daughter, I don't know what other people may have built on top of continuity as it exists.
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RE: Where's your RP at?
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Fallen World. It's on the slow side at the moment, although some of that is me being low-energy recently. But when it's on, it's on.
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City of Hope. Which is ... I mean, the quality of play there is wildly variable. Wildly variable. There are some pretty awful players, and I don't think that's entirely being an RP snob. Still. It's a big game, which means it's usually at least possible to find play when you want it.
I tried Arx -- several times, in fact -- and it just hasn't clicked for me. And none of my Fallcoast characters ever really clicked. C'est la guerre.
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RE: RL things I love
Snow days.
(Coming soon to the RL Anger thread: "Digging out after a blizzard.")
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RE: Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning
I make it a general rule to try to keep things strictly IC as much as possible. While there are a handful of people who are exceptions, I don't usually talk with other players about anything other than what bears directly on play. If I think something in a game is weird or doesn't make sense or just plain stupid, the odds are that either I will leave quietly, or else continue playing and just keep my mouth shut about it when I'm not talking to the aforementioned handful of exceptions.
All the same -- and I say this without making any judgment as to whether the people saying this in this specific case are justified in feeling this way or not -- if I felt at risk of getting kicked off the game, or even getting my head bitten off by staff, for not keeping my mouth shut -- then the choice between "shut up and play" or "leave quietly" would be a pretty clear one.
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RE: Forum Game Thread
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. And then the murders began.
Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. And then the murders began.
A lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. And then the murders began.
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RE: Do you ever include non-Mu events into your games?
@Arkandel said in Do you ever include non-Mu events into your games?:
@Ganymede The Fate guy would ruin it. "hey, lookie that, another natural 20... huh, what do you know."
And then Shrike punches him in the face and tells him not to do that again.
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RE: Do you ever include non-Mu events into your games?
While I have never tried it, I always thought it would be a lot of fun to have a Dream Park-esque cyberpunk campaign where the players generate two sets of characters: one for their "actual" characters, using Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2020 or some similar set of rules. And then another set for the characters their characters play in virtual reality fantasy adventures, using AD&D rules. And then just switch back and forth between rulesets depending on whether we're in the "real" game or in the "virtual" game. That way you can have exotic fantasy adventures while lampshading some of the weirder elements of the way Dungeons and Dragons works, but they still have impact because if you "die" in-game, your "real" character's lifestyle suffers as a consequence ...
Um. Anyway, that was sort of a roundabout answer. But I think it'd be neat.
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RE: Logging your activity
I log everything. It's not even really something I consciously think about any more, just a reflex to do "/log -wworldname worldname-YYYY-MM-DD.txt" before I log in somewhere.
It is only fitfully useful. But I found that my judgment for "this is worth logging" versus "this is not worth logging" often fails in both directions, so I thought it would be better to take my judgment out of the loop.
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RE: RL Anger
But more than a gun, I kinda want this: https://www.preppergunshop.com/flamethrowers
Why settle for one or the other?
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RE: RL Anger
Because I do pack heat.
Yes, but do you carry a firearm?
But no longer. Instead it's just... a variety of knives conveniently placed (for me) around my room.
It's important to have options for the zombie apocalypse. You can only stab zombies with the same knife for so long before it gets boring.
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RE: How important are rooms poll
I like large grids. I enjoy the ability for players to spread out across the map, I enjoy reading well-done descriptions of places that builders thought would be interesting to make public, and having a lot of established options for where to go sometimes helps me think of things that would be fun to RP. (Yes, with temprooms I have infinite options for where I can go, but that obliges me to pick one out of that infinite number, and I'm vulnerable to option paralysis.)
However. Large grids really, really, really need to have good navigation tools. If I need to go somewhere, then the game needs to be able to tell me how to get there from where I am in as few steps as possible. Ideally through something like RtA's +go that just takes me there, rather than telling me the fifty exits I need to take to get there.
I am of the opinion that the problem with large grids is not grid size per se, but rather, that large grids require more tools to take best advantage of them, and often don't get those tools.
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RE: Roleplaying writing styles
@Tempest said in Roleplaying writing styles:
When I hear 'brevity' I just picture those Elysium-sort of poses we're all familiar with. Or people who will just pose "She smiles." or some other 2/3/4 word action in every pose they write. Yes, we all abuse those small gesture, but like...give me some flavor please. "She laughs and flashes a cocky smile at Jane after the woman's comment." Not just "She smiles."
For me, brevity in RP is aggravating if the person isn't posing quickly and frequently. You know the kind -- the person we've all played with where you wait 15 minutes for a one-sentence pose? That will not stand. My best experiences with people posing briefly have been those who respond quickly, and usually more than once every time it's their 'turn' in the scene.
I suppose you could make the argument that if someone's outputting half a dozen one-line poses in two minutes, then it's no longer 'brevity' per se, it's just a stylistic quirk of using multiple lines to convey something that someone else might use a single long paragraph for. And I'm not sure I'd argue otherwise.
@Ganymede said in Roleplaying writing styles:
My style changes distinctly when you're involved. You know what I mean.
You ... you mean you aren't like that with everyone? blushing
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RE: Mobile phone usage poll
@Thenomain Plus, that way you can use GNU screen! And it's easier to keep all your logs organized.
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RE: Roleplaying writing styles
The games I started on -- and this goes back a ways -- tended to focus on shorter, more frequent poses rather than longer ones. It was totally expected that people would just pose something like 'X grunts' or 'Y rolls her eyes' and then in another thirty seconds or whatever they'd pose again. People who would routinely pose things four or five lines long would get roundly mocked on backchannels for being too wordy. The focus was all about keeping the action moving, rather than about carefully crafting evocative prose.
There were some people who could do very effective things with this. If anyone remembers the original player of Finndo @AmberMUSH, this was very much his signature style, and he managed to put an amazing air of menace into poses that, today, would get laughed out of the room for being too curt and lacking in detail.
As late as about 2005-2006 this was still more or less the style I adhered to. Somewhere between one to three lines, weighted toward the former, except for the occasional scene-setting or highly dramatic pose. A lot of short, choppy, dialog-oriented lines. Keeping the action moving. By 2008 I had pretty much migrated to the longer, less compressed style, although even a lot of what I wrote that late now looks a little curt, a little too rushed, to my eye today.
I still think this is a valid way of doing things, and it has some advantages over the long line-by-line, one-person-after-another style. When there are 20 people in a barroom, there's just not enough time to complete a scene if we wait for everyone to complete a paragraph in succession. But going short also has a lot of disadvantages; it privileges people who think and type fast over those who are more contemplative, it doesn't mesh well with a hard initiative/turn-by-turn combat system, and it's hard to be as effective on a limited word count and in a very short time as it is when you have more time to think and more words to spend. Like the old joke "I was going to write you a short letter, but I didn't have time -- so I wrote you a long letter instead."
In a large scene do you (consciously) change your posing style?
My style changes gradually as a scene size increases. In one-on-ones I'm at my most indulgent, but, as more people are involved, I get progressively less and less wordy. I focus less on being artistic, and more on being clear, fast, and timely. My 1995 self would still think that my 2016 self's fastest posing rate was still unconscionably slow and wordy, but there's a lot of other things we'd disagree on, too.
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RE: Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning
@Lisse24 said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
This is a result of what I view as the major falling down of Arx. Don't get me wrong, this is the best thought out game I've played on since RfK and it generally provides what I look for in a game. However, the help files read like they've been written by someone with a technical background and they don't actually tell the players how to use the systems or commands or what these systems and commands are for.
I just want to echo this for emphasis. The game has a lot of really neat ideas but the need for more and better documentation is pretty dire.
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RE: Technocracy!
Agent processing complete! Feel free to poke Juliette, while I figure out what I'm doing again. Not that I'm certain I ever knew in the first place.
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RE: Technocracy!
I always underestimate either how long original recipe Mage chargen takes me to finish. Or else I overestimate how much time I have on weekends.
Still. Science Officer Juliette Keyes will be, um, reporting for duty in the next day or two, approval permitting.
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RE: Technocracy!
@ixokai Well, we can definitely fix that in one way or another.
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RE: Technocracy!
@Ataru Oh, absolutely! The more the merrier, I think. Even if we somehow got more people than could realistically crew a spaceship, we could work something out where we kick it old-school Dungeons and Dragons campaign style and various sub-groups go on missions depending on who showed up that day.