@rook said in How do you construct your characters?:

@thenomain
I am coming to you, sir, to critique and make recommendations if/when I get ready to open.

You called this down on yourself.

I don’t mind helping, but this is the kind of thing that should be done by multiple people trying to make a character without help from you or anyone else. They do have to treat the testing honestly at first; you can test against people deliberately trying to break or misinterpret the systems some other time, like from game open to game close.

Every published board game goes through this; the developer gets people who have never seen the game before in a room, gives them the rules and components, and sits back to watch and take notes. We don’t normally have the time or ability to cold test like this, especially after the game has opened, but if we’re fortunate we will get enough players so we can read the temperature in the room.

But yes, I can criticize. Boy howdy can I criticize. The hard part is using my power for good, not whining.

@akurel I never got very far in Xcom 2. RNG was my hated enemy. No amount of savescumming could save the earth.

@arkandel said in Do you buy your RPG books?:

Digital files, when downloaded, don't take away anything from someone's inventory.

But it reduces the potential market pool by one: You. Each 'one' reduces the market pool, which reduces the selling power of that item. If they were following elementary market rules, they would respond to a decrease in demand (people paying for it) with a decrease in price. This has worked for the music industry and briefly for the TV industry, though I think as the streaming platforms fracture the number of people willing to pirate will rise again.

Atoms are easy to count, but those things that can be converted to bits are being converted to bits and the atomic-based economics can't be applied wholesale anymore. The movie industry is trying to hold on with both hands and their teeth to their control, and that content providers are also access providers (or strong-arming them, vis a vis Youtube) will certainly help the businesses charge what they believe is right rather than let market forces dictate.

Apple and Spotify are making money hand over fist (tho one is only now crawling into the black) because that's what the market wants. If video wasn't so expensive to make then maybe the same could happen there, though I should reiterate just how much I'm enjoying The Good Place and that can't be expensive at all.

Anyway, most writers don't get paid much. Most of us don't get paid much, but still, buy things from writers you especially like.

@surreality
I would say that could stay on the wiki, I think i am one of the hardliners on not wanting to mess with the wiki while playing so what I want on the game is all things I would need in the playing of the game. (Minus the rules which can't be reproduced in the case of WoD or other tabletop of course.)

Information on the wiki could be more in depth and wiki specific for things like using the wiki but I also would not want to have to log on the game to get info about how to do X on the wiki.

@derp said in System dealbreakers:

@thenomain said in System dealbreakers:

Gangrel was my second choice, but overlaps a bit too hard with Werewolf. Well. Depending on which Werewolf Princess archetype we'd be going for.

Think of the TS possibilities though.

Yawn.

@ixokai said in Period Piece Face vs Modern Face:

I am to a certain extent aware physical bodies have changed over time, gotten taller, but I'm not aware (outside of inconsistent tendencies in grooming) faces have.

Just not getting where this is coming from.

Period face?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/26/14/1d/26141d9d23438dedfa45a6b36c811ab3.jpg

@sunny said in Code systems that make it easier to get on with the business of roleplaying:

@auspice Yeah, can do the same on both Arx and M1963, too. Choose the colors and so on. It is one of my favorite new options people make available.

OH OH OH OH OH OH OH.

EMIT LABEL IS THE BEST THING EVER.

It puts [name] at the beginning of an emit for who did it.

The colors thing on Arx for your chars name and for quotes basically changed my entire life for the better.

@auspice said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

I played a heroin addict on a game once. I made sure to be careful of who I played it around (since I know it can be triggering), but what surprised me more than people who it bothered (which I get)...

... was how lightly other people took it? Like to some it was this cutesy 'oh your character has the addict flaw? Mine does, too! To caffeine!'

If you're going to play an addict, I'm going to take it lightly not because I would make light of it, but because I happen to live near the county with the highest per capita death-from-overdose rate in the country. (We made the news.)

Addiction isn't funny, but I handle the grim reality with absurd laughter. To do otherwise would make me either severely depressed or violently enraged. (I've had a couple of friends long ago who died of overdoses to other drugs.)

@layla
At that level of desired control it seems like they would be better suited to writing a script or novel. My its very nature a MU will have multiple folks each with a slightly different idea of what the setting and genre are. Ideally you have a staff that is firm enough to provide coherency while also giving players enough freedom to stretch creatively. that place sounds limited to the extent that you would be expected to follow a script without the courtesy of being given one.

In contrast, I care where what behavior goes. It's a utility thing.

@surreality said in Questionably viable character types and tropes (tangent from staff ethics convo):

@tinuviel I don't know if the thread has just come full circle here (re: some concepts don't work well in this medium and should potentially be restricted), or if we just agree or disagree really strongly.

Let's say I have a scene posted for 'it's a normal day at the diner when two thugs show up and try to rob the joint', and Giles, the sniper, the seamstress, and let's say someone specializing in playing guitar, and another who is a crime scene tech are the ones who sign on to show up.

Are you suggesting that each of these characters should reasonably have a chance to demonstrate their primary concept skill in this scene or someone is a failure as an ST? (Sniping, occult research, tailoring, playing guitar, and investigating a crime that hasn't yet occurred?)

I could fit everyone but the sniper into this scene. Have you seen the Story of Ricky? There's a guy that murders with knitting needles. BAM. Have you seen 80s wrestling? The honkey tonk man used a guitar to great effect in combat. Occult Research, well, the thugs likely have tattoos.. or something...

You're probably right, I just wanted to picture that guy from Ricky-Oh and the Honky Tonk man teaming up in a buddy cop movie.

You could probably build and run Penn on any modern Android device using Termux (you can get this from the Playstore). I have not tried this with Penn but I /have/ gotten Evennia to build and run on my LG G7 and a cheap Asus Chromebook that also supported Android apps using these instructions. I'm pretty sure that anything that can handle Evennia, can handle a simple MUSH server.

@ixokai

I think that it's interesting and indeed very important that the other person involved, really the person who was the victim of her passion play, said they didn't want it retconned. While I go on about how "The Game" is more important than a single player, players do make up The Game, and it must have been a hellish situation to find yourself administrating.

Finding the importance in balancing respect toward multiple people is when you can't just say "Don't Be a Dick" and when you can't go with strict policy. A mix of both can inform without demanding, and I appreciate it when people try.

I know for a fact this kind of thing, with this person, goes back to before 2010. He got booted from a game then for indiscretions that carried over into Real Ass Life.

It ain't changing anytime soon.

@gangofdolls I think you pretty much should always do it, and if you have doubts about whether you should just say, 'Hey I don't wanna make a big deal about this, and I'm not sure this is actionable, but this happened so you know just in case it points to a larger pattern'. It can be decisive if there was larger issues and even something you had that seemed minor was indicative of a larger, worse pattern of behavior.

@alzie Yep, they made sets/material for some of them (there was a full RPG for Burning Sands, too). They also made material for non-samurai (monks, Ninja, Kolat) playable nonhumans (nezumi, naga) and various other weirdness. RPG splatbook creep is a thing (see: old White Wolf), it doesn't mean that all of that material is good or easy to integrate.

Of the stuff you've mentioned, the Great Famine is probably the most sensible. I've always liked it as a less grandiose, more human take on things, and avoids totally changing the cosmology, technology, etc as many of the others do. All the others also kind of buck default game assumptions (even changing the core great clans) and may be hard to do, especially with a new ruleset.

@surreality

It's funny when that happens.

@cheesegrater

God, I hate you.

@tragedyjones said in White Wolf Street Fighter:

Cool! I only briefly flipped through that book, once. Never saw that part.

Yeah, it's pretty good. It's like a deck-building card game crossed with an RPG. Any White Wolf game can be cheesed, but the simplicity of the mechanics prevent a lot of that, and the card game aspect brings in elements that add entirely new player skills to gaming.

@arkandel For the record as someone familiar with the period, I think a game in 1950s Iran would be all sorts of awesome oink