Course Corrections
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@Ghost Oh FFS... did you READ what was WRITTEN? I agreed with you you jackass. Just not on the count that one would roll a skill attached to coding and software engineering for being able to navigate Google and wikipedia.
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@Miss-Demeanor and I was extrapolating.
Edit/Afterthought: you jackass
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@mietze said in Course Corrections:
What's wrong with staff saying "Clearly you've put thought into this and we respect that but it's not a direction the game is going to go, no matter what you roll, by our choice?"
There's no need to do weird contortions to justify it, just say "We don't want that within the scope of the game."
Will some players get huffy or feel constrained? Yes. Would they have probably found something else to bitch about? Yes. Is it unreasonable for players to have the expectation that they have truly free reign without boundaries to change anything at all in the game environment whenever they wish to start rolling for it or because they want to? Yes. Has our community coddled this a bit by letting people down easy, throwing down false mechanical barriers, and deflecting the question so as not to cause a fit? Yes.
This is exactly what I was wondering about.
There's a pretty pervasive 'omg they won't let me change X!' outcry whenever someone finds one of these barriers -- and I think it's reasonable to have some barriers in place.
I don't think would this dramatically change the feel of the game in a way that makes it into something entirely and irrevocably different within the space of a week or less is not a bad litmus test for that question to arise: do we just say no, even though this is something this character could arguably accomplish.
Destroy the grid and most of the people in it is a pretty easy call, if you're willing to ask the question.
I see the question as a reasonable one to ask. That doesn't seem to be a common view, though, since for too long, I think, people weren't allowed to do anything that might upset some absurdly stagnant status quo.
People need to know that the world has room for (and ideally welcomes) change within the scope of what the game is intended to be, but that room isn't infinite, nor is the scope.
Someone could, arguably, take on the leadership of the Invictus on a game, be too powerful for players to take down easily, and say: "We are no longer the Invictus. We are now Bronies. Choose your magic butt-sticker and pony codename and get it tattooed within the week or I will call a blood hunt. I will now dominate all of you into dyeing your hair rainbow colors and wearing enough body glitter to make the entire cast of Twilight start muttering about overkill."
I would hope the players would find a way, but really... as a TL or headstaff, that would be a log I would read with my finger hovering over the retcon button, and I hate that button really a lot.
A player stepping in and running the faction? Should be welcome, even if they do some things differently -- so long as they're still within the theme and scope of the game, which the example above is really just not for most of the games currently running.
This is similar, to me, to 'I don't care how many dice you have or how good your roll is, you are not going to jump the English Channel on your motorcycle: this is an impossible task.'
Oh fucking well.
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@surreality said in Course Corrections:
@mietze said in Course Corrections:
What's wrong with staff saying "Clearly you've put thought into this and we respect that but it's not a direction the game is going to go, no matter what you roll, by our choice?"
This is exactly what I was wondering about.
To be clear, I did not say there was anything wrong with saying the above. But the topic is on course correction, right? So, to extrapolate from the original poster: what would you do in this situation?
I don't think there's a general rule, but there seems to be a general consensus that wackiness -- complete off-the-wall horseshit -- is what we'd normally bar, but some of us have a sliding scale on the rest of it.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@Ganymede I didn't think you had. I'm just further rambling after getting in for the day. @meitze pretty much nailed the issue I see with things.
I want to make 'can add things to the world and shape the game' as a real collaborative OOC feature in some respects, so defining this kind of line is one I'm looking at somewhat closely while working on those things. There will be times those things get a 'no, that's not going to work' (though I'd still probably give them the incentive for simply trying unless they decide to keep pitching dumb things they know won't pass muster to exploit that somehow; ex: 'How about a pistol?' No, but here's a thank you for putting the time and thought into that concept. 'How about a laser pistol?' No, but here's... 'How about a shark with a laser on its head?' '...and how about a nuke? A nuke shark!' I think you can stop now... ).
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In hindsight, I can't say that I've never did anything like Lego Girl, although maybe not quite as blatantly obvious. Kitty, my engineer gal on Serenity, had a (very) vintage Hello Kitty shirt. Not that I called the image Hello Kitty right out, but I did refer to the image as being a known character - white cat with a red bow in front of one ear. I did it due to all the 'hello, Kitty' puns that came to mind whenever someone would greet her ICly and me OOCly.
"Just leave me alone. I'm not myself. I'm falling apart, and I don't want you here." - ― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
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@surreality said in Course Corrections:
This is similar, to me, to 'I don't care how many dice you have or how good your roll is, you are not going to jump the English Channel on your motorcycle: this is an impossible task.'
What if the character was Arthur Fonzarelli?
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@Apu said in Course Corrections:
Kitty, my engineer gal on Serenity, had a (very) vintage Hello Kitty shirt
Alas, Firefly canon actually includes Earth That Was. It's in canon that the greater Firefly universe is a direct, forward-in-time descendant from our time.
Battlestar Galactica goes the other direction. BSG predates historic Greece.
And Legos, Sweden, Zorbing, etc.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
True. So I guess a character having a Hello Kitty item wouldn't be too horribly anti-thematic. It'd be more of a matter if pop culture would survive all those hundreds of years.
"Just leave me alone. I'm not myself. I'm falling apart, and I don't want you here." - ― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
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I think it's a good example of a line that's not hard-and-fast. I'd probably look twice at Hello Kitty in a Firefly game. But it's also a setting where there's clearly Old Earth iconography still around, and where cartoons and advertising imagery exist (I'm thinking of the Fruity Oaty Bars from the movie, and the imagery in that jingle isn't a million miles from Hello Kitty). So it's at once a thing I'd find kind of jarring, but also a thing that upon reflection I don't actually think is wrong.
This is why I don't think players policing this stuff among themselves is a particularly good idea. Take it up the chain to staff or shrug it off. These things either fix themselves, aren't actual issues unless you're anal-retentive, or, frankly, reveal players as morons that it's preferable to avoid (if you're mean, like me).
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@Apu said in Course Corrections:
True. So I guess a character having a Hello Kitty item wouldn't be too horribly anti-thematic. It'd be more of a matter if pop culture would survive all those hundreds of years.
Malcom references Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Serenity, the First Laser Pistol is in the episode Trash, so while I'd cast serious doubt that even an advanced cotton/polyester blend would survive wearable after a few centuries, that some crazy great grandmother could have resurrected an image from stories. It's plausible in its anachronism as a rare cultural flotsam, because of its rareness.
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@Apu @Thenomain Or, in my preferred way of thinking, that kind of like how some people nowadays are really into Greek Mythology (or at least enjoy a good toga party) that somehow, despite the passage of time, someone thought the Hello Kitty (perhaps an image in an archive, a museum, or an old photograph of teenaged girls from Earth that was) was fucking cute as hell and had it printed it on a tee shirt.
Digging up old culture references from the past is way more explainable that drudging up pop culture references that haven't happened yet.
For the record, I thought Kitty's Hello Kitty shirt was badass, even while she was tasing my character and two others in an ill-advised, completely accidental shower brawl incident.
"HAT TRICK"
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DOUBLE POST
One of my favorite ways an RPG system approached stuff like this was in Eclipse Phase. In the setting Earth is a destroyed nightmare wasteland, which requires all of society to live in space on stations, habitats, etc. It's a trans-humanistic setting.
In the flavor text around culture and how it's approached, they mention that since money isn't needed anymore; that old, obsolete Earth concepts had become a sort of fashion.
- A gypsy-esque coin bra made out of nickels and dimes
- A lucky chain keepsake of a tearing from a $5 bill trapped in a clear, plastic case
- Old AMERICAN EXPRESS and DISCOVER cards hanging from a mobile in a cramped habitat dorm room
