Best posts made by Arkandel

I'm enjoying Tyranny. Playing as the bad guy in RPGs is always neat, and it's got a very heavy emphasis on plot, dialogue and choices.

The holiday season is usually reserved for tech requests by friends and family. "Hey, can you fix my computer issue? It will only take you a second!". Unless this comes from people actually close to me and not semi-friends I talk to a couple of times a year that's fine.

My actual peeve though comes in the form of that rare combination of someone both asking for my opinion and defending what they're already doing that they need help with, whether technical or otherwise.

This year's came in the form of nutritional advice. I mean no one is really eating properly during the holiday season, there are too many damn cookies, desserts and family get-togethers full of snacks for that to happen which is okay - but if you ask me then why do you argue what I say?

"What should I do?"
"Manage your caloric budget"
"But I hear intermittent fasting works!"
"Sure, that's a way to help you manage your caloric budget. First you'd need to calculate your TDEE and then track your intake, I can give you some links?"
"Eating ice increases your metabolism since your body needs to cool off."
"Uhm, sure? But it'd be a very tiny spend on your budget, you need..."
"Or eating celery, that's negative calories!"
"Well, sure, but it's still not that much at all."
"I'm doing this great diet I read about on that web site"
"Well if you like it and it works then do that."
"But I'm not losing weight!'
"... Then why do you think it's great?"

I've been held hostage in pretty much this conversation in small variations twice in the last two weeks. Look, I'd never initiate that kind of chat - do what you want, people. But if you ask me then I'll tell you, and if what you're doing isn't working why are you defending it in the same breath you're come to ask me questions about what to do instead?

Also no, walking 'a lot' won't do much either if you eat junk at work, which I can't even blame anyone for when our management fills every available surface with sugar-filled stuff every morning.

@krmbm I'm not looking to do it as much as I'll have to. Be the change you want in the world, etcetc.

I'd much rather just play a modern tech WoT MUSH, but c'est la vie.

@magee101 said in General Video Game Thread:

@Arkandel said in General Video Game Thread:

@Coin Are you more used to a controller, is that why you got one for the PC instead of using a mouse+keyboard?

I've found that for third person action games I really really enjoy a controller over a mouse+keyboard.

I've owned an XBone for a year+ now and I still can't say I like using a controller. For just about anything...other than sports games, maybe.

@auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

But the worst, the worst is that he is constantly trying to weigh in and lecture people on their eating habits and diets. Like, @Arkandel knows what he's talking about. That's clear enough. But I don't want someone who eats fast food 2-3 times a day trying to tell me that my meal isn't good enough (I usually have a sandwich, carrots, and either an orange or pretzels depending on mood for lunch). Esp. when it's usually 'you should buy <whatever frozen diet meal he's into right now>.'

I'm sick of it, but really I'm sick of him. For so many reasons. But the slob behavior and the need to comment on everyone's eating habits are big ones.

For starters it doesn't matter what shape you're in - unsolicited advice is a no-no. Even at any half-decent gym it never happens; no one should come over while you're working out to give you tips no matter if they're a world-class contender unless you already know them and that's the kind of relationship you have with them... or, I guess, if you're in immediate clear and present danger or something.

The same thing happens with technical issues though. I've heard too many lectures about how Google is stealing our information from people who don't understand how any of this works - who are feeding Facebook everything they do the rest of the time. Personally if I'm sitting at a table and the conversation gets to these matters I shut up unless I'm asked.

@packrat said in Wheel of Time mechanics:

So say you are an Andoran Lady.

You have an income of (random number) 1000 Crowns a year.

That's what I was thinking, yes. The following parts are tricky though, especially if we want the overhead for staff to be as light as possible (which we dooo):

1. How do we, as system designers, ensure a faction won't be screwed over either because the player in control of it lacks the OOC skills needed to administer its economy efficiently? Do we let them get in a hole? Because just like RL once you're in a hole the probability increases you'll stay in there for a while.

2. How do we deal with OOC alliances? Say you're playing the Andoran Lady and I roll a Tairen merchant who gets 200 Crowns a year... and I donate them to you, yet almost never play.

3. How do we deal with dinos? Remember, XP may be capped but resources are stable (more or less). So you've been playing for a year and you've been securing alliances, etc... so by now your income is 9000 a year. You can outspend newcomers nine to one! And, as noted before, the resource pool is finite - it's a zero sum game. When you make more others make less. This could either encourage politics or become... messy.

Thoughts?

@wildbaboons said in Wheel of Time mechanics:

People do love their fake popularity.

I can think of nothing MUSH players - in general - want more. Not XP, not bonuses on their dice, nothing. This above all.

@Rook I tried to play LoL a couple of times over the years. People are so impatient with newbies, and the only way to go through being a newbie is to play... which is made unpleasant. No, thanks.

But more and more games are multiplayer-only these days (or might as well be, since the PvE campaign is so short). Perhaps it's so they don't need to develop more advanced AI, I don't know.

For all y'all single ladies out there.

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

The former is a little harder. I agree that taking away gamist incentivisation is a good start, but I worry that @seraphim73's idea of having only 'karma' as a stat would also risk people running too wild with their character builds. I like @arkandel's idea of rewarding failure but I feel like this too is a band-aid, as it would still, ultimately, be about a system of rewards and progression. However a band-aid might be the best that can be hoped for.

It isn't a bandaid, and it's easy to see why if you look at stat-less sheet-less games; there are no hard carrots there - no XP, no gear, nothing - yet people still chase victory for basically the same reasons @faraday mention. Their characters are their proxies, and the game still rewards winning over losing.

What do you get for being successful on such a game? Oh, everything. You have access to exclusive scenes, for starters; there are plenty of "high council meetings" in MU* to the point it's almost a separate trope for them, where the Duchess and the Count meet their peers to share secrets and make decisions. You are among those who get the spotlight in public scenes, who are invited to social events and are bestowed the cool ranks.

You don't get those - as a rule - for failing. It's not a matter of attributes and dice pools (or at least not exclusively) but rather the fact that it reflects how real life works; politicians, business people and generals don't advance in their perspective careers because they are challenged but because they beat those challenges.

Books are just different because they present readers with different perspectives. In the Robin Hobb's Farseer series Fitz isn't a powerhouse although he gets his chance to kick ass, he's a character repeatedly brought down hard, and we as readers are given the chance to empathize with the measure of his sacrifices.

Something like this is not going to work on a MUSH the way we design them because for characters like Fitz, the sacrifice itself would simply take agency away from them. They would get access to fewer scenes, less name recognition, and their ability to be the catalyst of great things would be lessened since what drives roleplay is perception, and the ultimate focus of too many people is getting a stranglehold on the spotlight.

This effect isn't intentional but it's not accidental either; most games explicitly reward the latter and they punish the former.

To change it you are fighting an uphill battle. If you want a literary experience then you need to build a game meant to emulate and incentivize that, which means breaking free of traditional MU* tropes since they are doing the exact opposite of what you want, and a MU*'s culture is based on actions and not words. You can't say what you want on a post or wiki page, you need to design then implement it in your entire game, from CGen to the grid.

Alt right.

@aerianyx said in Good TV:

I can't say enough good stuff about it.

What I always loved about sci-fi is that it's not about lasers and giant monsters (at least for me). That's just a filler, and it's what the new movie versions of Star Trek somehow managed to miss completely. They just didn't get it.

Science fiction is about examining aspects of humanity in a vacuum by putting them on show through viewpoints that don't exist. Gender equality in a society completely different than ours, addictions to things we don't possess yet, discrimination over traits not found in our species, figuring out how to coexist with cultures absurdly different than ours.

Orville does this well. Not only is your colleague a slug-like thing but you commiserate with them over your dating woes. They are as dumb as you are, they hate going to work in the morning as much as you do, they make idiotic jokes and don't have it together any more than you do.

That's amazing stuff.

@faraday said in Heroic Sacrifice:

This is not a subtle loss, though. This is the main loss for an awful lot of players, myself included.

Yeah, I meant subtle as in... it's easy to miss. But it's definitely a major factor, as big as the XP loss.

I couldn't give a crap about the XP/rank lost -- on the games I play, mechanical advancement is downplayed or non-existent.

Fair enough, but many do. More so on MU* where XP is majorly a factor of time invested, so when Joe died and your 800 XP went away, to rack them back up it would take another RL year. When you are reeling from every other part of that loss as well, this can easily push you well over the edge - and it's completely understandable. You're not a bad player if you leave a game over something like this (although you are if you respond in other, less sociable ways ).

I care because my investment is in the character. Their relationships, their personality, their goals -- their story in other words.

That's a really tough problem to fix from a systemic point of view. The way I'd put it is that your RP partners are gone as part of those relationships vanishing into the ether; your character's boy/girlfriend, their hard earned alliance with that tough S.O.B. Gangrel with a heart of gold... gone.

Hell, sometimes (and this is another 'subtle' thing) players are discouraged from rolling their next PC into the same faction let alone group out of concern it would be a clone of their last PC, or a 'revenge character' or... whatever. So basically what this translates to is that if you are removed from play you can't rejoin your friends, which is also a major blow.

So of course most people don't want that to happen to them. Barring truly exceptional, mature players you know who doesn't mind? Someone who has nothing to lose. No shit I'm okay with my character dying when I'm barely playing him, he has no allies and next to no past.

@pyrephox said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:

And in MU*s, I notice this is promoted by people who ask for/demand a certain skill level before even letting you into a plot or giving you RP. Hell, even on ARES, with F3S - which is NOT a particularly 'high threshold' system - I've had to shut someone down because they wanted to find the mechanically "best" person to take on a plot scene, rather than base it on RP factors.

I think this sounds like the 'arms race' phenomenon I had seen before in nWoD MU*.

Aside from the other, social factors, it can be devastating to the entire game if left unchecked. If Big Puncher (or Rich Noble, Vampire Hypnotist, etc) get significantly more RP simply for having those stats, but playing a chef just... doesn't, then you aren't going to see chefs getting rolled. You won't see much of anything rolled other than the specific archetypes the game - quite possibly inadvertently - promotes.

And that can and does affect the overall theme.

@zombiegenesis said in Good TV:

@arkandel I'll say this for the new Trek movies; I thought the cast had decent chemistry. They still pale when compared to the TOS movies but I enjoyed them more than most of the TNG movies.

Oh I enjoyed them for the most part - as movies. They entertained me. If I was judging them as space opera, generic sci-fi or just on the merit of what was on the screen they'd have been fine; flawed, but I'd pay a ticket to watch them.

They are just not Star Trek. Obviously this is a subjective issue but what Trek means is overcoming problems through intellect, logic and relying on multiple individuals you trust as a team to overcome obstacles and not just shooting your way out of them. There wasn't one time I thought James T. Kirk was brilliant, pulling victory out of the jaws of defeat by coming up with a plan no one had seen coming; I saw a guy who rode motorcycles and shot at evil aliens.

There's still lots to like about that, but it ain't Trek - for me.

Now Star Trek Discovery is a different beast. I quite enjoy it as well, even if after its first two episodes I wasn't so sure. But that's definitely Trek.

@faraday said in Heroic Sacrifice:

@arkandel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

Fair enough, but many do.

Yeah, I wasn't meaning to downplay the impact of XP loss when it happens, merely to illustrate that you can take advancement completely out of the equation and a lot of people still won't want to start over purely for social reasons. As you say, it's not a systems problem, which is why I don't think it's going to be solved through systems/incentives.

Agreed, but I think that's not relevant to most of this debate here. I mean the question isn't really how to handle character death but overall adversity.

You don't lose the character - which we agree on carries heavy social consequences - because someone called them a poohead and everyone laughed OMG.

@insomniac7809 said in Thirtsy Sword Lesbians wins some ENies:

I mean, the title says it all, doesn't it?

I read it as 'thirty sword lesbians' and I didn't know if it was referring to the number of blades or ladies involved.

@Derp Else you'd be trespassing and @Ganymede would have to prove damages in a civil action.

Popular settings done differently.

We've all seen stock nWoD, sandboxes, L&L based on simplified mechanics, etc.

Doing something completely radical might have a niche but throwing some assumptions aside and modernizing an 'old' favorite instead of copying much of what came before with a facelift could be interesting.

That way you can have players ready and interested in what you're doing without repeating the mistakes of the past (you can instead make new ones of your own ).

@wildbaboons said in Anywhere for Requiem 2E?:

Yeah.. I think that's why most are set in the USA. Most players are from there, we are familiar with it and don't have to worry about folks telling us "you're doing it wrong!" regarding the setting.

That's why you need to go with a semi-fictional/Hollywood approach for all things unfamiliar. Anything else is madness - try to actually set a game in Roman times and keep things consistent within the historic era and it will most likely be a disaster.

Turn it into a Xena production and it can work just fine.

But barring very specific goals (typically someone trying to show off) why even try for the faithful, realistic approach? You want a game in Russia? Base it on tropes all the way. Corruption, crime, Putin, violence and rivers of vodka.

@Ganymede Pffft. http://prairieweather.typepad.com/big_blue_stem/2014/12/beloved-disgusting-food.html