Best posts made by Arkandel

@thatonedude said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:

But ... more fun for who?

Hopefully everyone involved?

I'm not sure where you are going with this.

Updated and excited about my new Jedi on Dawn of Defiance - I never played on a Star Wars MU* before.

I think I'll spend the first scene turning my lightsaber on and off again. Pssshhewzzzzzzz!

New gym. This one isn't a commercial chain, there's no marketing stuff, corporate inspirational banners or daycare rooms for soccer moms, it consists only of a bunch of benches, iron plates, racks and barbells in a big square space. No Justine Bieber or Taylor Swift blasting on the speakers either, this one is all about Aerosmith, Guns and Roses, Springsteen and their kin.

So I ride my bike over all pumped up for my first session! Personal record on the first set of flat bench press, woohoo! Another set! I'm rolling! Third set, I'm rolling! Forth set... ugh, fail on the last rep, roll of shame.

... It turns out being at a new gym isn't the same as being bitten by a radioactive gainz spider.

@thatonedude said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:

Right, but again... Perception of intent/attitude. I don't know the player that did this job in the example and I only know @Arkandel from his posts here.

Sure, but why does that matter? This isn't a post about that incident, I'm not exposing someone for being a jerk or anything (they weren't), it's just an example.

With that said: What if that player didn't know how to move forward? What if they asked someone else what they should do and that person said open a job and CC the person that ran the event/plot? What if a million other things that wasn't the person being a tool was what really was going down? Granted I know there is the possibility this person /decided by fiat/ but there is also the possibility that he/she didn't.

None of those things would have mattered because this anecdote wasn't meant as a witchhunt for that player. It was to illustrate that STs in the nWoD/GMC needs to oversee control of certain story elements - in this case pacing and exposition - in order to use them as seeds and hooks into other arcs - and then try to frame lapses of that control have a larger effect for the overall setting.

To use a more abstract example, imagine if I'm playing Sam in your Supernatural game using nWoD rules. You present me with an unknown creature type I've never seen before and plant a potential resolution path for me; in fact that could be the beat and bones of the story, going on a quest around pawn shops, redneck psychics and infiltrating the local police department's evidence room to find all the missing pieces. Sure, I might have missed clues (in which case you can either remind me somehow or feed me information through some other plot device) but deciding on my own I will research this on my laptop and the answer has to be there because I got 1 success isn't an acceptable outcome. It trivializes the content.

Worse than that, in fact, is that since Dean (or the rest of the party, since we're talking about MU*) doesn't get to come along and do stuff too. I, alone, handle all that by rolling.

My point is as a player, that attitude is felt and it has to be part of what makes this whole thing a problem. The ST/Player/Staff "issue".

It's not an attitude. It's just how the interaction between STs and players works. There needs to be some chemistry there, and sometimes it works but other times it doesn't. If you don't like your ST then you can find someone else to run stories for you instead - and I don't mean that in a negative way.

Your username is the most 90s thing I've seen this week.

(Not a RfK player, I just wanted to say this )

Cat.

Cat decided having less than 30% food in her bowl wasn't acceptable at 4 am. She came and whined at me until I fixed this atrocity.

Then as I was drifting back to sleep she was of course gobbling it up like a fool so, as usual, she threw half of it out again. But that made her feel bad! So she came and whined at me to pet her so she'd feel better... at 4:30 am.

I should surely be sainted since, when I finally managed to get up to my alarm in the morning bleary eyed and stumbling about only to see her blissfully asleep on a couch I didn't wake her up out of pure spite.

I've very rarely seen issues with someone taking too many liberties with NPCs. When it happened at all, it was when those were established ones (the barman at that Elysium) who had been used often and someone commandeered him to have him do something out of character.

It's a theoretical issue and not a practical one, IMHO. I'd gladly pay the price for the occasional nutball in exchange for extra spice of life in RP, but that's not the hold up.

@EmmahSue Yes, but did she fight crime?

@WTFE said in Retail "Horror" Stories:

• approximately $50,000 (1980s money!) of cocaine in brick form

I'm picturing the cops were wearing light blue double-breasted jackets over white shirts. Don't ruin this for me.

@thebird said in Retail "Horror" Stories:

About 60 cake orders a day all weekend. One of our three decorators broke her foot, and a bunch of other stuff and was in the hospital (still joke she was the lucky one)

TIL that although war is hell, cake decorating involves an attrition rate.

@coin said in Geist 2.0 Kickstarter:

We could just do it all ourselves. Changeling. Geist. Add some Kuei-Jin in there. I mean at this point I think we could write-up some badass fan-supplements faster than they could produce actual content.

Yes, but then it'd be our home-grown content and not universal. Much of the appeal of using an established, public system is that you can get fans to play the game more or less as it was written.

Rewriting an existing system seems more restrictive than making your own completely from scratch. For example why use the Vampire: the Requiem branding instead of going with your own vampire mechanics as a brand new game?

Aislin! HI2U

@Luna I do ask! I think what happens often is that the person taking your order isn't the same as the one bringing it over, and if I'm in the minority they just put the ice/whatever in there out of habit. Bonus points if they ask for a refill, I agree with a hopeful smile and a "yes, no ice please" then by the time they're back being busy as hell, they just forget and do it again. Then I'd feel bad about being that guy so I don't say anything.

With the straw I don't care, I can just take it out. The rest though, bah. #firstworldproblems

@bad-at-lurking said in Why did you pick your username?:

I tried lurking.

I'm bad at it.

Wait, you LIAR.

You named the account before you lurked badly!

@magee101 said in Magee101's Playlist:

The Reach: I think my first character was Miyah? Main was Alicia (Geist) I think I made one more before it closed down but don't remember.

Hah, I remember Alicia.

Sometimes you were a pain in the ass, but I never thought it was intentional and it could have been circumstantial, so that's good at least.

..."Using scientific principles, students at the University of Leicester spent seven years examining the feasibility of the powers of superheroes" (emphasis mine).

What have I done with my life?

@ominous Too many years ago when I faced the same dilemma I was like "yeah, I'll pick a cool Tolkien name no one will ever recognize is from the books since it's so obscure", so I picked Narsil. I used that as my internet alias for a while.

So it turns out so did many, many, many, many people. Arkandel it is!

@Thenomain said:

I have come to hate the Apple Store.

N.b., I am loving my new MacBook Pro.

... Stockholme syndrome?

Japanese Hearthstone commercial. Be Legend!

@wizz Jira is okay. We're migrating from SalesForce to Jira HelpDesk which is at least an upgrade, too.

@faraday said in Preferred App Process For Comic Game:

(Of course - I'm no longer a fan of having PCs in enforced RP-leader positions for this and other reasons, but I understand I'm in a minority there.)

Leadership positions are only as good as the player occupying them. Put a great one in and you'll get great results; if they're inactive the effect will be anywhere from invisible ("I didn't even know we had a Tony Stark!") to being a bottleneck ("I've been trying to get a scene with Reed Richards for days to warn the FF about the secret Skrull invasion"). And obviously if you choose a bad one, well...

This isn't specific to comics. The same applies to high-end nobility in L&L, to Prince or Primogen in a Vampire sphere, etc.

For me the worst part of having these positions filled by PCs isn't really the risk factor of picking an 'incorrect' player. It's the OOC issues from not being picked to play one, the dancing chairs effect in a bunch of people desperately trying to land that kind of position on day 1, the envy over who did get to play a covered roster spot, etc.

In comparison an inactive person is almost a non-issue.